How much did you know about dentistry before you chose it as your forever career?

If you’re like me, not much. Many of us interviewed a few dentists, spent a handful of afternoons shadowing them, or just found teeth interesting as patients. We chose dentistry based on a somewhat superficial impression of the work involved.

You can see how easy it would be get into the career and then realize it’s totally wrong for us.

Imagine if you did that with your romantic relationships. Imagine marrying someone after you’ve only met for coffee 5 times. It would be kind of a crap shoot whether it would work out or not.

So why would marrying dentistry be any different?

Here you are, in a career that you thought was your forever, and you realize you aren’t happy. You’re stressed and anxious. Maybe you’re burnt out. You might feel completely stuck, thinking you have no options. After all, you made this mistake of getting into this career in the first place, how can you trust yourself to make the right decision the second time around?

A lot of us feel this way by the time we get here in our career marriage. We commonly lose trust in ourselves for making what feels like such a colossal mistake. You may not trust yourself even if you did your due diligence to learn as much as you could about this career. No matter how prepared you were to become a dentist, it’s one that you never know what it’s really like until you pick up the hand-piece yourself.

This lack of trust in ourselves keeps us stuck, afraid to choose what’s next. We are afraid that we will make the same mistake again. As a result, we do nothing.

It’s not too late. There is a way you can earn your trust back.

Start dating your career.

Think about it. We date people to get to know them, but we gain much more than that. It is how we learn about ourselves and grow. We figure out what’s important to us and what our deal-breakers are. It’s all about an experience and not necessarily a destination. It’s a normal process that we all accept as part of life.

What if we applied these principles to our careers? What if we accepted that dating your career could be a normal process we go through, instead of a failure?

You can take the pressure off by dating your career.

What does that mean?

It means getting curious. It means no strings attached.

Forget having a passion.

Isn’t it annoying when people say the secret to happiness is finding your passion? What if you don’t know your passion?

Give up the quest for your passion. Instead get curious. Explore. Pursuing your passion involves commitment and obsession. Getting curious and exploring is just like dating. It allows you to dabble without the commitment.

If you’re feeling stuck because you don’t know what to do next, take the pressure off. Lighten up. Try to have a little fun with it. Getting into your next career is rarely a straight line from A to B. Besides, jumping into a career marriage didn’t work the first time around, so why would that work the second time around? Now is your chance to create a new beginning for your happily ever after.