Slaying Dragons and Changing Careers

Slaying Dragons and Changing Careers

I somehow stumbled onto Laura Young’s The Dragon Slayer’s Guide to Life, a blog about finding the courage to make those difficult life changes. I’m in a shifting life change mode again, and I found myself particularly receptive to Laura’s story-based relating of her personal insights. There’s a nice post about discipline, an interesting story about metaphorically slaying dragons met in a hospital room, which itself is part of a 7-part series titled Adventures of an Unlikely Superhero. The dragon slaying story reminded me a bit of a post I wrote about a year ago, Thinking Negative in its structure (ghosts and demons that haunt me). And wow, has it only been a year since then? Time flies!

The predisposition to face difficult choices in the face of uncertainty apparently runs in Laura’s family. Her brother was a police officer writing about life behind the badge, and later laid down his badge just 8 years shy of retirement to get away from the pervasive negativity that infested his department. The story reminded me of some of my experiences, and seeing the same issues from someone else’s perspective is helping to clarify my own thinking. As with Laura’s writing, he tells instead of sells, letting the reader draw his/her own conclusions without giving up his own. It’s an approach that I try to follow myself here, so it’s no wonder that I’m enjoying it.

1 Comment

  1. Laura Young 17 years ago

    Hi Dave,
    Thanks for the nice post!  I’m glad you are enjoying the blog and Jason’s posts as well.  You probably saw that I recently started the Carnival of Courage.  Given how my blog resonated with you, I’d love to get some perspective on courage from you to add to the mix.  Your readers are more than welcome to submit entries also.  As you said in your post here, sometimes reading about someone else’s parallel journey gives such great perspective and the validation keeps us moving forward for our own “slays”.  I’m not sure there is such a thing as too much inspiration, especially when tackling something as challenging as a career or other major life change.  And no slay is too small.  We all have to start somewhere. Courage is something that has to be cultivated.

    ——-