Curate the Future
Curate the Future
Sumayya Essack
Curate the Future is for multi-passionate high achievers to get clarity on your dreams, get unstuck, and design and launch your new career or business. If you're a purpose-driven, creative soul ready to reinvent, but need to push past perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and self-doubt, this is for you. I'm Sumayya Essack, an educator and coach who helps creative, high achieving women to design their career changes and businesses and get the confidence and strategy to launch. I'll share the paradigm shifts, actions, frameworks, and tools to forge your path and tackle the mindset blocks so you can start your fulfilling new chapter. In addition to solo episodes, I interview women who have made their own reinventions and started businesses, to give listeners an intimate and real-world view at navigating the journey.
Give Space Between the Question and Answer
Feeling frustrated that you're not coming up with any answers to the big career change questions? When it feels like trying to squeeze water from a stone, here's the antidote.
Jun 21, 2021
3 min
The Decision Informs the Path, the Path Informs the Decision
Career change clarity often feels like two steps forward, one step back. When you're excited about an idea and then you find out it will take more than you expected to get there, it can feel like sliding way backwards. But you're actually still going forward.
Jun 7, 2021
7 min
Let Go of Forcing What Isn't Working, with Kaitlyn Casso
When Kaitlyn Casso worked in marketing, she found a passion for photography when she took that on as part of her role. Later, after spending a year looking for a new marketing job to no avail, she felt she was trying to force a career to work that she no longer wanted. She decided to take a chance on her new passion and now she's an independent brand photographer (and much happier!). The dots in her story connect in a way she couldn't have predicted, but she says sometimes we have to be patient with letting the answers come to us over time - they aren't instant.
May 31, 2021
35 min
Let it Be Easy
Have you ever set arbitrarily ambitious goals for yourself, then felt like a failure when you didn't meet them? High achievers tend to make things really hard for themselves, and be tough on themselves for not measuring up to their own standards. Why is that?! We've become suspicious of things feeling too easy, but sometimes the answer isn't doing more, it's doing less. 
May 24, 2021
6 min
Say Yes Then Figure it Out, With Vanessa Awong
In her 30s, Vanessa Awong decided she'd had enough in her finance career and decided to become a doctor while also starting a family. "Let's just say yes and figure out the rest as we go," she told herself, and that started her new path. With four years of commuting out of town, it wasn't an easy road. She's an M.D. now and has thrown some creative projects and consulting into the mix, because why not? 
May 17, 2021
28 min
Leaps and Lily Pad Hopping
"How do I get from here to there?" is the million dollar career change question. Sometimes you can get there in one big leap, but lots of career changes happen by strategically hopping between a series of lily pads. Here's how to know if you can make a shift in 1 move or if you need to lily pad hop, and real life examples of what hopping looks like.
May 10, 2021
7 min
Move Forward Calmly, With Alejandra Molina
Alejandra Molina is co-founding a language learning app, currently focusing on medical Spanish during the pandemic. She doesn't have a tech background, but believes in figuring things out with a willingness to learn, to find inspiring mentors, to see value in all of your previous experience, to put imperfect ideas out there and get feedback. "Take everything calmly," she says, noting a venture capitalist's advice that each VC would give different feedback based on their own backgrounds. It's a good reminder that when everybody and their uncle has an opinion on our professional goals, we have to be careful about who we listen to because everyone's opinion is based on their own backgrounds.
May 3, 2021
30 min
Overthinking and Underthinking
Overthinking is a thing, but so is underthinking. We dwell on some career change questions to the point of overthinking, and we skip over the useful questions by underthinking. If you find yourself drawing a blank, here's how to know which it is and what to do instead.
Apr 26, 2021
7 min
Listen to the Sparks, With Claire Simeone
Claire Simeone is a marine veterinarian and 2018 TED Fellow who started her own conservation-focused company, Sea Change Health. She has carved her own way through her field by following subtle clues. In our chat she describes how she learned to listen to those sparks: by separating her self worth from her career, and by separating fear-based anxiety from anxiety provoked by deep misalignment between our careers and who we really are. 
Apr 19, 2021
37 min
Behavioral Economics Explains Why Career Change is Hard
As a coach I tend to hear similar themes in the fears and objections potential career changers have. We can take those thoughts as signals that we are weak and inferior, but they're often actually just behavioral economics at play. Here are 5 ways the difficulties of career change can be explained by behavioral economics. It's not you, it's your brain.
Apr 12, 2021
17 min
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