January 18, 2024
Escaping the Career Trap:
Transform Your Apathy into Ambition and Never Hate Mondays Again
Tammy Alvarez
Aviva Publishing (2023)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-300-8 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-301-5 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-302-2 (eBook)
New Book Reveals How to Turn Career Distress into Professional Success
Are you surrounded by clueless managers, tired of pointless meetings, and ready to gouge your eyes out at the thought of another year in the same place? Then look no further. Tammy Alvarez is ready to teach you how to escape the career trap. Filled with spot-on advice, no-nonsense truths, and a healthy dose of humorous common sense, Escaping the Career Trap: Turn Your Apathy into Ambition and Never Hate Mondays Again will have you rethinking your career and making dynamic moves that will take you to new levels of success and happiness.
If you dread Mondays, but feel you can’t leave your current career or position because you have bills to pay, you might be surprised to learn it’s easier to make a change than you think. Tammy has been in corporate America more than twenty years, but she was able to transition to running her own business, and now she shows others, including CEOs and high level managers, how to do the same.
Escaping the Career Trap is divided into four parts: Reveal: The Dynamics Behind the Dysfunction, Align: Prioritizing Your Vision, Disrupt: Breaking All the Rules, and Thrive: Becoming The CEO of Your Career. Each part is then divided into several chapters that will take you on a journey from exploring why you feel trapped to recreating yourself and learning to love Mondays again. But this is no pie-in-the-sky book. Tammy is a straight talker who cuts away the excuses and impracticable solutions to get at the heart of the matter of what is bothering you and what will solve your problem. She offers hard-earned advice and realistic strategies to getting you where you want to be.
Early in the book, Tammy introduces us to the five lies we tell ourselves that keep us stuck in jobs we don’t like. Two of them are “No one loves what they do” and “You don’t have the experience to do something else.” Neither are true. Tammy shares her own personal experiences and those of numerous other people who have seen their careers skyrocket once they moved past lying to themselves and took action to change their situations. Some of those actions are big, some are small. Some require just a change of mindset. One of my favorite is how Tammy recommends people respond in interviews. When asked about your salary requirements, your response should be, “As much as you can possibly afford. What’s your budget?” She says she doubled her income by responding this way. It might be a bit bold to say, but what do you really have to lose?
Admittedly, Tammy is a bit of a rulebreaker. She’s not a rebel without a cause, but rather, she realizes there are always exceptions, so she recommends that you embrace the mindset that rules apply to others, and don’t let them slow you down.
One of the most refreshing pieces of advice Tammy gives may come as a real surprise. She says, “Break up with your unhealthy relationship with self-improvement. Not everyone can be an eagle, nor should they want to be. Embrace your inner flamingo, or peacock, accept your flaws, and do what you do best.” In other words, we don’t all have to have the same goal and all compete for that goal. We can forge our own career identities. She reminds us, “The sacrifices you make in the name of your career introduce anxiety, stress, and time away from your family and the things you love doing. You start to get that pit in your stomach thinking about the barrage of meetings and deadlines. You lose focus on what’s important: joy, those you love, and having fun. You created this monster, and you have the power to destroy it.”
Other great advice includes how to eliminate the Sunday blues. We all know the feeling. By Sunday afternoon we start getting stressed about Monday and we feel called upon to start checking email or doing work to get a head start on the work week. Tammy not only warns us not to do that, but she offers three fundamental mindset shifts to help us embrace the magic of Sunday-Fundays for the rest of our lives.
Throughout the book, Tammy shares some wonderful, inspirational quotes. I love the one from Ayn Rand in relation to Tammy’s urging us to be rule breakers: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who will stop me.” Another favorite of mine is from Alice Walker, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” And from Hillary Clinton, she shares, “Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.” Tammy teaches us how to remove that kind of confusion by revealing how to use the power of saying no, and like with all the other topics she discusses, she shares a compelling and true story of someone who learned that lesson.
Each chapter ends with a section Tammy calls Brain Candy where she offers important questions for the reader to chew on based on what they have just read. For example, “What worries you most about trying to achieve greater job satisfaction?” One of my favorite questions is “What would it look like if you cleared every obligation from your work and personal calendars and only put back what aligned with your values and goals?”
There is so much more in this book worth digesting and putting into practice. Tammy teaches us how to overcome imposter syndrome and having low self-confidence. She reveals how we can become a skill-stacking ninja. She teaches us how to overcome the fear of being fired by standing up for ourselves, and she coaches us in how to treat our employment like a business transaction—after all, that’s how your company treats it. It’s time to become the CEO of your own career. When you read Escaping the Career Trap and follow the advice Tammy Alvarez offers, you’ll be able to do just that.
For more information about Tammy Alvarez and Escaping the Career Trap, visit www.CareerWinnersCircle.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
