A friend convinced me to try out the whole South Beach diet thing, and so I did.  I didn’t exactly give up carbs altogether (meaning beer), but I figured with my moderate amount of exercise and an arsenal of new and improved eating habits, it would be a matter of days before I dropped a few LB’s and felt hot again.

Yea, that didn’t happen.  At least not the dropping LB’s part.  Because when you stress yourself the $%*# out for months at a time, your body goes into crisis hyper-fat-storage mode.  Stress makes you fat, or at least not thin, and that’s the truth.

The other truth is that all my stress came from the prospect of leaving a full time job that I was 110% confident I truly wanted to leave.  And when I wasn’t worrying about and furiously planning the next steps, I was stressing about how unhappy I was in the current situation.  But only a complete moron would consider leaving a steady paycheck and benefits in this type of economy to become a freelance solo-preneur. I mean, right?

We as humans are pervasively adverse to change because we are afraid of all of the potentially unfavorable outcomes that we conjure up in our minds. We live by a constant mantra of “What If…” But yet we refuse to acknowledge the current existing unfavorable outcomes that we’ve already created for ourselves, and are living day-to-day.  So what’s worse – being miserable, or the chance of being miserable?

It took me jumping head-first (with a slight push from behind) into the unknown to truly understand that there is no absolute roadmap for change, no guarantees that everything would be okay, or conversely that I would fail and everything would be horrible. No amount of inspirational blog posts, counseling or self-help books will fully 100% convince you of that. Because  nobody finds that out and truly understands that until they take that jump and make it their own. And I’m in the business of pushing people off cliffs.

So what happens when you leave a full time job with a “steady” paycheck and benefits to pursue your own business, or the freelance lifestyle?  You define new standards for yourself.  The biggest deterrent is usually money – will I have enough of it? Will I be able to generate it?  Do I actually have something of value that people will want to pay me for?  What if I don’t make enough?  I’m really bad at marketing myself.  Etc. Etc. The answer is, you will find a way to find the money, and you will find a way to make a living if you truly have confidence in yourself and know you’re doing what’s right for you, emotionally, spiritually, creatively & professionally.

And you will have to make changes for that to happen.

Yes, your lifestyle can change.  And it will, but not necessarily in the scary negative way you’re so sure that it may, if you make that leap.  You will find that the realization of your dreams and the accomplishment of listening to your gut, and having faith enough to leave the 9 to 5 and set out on your own, far outweighs the enjoyment you used to superficially garner from a couple of post-work drinks where you were simply drowning your work-related sorrows anyway.  You might have to give up going out one extra night per week.  You might have to shop at discount stores instead of Club Monaco.  You will get used to eating healthier and feeling better because you now make more meals at home instead of buying $10 sandwiches in Midtown.  You’ll start to be okay with getting more sleep because you no longer have a terrible hour-plus commute ahead of you each morning.  And you’ll get used to not feeling like you have to prove yourself everyday to superiors and colleagues who doesn’t notice or care about your contributions or work ethic in the first place.  Most people will start to care when the company goes under.

At least this is what the experience was for me after I made the jump.  I left a full time job to start my career consulting business in my late twenties with my father’s voice on full blast in the back of my head, telling me how hard it is to run your own business, and to turn back while I still could.

Yes, when you leave a full time job working for someone else, in addition to leaving an assumed paycheck and the slight comfort of routine, you also leave behind the organizational facade that we all at times take comfort hiding behind when something goes wrong, or a client isn’t satisfied.  “Hey don’t blame me if the customer doesn’t like our product- I didn’t build it.” But now it’s your business, and you build everything.  You are responsible for everything – time management, customer satisfaction, brand consistency, making money, spending money, paying all your own taxes.  That is one thing that is hard at first – when you set out on your own, you are completely 100% exposed to the world, because it’s now all about you!

But that’s just it – it’s all about you!  I have not lived a single day where I would honestly trade that freedom for what I used to have.  Sure, there are challenges I’ve never experienced before, but there are also opportunities I never imagined I would have the option to explore.  That’s the stuff to consider.

Even the most confident of people who manage to put months of savings away to prepare for the leap, or have partners willing to support them through the transition, still worry endlessly about the potentially negative outcomes, of things not working out as they planned. And we forget to consider, “Well, what if it DOES work out, even in some slight variation of what I’d hoped for?” What if I find out that having less money initially is a far better alternative to having a steady paycheck and being miserable in a career that drains me every day of my life? And it’s not until you go ahead, you quit your job, you cry, you question your decision, and then you get back up and just start making it happen one step at a time, that you realize all the worry was pointless.  It was simply one big wall of defense going up, because like we tend to react in any other scenario of high risk, we were simply afraid of failure, rejection and getting hurt.

Leaving a full time job to pursue another career, be it your own business, a freelance gig, or even another full time role somewhere else, is scary, and you absolutely will worry about it, like any normal human being.  But in my experience, and the experience of many many others like me, for every ounce of energy and time you put into worrying about the negative outcome, you will put twice as much into creating the positive ones. You simply won’t let yourself fail.  And if you do fail, it’s not failure because you tried the best way you knew how.  And so you return to plan A, you readjust your strategy, and you try a new approach.  But you already made the leap, and there’s no jumping back onto the ledge from the ground below. Instead of jumping cliffs, you’re simply stepping stones.

And that’s when you realize, no matter what outcome you encounter, the hardest part is already so far behind you.