he last real performance review I sat through at the agency was a Tuesday afternoon in November, and I remember thinking, somewhere around the part where my manager was explaining my "growth opportunities," that I had absolutely no idea who I was outside of this job.
Not a clue.
I had been doing PR for eight years. I was good at it. I could write a press release in my sleep, manage a crisis at 2 a.m., run three campaigns simultaneously without dropping a thing. I had a title and a salary and a WeWork badge and a LinkedIn profile that looked, from the outside, like a person who had her life together.
And I was falling apart.
By March of 2022, I was working 70-hour weeks. I had been on antidepressants for two years. My body had developed this low-grade hum of dread that I had started to accept as normal, which is maybe the most frightening thing I can say about that period. At some point the floor fell out, literally, on a Tuesday night in my kitchen in Greenpoint, around 11 p.m., and I sat there for a long time not knowing what I was going to do with my life.
What happened after that is something I've written about before. Priya sent me an audiobook at 3 a.m. Three weeks later I was laid off with $8,400 in severance. Six days after that, a freelance contract appeared. I cleared $40,000 in debt in 14 months. I built work I actually wanted to do.
The career change I had been terrified to make happened. And most of it happened from the inside out.
This is the article I wish I'd had in those early months, when I was starting to understand that manifesting a career change was possible but had no idea what the practice actually looked like, step by step.
The Version of You Who Has Already Left
The store has products I'd point a friend toward. Honest reviews, no aggressive upsells.
There is a concept in Neville Goddard's work that I keep returning to, which is that the imagination is not a rehearsal space for reality. As Neville wrote in The Power of Awareness, your assumption is the fact you live from. The version of you who has already changed careers is not a future self you are trying to reach. She is a state you can occupy right now, in your mind, and the outer world will eventually rearrange itself to match.
I know how that sounds if you are sitting in a cubicle at 4:47 p.m. wishing the day would end. I sat in that cubicle.
But here is what I slowly came to understand: the reason most career change attempts fail before they begin is not because the person lacks skills or connections or the right resume. The reason is that the person is still operating from the identity of someone who is stuck. They're sending out applications while internally narrating a story about how hard the job market is, how their experience doesn't transfer, how they don't have the right credentials for what they actually want.
The outer action is contradicting the inner state. And the inner state, in my experience, almost always wins.
So the first step is not updating your LinkedIn. The first step is asking yourself: who is the version of me who has already made this shift? What does she assume about work? What does she assume about her own value? What does she assume about how easy or hard it is to find the right opportunity?
You don't have to believe it immediately. You just have to start trying it on.
The Specific Problem With Career Identity
Most of us have more of our identity wrapped up in our jobs than we realize.
I didn't fully understand how much of my sense of self was tied to "being in PR" until I was suddenly not in PR anymore. When the layoff came, I expected relief. And there was some. But there was also this destabilizing silence where the daily narrative used to be, this voice that said you are someone because you have a demanding job at a real agency in Manhattan and your clients are important and you work very hard.
Gone.
And what was left was the question I had been avoiding for years: what do I actually want?
Manifesting a career change requires you to sit with that question longer than is comfortable. Cheryl Strayed wrote something in Tiny Beautiful Things about needing to know what you want before you can go after it, and she was not writing about PR, but the principle holds everywhere. You cannot navigate toward a destination you haven't allowed yourself to name.
What made this harder for me was that I had been so thoroughly trained to want the things my career said I should want, the promotions, the clients, the prestige, the salary milestones, that I had to do some real excavation before I could hear what I actually wanted underneath all of that.
So step two, which I think of as the internal audit, is this: sit down with a journal and finish these sentences honestly.
The work I have been doing makes me feel.. The work I imagine doing makes me feel.. If no one could see my career and there was no status attached to it, I would want to be doing.. The last time I lost track of time doing something was..
Do not perform optimism here. Write what is true. If the work you have been doing makes you feel hollow, write that. The practice only works when you start from what is actually real for you, not from what sounds good.
Identity Revision Is the Actual Work
Here is where I am going to be direct with you, friend.
Most career manifestation content online skips the hard part. It tells you to write down your dream job, say some affirmations, trust the process. And while those things have their place, they are downstream of something more foundational that almost nobody talks about.
The work is identity revision.
If you have spent years in a career that doesn't fit, you have accumulated a story about what you are and are not capable of professionally. Those stories are not just thoughts. They live in your body. They show up as hesitation when you click on a job posting that feels too good. They show up as the voice that says who do you think you are when you start drafting a new kind of resume. They show up as the impulse to stay small and safe and familiar even when familiar is making you miserable.
