“I don’t want to sell anything, to anyone, ever again, as long as I live”.

It was almost as if I was standing outside of my body and watching in disbelief as those words tumbled out of my mouth.

I’d been burned out for years, and that feeling seemed to only get worse, never better.

Leaving sales had been a daydream of mine for a while, but I had no plan. I had no clue what I should leave sales for. I just knew that I didn’t want to do this anymore.

I hadn’t planned on saying that to my boss that day, but here we were.

He had asked me what was going on and said he could tell that I was checked out.

The next seven months were spent researching, thinking, interviewing, and pondering what in the heck I was going to do professionally now that sales was off the table.

Had there been a guide like this available to me, I could have had a smooth transition out of sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast working out, goofing off with my son, watching The Handmaid’s Tale, and landscaping the heck out of my backyard, but randomly quitting your job when you have a family and a mortgage is always ill-advised. I got lucky.

This guide is a combination of what I ended up doing to land my dream job, what I wish I would have done, findings from 9+ months of coaching and testing, and learnings from mistakes made during that 7-month exploratory/midlife crises/landscape-apallooza/drive my wife crazy/career break.

People stay in sales past their expiration date for a number of reasons. Maybe you’re comfortable where you’re at and the unknown of doing something different is too scary. Maybe it’s the money, the old golden handcuffs, and a fear of financial insecurity. For a lot of folks, it just comes down to sales being all you know. You never thought of changing careers. Is that even something that people do!?!?!

If any of the above resonates, there’s hope.

If you’re comfortable at your current company, chances are strong that you could be comfortable at a different company and not have to carry a quota.

If you’re used to making great money and don’t want to give that up, there’s a good chance that, because you’re money driven, you’ll end up finding a new career that pays well and doesn’t give you pre-demo anxiety attacks.

If you have the Sunday scarries Sunday through Friday, but have no clue what else you could do as you’ve only ever been in sales, I guarantee that you can pivot out of sales and into something less stressful that’s more suited for who you are now, and not who you were when you started in sales.