Hello, this is Jenna and welcome to the Elevate Yourself podcast where we can talk about beauty and self care without judgement. 

Jenna: Today, I wanted to do an episode on something I think is really relevant to so many people right now. I know lots of people are caught in the middle right now. There's a lot of change happening in the world and there's a lot of people I feel that are just feeling stuck or maybe not sure what direction to move in. So I thought it would be really timely to talk about how choosing the right career can help align you with your self care goals. I've never really considered this before there's like a lot of different ways we choose our careers like money is a huge motivating factor. Just like kind of fate too can be a really huge motivating factor in deciding where you're going to end up like you hand out a bunch of resumes and someone calls you back. That's maybe its fate. Maybe it's maybe it's more. Yeah, sometimes we just don't really think about these things actively to decide what is going to make us the happiest so I think this is a really important topic to think about because we spend so much time at work. The average person spends more time at work with their partners actually. So you know, if you're putting all this energy into picking the right husband, you better be putting as much energy or more into picking the right career. Just because if you don't pick the right career, just like if you don't pick the right husband, you're going to have a world of trouble and you are not going to be feeling good about things and things are not going to go well. The basic definition of self care is regularly doing things for yourself that make you feel good. So this is why it's so fundamental for us to think about this before we take on a new career path or even to just pause if things aren't feeling good. 

This I think is a good time to pause and just like really process that definition. So I'm going to repeat it again, a good self care definition. This is according to Tony Robbins. Thank you for this definition. I think it's the best definition I've heard so far on self care. Good definition for self care is regularly doing things for yourself that make you feel good, so simple, but so hard. When you're feeling that disconnect in your life, when you are feeling completely drained, this might be a good time to pause. And write down the things that make you feel good. Or if you cannot find a list of things that make you feel good. Write down the things that are making you feel bad and kind of like take an assessment of your work relationship and see how many of those things are connected to your job and how many of those things are things that you may be imposing on yourself, or things that are actually a career specific.

So I want to go a little bit deeper into this because I'm like thinking about this a lot in my life to a lot of the things that we don't like in our jobs we actually do impose on ourselves and they are and if we think about it differently, and we're conscious about it, then we can actively switch this. Lots of other times our employers or our clients if we make these like new boundaries that will make us happy if we acknowledge and take the time to figure out what these things are that make us feel good and how we can tweak things. More often than not, people are going to be super accommodating. Because if you're feeling good, you can do a good job of your job and help them even better. So I think lots of the times we're putting these barriers on ourselves, but there are these times to where you are in something that is fundamentally wrong. You're going to be putting in situations every day that are not going to be making you feel good and you do not have the power to switch them.

So a really powerful example I think is my switch from electrical. Yes, I loved that job for so many different reasons but there were just so many things that weren't making me feel good about it to to back, go back into the beauty industry, which I had been in previously. But you know what, sometimes you just don't consider something seriously also because of like how it's viewed in society. Back in the day getting a trade was maybe not as revered as going to University back in the day. 

But it was definitely more of a respected thing than being in the beauty industry, like especially to someone on a mortgage application or something like that. So even though I knew I was happy in the beauty industry I did sacrificing go into a different industry because I want it to be able to have that financial credibility, especially to the bank to be able to qualify for a mortgage or something like that with my future. This has changed a lot though in like recent years, especially with like the developments in the beauty industry. So these ideals are shifting a lot with like how all gender ideals are really shifting at the moment. 

So anyways, back to what my situation was then, basically, fundamentally the things that were making me feel good I'm the kind of person who really wants to be able to work hard and do a good job and not worry about like politics of like union and stuff like that. So lots of time I'd be working like as hard as I could and doing it best job as I could. And I'd be getting all kinds of stares from across like the site like, "Oh, you're burning the job", which means like you're eating up all the work so people are going to be laid off before it's necessary because if you work at like a slow steady pace that everyone is kind of working at then the job technically will last longer but for me I just that was not how I am wired and that's not how I want to work and I always felt that like pressure on me that if you do too good, someone's going to be like out for you. But if you also do not good enough, then you'll be on that layoff list. So it was always like really high pressure because you're always working yourself out of a job. And it was kind of a little cutthroat so there would be a lot of people who might throw you under the bus because of such a good paying job but lots of people want to be on that job for as long as they can. So if there's sometimes an opportunity to do something that makes someone else look worse, that can sometimes happen in those situations. And just in general, the whole gender thing really did get to me. It's an ever evolving situation. But I think also just like if we go straight down to the language of being in the Brotherhood, like that's the name of the Union, the Brotherhood of Electricians, just the language of being so exclusive, and like really excluding women from like the title of your union.