I had years of internalized agency culture telling me that what I did was valuable because it was hard and fast and high-stakes. When I started imagining doing work that felt slower, more intentional, more aligned with what I actually cared about, there was a part of me that wanted to dismiss it as not serious. Not real work. Too easy. Who was I to just.. want something that felt good?
That voice is not your voice. It is a story you absorbed, probably over many years, possibly from watching the adults in your life relate to their own work.
Joe Dispenza talks at length about how the body becomes conditioned to the emotions of familiar environments, and how stepping into a new identity requires you to literally break that conditioning at a physiological level. The somatic piece is real. When I started trying on the identity of someone doing work she loved, my nervous system had a reaction to it that was not entirely pleasant. It felt unfamiliar. Slightly unsafe. The same way a new country feels before it starts to feel like home.
You have to tolerate that discomfort long enough for the new state to start feeling normal. That is the work.
Practically, this looks like a daily practice of spending time in the felt sense of your new career identity. Ten minutes in the morning. Not reciting affirmations robotically, but actually generating the feeling-state of the version of you who is already doing the work she loves. What does her body feel like on a Monday morning? What does her relationship to time feel like? What does it feel like to be compensated for work she finds meaningful?
Sit with that for a second. Really sit with it.
What Affirmations Actually Do (And Don't Do)
I want to address affirmations directly, because they are both useful and wildly misunderstood.
The popular version of career manifestation affirmations looks something like: I am attracting my dream job. Abundance flows to me freely. I am worthy of success. And I am not saying those are useless. But if you are sitting in a job you hate, reciting affirmations that feel completely disconnected from your actual internal state, you are not doing affirmation work. You are doing wishful thinking with extra steps.
What affirmations actually do, when they work, is they interrupt the default narrative long enough to introduce a different possibility. They are most effective when they are specific enough to feel like a real thought rather than a slogan, and when they are paired with the felt sense I described above.
The affirmations that helped me were not grand declarations. They were quieter. I am someone whose work feels like an extension of who she is. I know how to find the right opportunity. The right people find their way to me. Small enough to be almost believable when I said them. Close enough to the edge of my current belief system that they didn't trigger immediate rejection.
Anne Lamott writes about this in a different context, the idea of moving toward something one small true thing at a time instead of trying to leap to the whole vision at once. That principle applies to career affirmations. You are not trying to convince yourself of something you don't believe. You are planting the seed of a different assumption, and watering it daily, until it is slightly more real than it was yesterday.
If you're building out a more structured job-search practice alongside this inner work, my article on How to Manifest Your Dream Job goes deeper on the specific techniques and what to do when the external search feels stalled.
The Outer Steps That Actually Matter
I have been talking about inner work for several sections, and I want to be clear: I am not saying external action doesn't matter. It does.
What changes when you do the inner work first is the quality of the outer action. It becomes less frantic. Less desperate. Less driven by fear.
When I started moving toward freelance writing and consulting, I was not coming from a place of "I have to find something before the severance runs out." I was coming from a place of "I know what I want to build, and I'm going to show up as the person who is already building it." That shift in energy changed the conversations I had. It changed the emails I sent. It changed how I showed up in what would have otherwise been very nerve-wracking introductory calls.
Here is what the outer steps looked like for me, and what I'd suggest for anyone doing this kind of career change work:
Clarify the specific. Generic intention produces generic results. "I want a better job" is not a specific intention. "I want to be doing independent writing and consulting for clients who care about honest communication, in a format that lets me control my own time" is specific. The more specific you are, the more your actions can align with your intention.
Take one aligned action per day. During the first few months of my transition, I made a commitment to do at least one thing per day that was an action a person who was already building this career would take. Some days that was writing something. Some days it was reaching out to someone. Some days it was reading one thing in the direction I wanted to go. Small, consistent, aligned. Not frantic.
Update how you present yourself before you feel ready. This one makes people uncomfortable. But if you are trying to move into a new professional identity, you have to start representing that identity outwardly before you have the full resume to back it up. Not falsely. But with intention. The way you talk about yourself, the way you describe your skills, the way you frame your background, these things are not fixed.
Let people know. This sounds almost too simple, but it's consistently where the stuckness happens. People who are trying to change careers often keep that intention private, as though naming it will invite judgment or failure. In my experience, the opposite is true. The opportunities that appeared for me in those early months came overwhelmingly through people who knew what I was trying to build.
For practical guidance on timelines, my article on How to Manifest a Job in 7 Days deals specifically with short-window intention work when the pressure is real and the timeline is tight.
