All right, I'm going to read the first one. The U.S. audio therapist, I'm going to skip that because now it's

your therapist in a former monk.

I am almost 40 years old and I have a successful career as an accountant working for multiple large corporations. In my search for another position, I realize that I really genuinely don't want to do anything related to tax or accounting. It really makes me feel sick just thinking about going back to that. I love interacting with people, talking about perspectives and emotions and talking about myself as well as to others about their stories and issues. The simple answer is to go back to school and get a degree in something else. However, that doesn't seem to be the answer for me as it brings up more questions and anxiety than answers. Can you help me?

Thank you so much for the detailed question. It's great to have some of those subtle insights into your particular journey. I think it's really brave of you to acknowledge that something that you've invested in and done up until the age of 40 is something that you're not comfortable with. People never get to that stage because it's so hard to even admit to yourself that, hey, this thing that I've been investing in for maybe 20 years is not what I'm looking for. I think the key thing here is first of all, to realize why doing tax still has value in your life. Often we look at things as binary. Either it has value or it doesn't have value. So at one point, your current career had value and now you almost feel like it has zero value. The truth is it still has some value. It may pay the bills. It may put food on the table. It may take care of your family. So it still has some value. And allowing yourself to recognize that allows you to keep doing those things if that's still important to you at the same time as exploring and experimenting with your curiosity. And so what I would suggest is that continuing in the work that you're doing right now to provide a foundation unless you have the financial freedom to make a leap and take a risk and start exploring. And the second thing is looking into that curiosity. So when you start looking into your calling or your passion, it's important to recognize the difference between hobbies and your purpose or something that you're really meant to do. And so you may be missing hobbies or passions or interests that you may want to get back involved in. But the difference between that and another career path is what are you so passionate about that you're willing to invest in building your strengths, your skills, your expertise and your abilities. And so that exploration starts with courses. It starts with going to shadow people that you may be not have spent time with. You may listen to podcasts and hear about people in those career paths. This is a great time to allow your mind the openness to explore this new path, but do it in a way that feels safe and comfortable as well. Allowing yourself to test courses, shadowing people, hearing from people who are doing career paths that you're fascinated by is a great way of starting that initial research. I love

what you said about things not being binary because I think that so often what happens is people are doing something and they feel like there's something better out there and the thing that they're doing becomes horrible. It makes it really hard to hold on to the fact that the other thing isn't 100% great and the thing that you're doing isn't 100% bad. And so it gives you that perspective and it also gives you more freedom to explore. So it's not like the desperation of I have to get out of this thing this second where you said it makes me sick to go back to this, right? The reason this person gave for not wanting to go back to school or do something else was the uncertainty. And it wasn't like you have to jump into a graduate program because you don't know what you want to do yet. Exactly what you said, Jay, it's a time to explore and to be able to sit with the uncertainty. And certainty is an opportunity because it opens up all of these possibilities.