Not that I was in that union, but just that that's the biggest most generally accepted union for electrical just it really did speak a lot for how that trickle down through everything with that same thinking if you beat a boy at their job that's like their technically like male like birthright job. You are in a bad situation there. too. It's not like when a man does something awesome. Like male apprentice does a super good job and the guy's like, "Oh, good job", pat you on the back. It's like this weird hangover from like such a sexist patriarchal background where it's almost threatening to a male that if you can do something better than a man in that scenario where it's traditionally male oriented industry that you are going to be causing a situation basically where that person is feeling shame or like negative feelings towards you and I don't think they even notice that that's happening but in a lot of different situations like and I have had so many awesome, awesome, awesome men that I have worked with. But you do see it a little bit in the eyes sometimes like for some people that just like really wore on me just having to deal with that every day, not knowing what you were going to really come up to every day and not knowing what kind of personality and where that person was going to be on their journey with equal rights for men and women. Basically, just like really got old. 

So when I look at my self care journey and how out of line I felt with self care how drained I was when I got back from that job, and how hard I had to struggle to really come home with a feeling of like accomplishment without like feeling attacked or just having to watch my back like those were really bad feelings to have pretty much consistently. There wasn't a lot that I could personally do to change these things. I could totally have stuck it out and found a consistent job where I was with a crew of people consistently that I knew very well and probably wouldn't have had to deal with like these problems of continuously working with different people on massive job sites of like 20,000 or well 10,000 electricians, but that's also not really who I was at the time. So yeah, there was not really a lot of ways that I could change the fundamental nature of what I was doing. 

So when I look back on it, and how this change really affected my life, I did really resolve a lot of things that were not making me feel good, which is like the opposite of self care. Regulate, literally doing things that do not make you feel good. So across a lot of those things off the list and just made them non issues by switching my career. 

And so now I do things that I love every day. I can work as hard as I want to. I can really give it my all and instead of someone like being jealous of me or feeling like like I'm competing with them. It's a situation where I'm making my client even happier. And I'm seeing them smile and there's no weirdness of "Oh you did such a good brow lamination" "Why are you doing such a good brow lamination?" "Maybe it's gonna make my brow lamination not look so good". No, it's like everyone in this industry. I feel like there's so much Stoke, if you see someone doing better you're like, How can I do that? It's not "Oh, that bitch." So it's a lot of more stoke of like building knowledge instead of kind of having that competing behavior because you're all rushing to the end of a job, which is like what construction is right, you get the job. You're building something unless you're on maintenance, but also there's very few maintenance maintenance positions, usually. Usually with construction, you're building something and then that thing's gonna get built. And then there's gonna be layoffs and then who knows when the next job is you kind of it's like that pattern of that job in that industry. So for me just wasn't as great as knowing like I have a regular clientele and I get to know these people and the better I do, the more happy they are with me and we develop a relationship over time, which is awesome. And I get to hear about how their life is just so much more fulfilling than just doing something and having that toxic relationship kind of like always have to having to fight for the next thing that's maybe not coming and then competing with all these people and dealing with all this like sexism and that's also not an issue at all. Because you are working with mostly girls. 

I would love to train more men in this industry, though, and I do see so many coming up in the future. There's up and comers for sure. So I hope that this does change just like the electrical has, like the trades has included so many more women, I think that we would really also benefit from having a lot of men in our industry as well. So yeah, the sexism isn't an issue, though. Like also the jobs don't take you away from home. You can also make your own schedule a lot of the time like all the girls who work in the studio, if they have something they want to do and they're not booked. They just block the time off. It's not like waitressing where you have to sit around and you're not making any tips and you're just making minimum wage. No, like if you're not working, then you're off and you're free to do whatever you want to do. 

And you have a whole world of opportunity then for taking advantage of taking care of your own self care with like doing more things with family or having a side hustle or just whatever you want to do going to the beach in the middle of the day. If you got a couple hours off or whatever, you know, you just have so much more flexible ability in your job versus like having to show up to something where you are definitely going to be there for in my case back in the day 10 to 12 hours. And a lot of that could just be sitting around because you're waiting for I don't know like materials or you're waiting for blueprints and you're just told to like go pick up garbage around site or go look busy. Some people can do it and be awesome and like love their job that they're not really engaged with but for me when I'm on, I want to be on and when I'm off, I want to be off so yeah, all these things for me. It just added up to the beauty industry being absolutely the right choice. And so I think for a lot of different people. It's just so important to do if you are having a time in your life where you're feeling super stressed out and you're feeling like you don't have enough time for yourself. Do an audit of your work life and the things that are making you feel you don't have enough time for self care are the things that you have to do every day that you absolutely dread. And I would really suggest taking a second and just like thinking "Okay, is there any way I can do this differently myself without changing the whole situation?" and approaching your job trying to make those changes. If those changes aren't possible, then looking at the possibility of shifting your career because obviously it's always better to keep building and going in the right directions because if you don't address that, you're just gonna have the same problems when you switch to something else. So start with what you have, take audit of what you like and what you don't like what's draining. Try to check if you can actually change these things day to day. But if you can't make those changes then take a look at what would be a better situation for you. If you have any questions about whether the beauty industry would be perfect for you. Please don't hesitate to contact me. DM me on Instagram at Elevatelash.ca I would love to chat with you tell you more about what it's actually like working in the beauty industry. See if it would be a really good fit for you because I would love to be a part of that positive change in your life. If that's something you're looking for. 

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