The Nervous System Question Nobody Talks About
Whatever you're going through, the store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward.
Here is something I did not find in any career change book and had to learn the hard way: your nervous system does not distinguish between a new career opportunity and a threat to your survival.
Change, even wanted change, registers as danger to the part of your brain that is responsible for keeping you alive. Bessel van der Kolk's work helped me understand why I kept self-sabotaging early opportunities, why I would draft an email and not send it, why I would talk myself out of things I'd been actively wanting. The body was doing its job. It was trying to keep me safe by keeping me in the familiar.
The work of career change, from a somatic perspective, is co-regulation. It is learning to bring your nervous system into a state where new experience feels survivable, and then doing the new thing while you are in that state, rather than waiting until the fear goes away (it doesn't).
What helped me, specifically, was a practice Beatriz introduced me to sometime in 2023, after I'd been doing this work for a while. It is simpler than it sounds. Before any action that felt threatening, any pitch, any networking call, any conversation about rates, I would spend a few minutes deliberately calling up the felt sense of safety. Slow breathing. Feet on the floor. The knowledge that I had survived far scarier things than this particular email.
It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. And it worked.
The point is not to eliminate the fear. The point is to not let the fear make your decisions.
Sam Still Asks Me How I Did It
My friend Sam from the agency is still in PR. Still working the same kind of hours I used to work. We get dinner occasionally, and without fail, at some point in the evening, Sam asks some version of the same question: how did you do it?
And I always struggle to answer, because the honest answer is not a clean four-step framework. The honest answer is that I fell apart on a Tuesday night, and then I stopped pretending I was okay, and then I started doing a practice that most serious people would find embarrassing, and then things began to shift.
But the practical pieces of the practice, condensed as much as I can condense them, are these.
First: get specific about what you actually want, not what sounds good or what seems realistic. The practice requires a real target.
Second: start occupying the identity of the person who has already made that shift. Not performing it. Actually inhabiting the felt sense of it, daily, even when it feels unfamiliar or slightly absurd.
Third: audit the stories you are carrying about what you are and are not capable of professionally. Those stories are not facts. They are assumptions that became habits.
Fourth: take one aligned outer action per day, with the intention of a person who is already where she wants to be, not the desperation of someone who needs to escape.
Fifth: address the nervous system directly. Do the somatic work. Do not try to think your way through a body-level response.
And the one that took me longest: stop waiting until you feel ready. The version of you who has already made this career change did not wait to feel ready. She started before she was ready, and readiness followed.
What Doesn't Change
I want to say something here that I think sometimes gets lost in career manifestation content.
Making the career change I made did not fix everything. I did not wake up the day I sent my last corporate timesheet and feel suddenly complete. The money anxiety took longer to clear than the job did. (The $40,000 in debt I had accumulated over those agency years took 14 months after the layoff to fully pay off, and it was not a smooth 14 months.) The identity stuff, the deep need to be important-by-proxy, the old habit of measuring my worth by how busy I was, those things required ongoing attention.
This is real: the outer circumstances changed significantly, and faster than I expected. But the inner work didn't end when the circumstances shifted. It deepened.
That is probably the thing I most want you to know, friend. Career manifestation is not a one-time practice you do until you get the new job and then put down. It is the beginning of a different relationship with your own life. The career change is the first evidence. And then you go further.
For those already in a process with a specific role in mind, How to Manifest a Specific Job You Already Applied For deals with the particular anxiety of the waiting period, after you've taken the action and before you have any answer.
The store also has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of inner work, if you're looking for structured support alongside the practice.
The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you want tools alongside the reading.
The Day the Practice Became Non-Negotiable
There was a moment, somewhere around six weeks after the layoff, when I understood that the work I was doing, the identity work, the felt sense practice, the daily affirmations that were specific enough to almost believe, was not optional anymore.
I had tried the other way. I had tried ambition and productivity and looking impressive and keeping my head down and trusting that the work would speak for itself. I had tried it for eight years at a very high cost. And I had a kitchen floor moment to show for it.
The practice became non-negotiable not because I became convinced it would work, but because I finally understood that the alternative, staying in the old story indefinitely, was not actually safe either. The thing that felt familiar was also the thing that had put me on that floor.
If you are reading this from inside a career that is slowly eating you alive, I am not going to pretend there is a quick fix. The work takes time. The nervous system recalibration takes time. The outer circumstances take time to catch up to the inner shift.
But hell, friend, the inner shift can start today.
Not next year. Not when you have more savings. Not when you feel less scared.
Today.
