For years, the first sentence out of my mouth in any new room was some version of: “I’m a financial advisor at Sun Life.” It was accurate. It was also, I’ve come to realize, the wrong lead.
I still am a licensed financial advisor. I haven’t walked away from it — I’m actively managing a project connected to it, and I still believe deeply in the value of good financial planning. But I stopped leading with the title, and it took me a while to understand why.
The part nobody warns you about
What I never fully anticipated about the role was how much of it is built around chasing — chasing leads, chasing conversations, chasing a “yes.” I’ve since realized I don’t dislike the substance of financial advisory work. I dislike hard-selling. Those are two very different things, and for a long time I let the second one convince me I was failing at the first.
What I actually love — what I’m good at, and what doesn’t drain me the way prospecting did — is strategizing, organizing, building systems, and teaching people how to think about their own decisions. The financial advisor label captured maybe a third of that. The rest of it had nowhere to live.
The label stopped fitting before I admitted it
This is the honest part: I didn’t have a clean, dramatic moment where I decided to pivot. It was slower and less flattering than that — a gradual recognition that the role I was performing didn’t match the work I actually wanted to be known for. I kept the title because it was legible to other people, and because letting go of something that “made sense on paper” felt like admitting I’d made the wrong call years earlier.
I hadn’t. I’d just outgrown one version of the answer to “what do you do.”
What I’m building instead
I’m still Weanne, PMP. I’m still a licensed financial advisor. But the thing I’m actually building — the thing I want to be known for — is Life as a Project: a framework for applying real project management discipline to how people design their careers, their finances, their movement, their actual lives. The credentials are proof I can back it up. They’re not the identity anymore.
I’m not pretending this pivot is finished. I’m building it in public, in real time, which means some of this is still being figured out as I go. That’s the trade I’m choosing to make — sharing the “mid-journey” version honestly, instead of waiting until I have a tidier story to tell.
If you’ve ever outgrown a label before you had the nerve to say so out loud: I see you. What’s one you’re still carrying past its expiration date?
Moving by design, not by default.
#CareerPivot #PersonalBrand #LifeAsAProject #FinancialAdvisor #CareerChange