Have you considered leaving your profession but you don't think you know how to do anything else? Several people have written to me commenting on exactly that. In fact, it is not that they believe it, it is that they are convinced that they do not know how to do anything else because they have always worked on the same thing.
It is something very frequent also among scientists, in fact I thought it myself a few years ago when I discovered an exercise (I don't remember where, unfortunately) in which they asked you to think of five alternative professions if yours ceased to exist. At first, I could only think that if science was taken away from me, my professional life would end because I had no idea what else I could do (and I say at first because then I was able to find five possible alternatives).
You sure know what I mean. And the pity is that it is a very negative type of belief, it is nothing more than a limit that you put on yourself almost without realizing it. All this because of the current to which we have been subjected that one has to choose a profession and never change ever (and that it is vocational if possible, of course) and, therefore, if you do not consider changing why are you going to think of possible alternatives or make the most of your circumstances to train and expand your possibilities, right?
Actually, the question is not that you do not know how to do anything else but that:
1. You have never stopped to think about it because the opportunity or the need has not arisen and you had not considered doing anything else until now.
If this is your case, the real problem is not that you do not know how to do anything else but that you still do not know what you want and that is when all kinds of doubts and insecurities appear, as is normal, because when you see everything blurry it is difficult to feel safe. So your first step is to decide what you would like to do and for that the exercise that I mentioned before is very useful to start making you think: What five professions would you dedicate yourself to (or at least you would consider) if yours did not exist (or anything related to her)?
The next step would be what you need to take that leap and what you already have and this is where you have to think about the skills you have been developing, passions, talents, etc. Of course this is a difficult process to summarize in one paragraph and for which you may need professional help.
2. You know more than you think and you probably underestimate it or are not aware of it. I have verified this with scientists, for example, who tell me that apart from science they do not know what else to do, but the point is that in your scientific career you have probably had to teach, write and review articles, design experiments, supervising students, solving problems, learning and training and that these are completely transferable skills to another profession. And the same happens in your profession.
It is true that there are certain skills that may be very specific to a particular profession (pipetting perhaps), but many others can be applied to different fields (for scientists I recommend the book “So What Are You Going To Do with That ? ”By Susan Basalla). So what you need to re-analyze, with different eyes, as what you already know how to do can be applied to other fields.
That is, the problem is not that you do not know how to do more things, that does not really matter. What matters is that you are clear about what you would like to do (and not only what you can do according to what you have already done so far, because that you have done it does not mean that you like it…) and that you commit to learning or improving what you it takes to get it. Those are, in my opinion, the two keys.
And no, no one said it was easy. So tell me, what first step are you going to take? Only one.
