What Opportunity Lives in Your "Just for Fun" Box?
- carolmastrofini
- May 6
- 5 min read
ACTIV™ Coaching Framework · ACCESS & CHOOSE
What I've learned watching people navigate change — and the question that changes everything.
She was the first in her family to go to college.
Let that land for a moment. Not just the achievement, the weight of it. The pride of parents who sacrificed so their daughter could have a professional life. The younger siblings watching. The identity that gets built, quietly and collectively, around a person who made it.
She became an accountant. She was good at it. Reliable, precise, trusted. And for a long time, that was enough. For her being good at something, and being the person your family believed you could be, carried its own kind of meaning.
But meaning isn't the same as fulfillment. And she knew the difference, even if she couldn't say it out loud.
In my work as a workplace transition coach, I sit with people carrying exactly that weight — the gap between a life that looks right and one that actually feels right. It is one of the most common and least spoken truths of professional life.
The Pandemic Gift
When the world stopped in 2020, she found herself at home with time she didn't know what to do with. So she redecorated.
Not renovated — redecorated. Paint colors chosen carefully, then reconsidered. Furniture rearranged until a room finally felt right. Textiles layered. Art rehung. It was a small thing, and she treated it like a serious thing, and somewhere in that seriousness she felt something she hadn't felt at her desk in years.
Alive.
When the world reopened, friends noticed what she had done with her home. They asked for help with theirs. She said yes, because it was fun, because she was good at it, because it filled weekends with a particular kind of satisfaction she found almost embarrassing to admit. A hobby. A nice thing to do for people she loved.
She never once thought of it as a career. That category of thinking wasn't available to her yet.
When the Ground Starts to Shift
Then came 2022. ChatGPT. The acceleration.
She watched AI move into her field with the focused attention of someone who understands exactly what they're looking at. Reconciliation. Reporting. Audit preparation. Tasks that had defined junior roles for decades, absorbed quietly into tools that didn't need a salary or a benefits package. Colleagues grew nervous. The conversations in professional circles changed.
She was nervous too, but not quite in the way she expected. It wasn't panic. It was something more unsettling: a dawning sense that the career she had built, the one that carried so much family pride and personal sacrifice, might be contracting around her. And beneath the fear was a question she couldn't quite form yet.
That's when she found her way to workplace transition coaching.
First, ACCESS — Reconnect With What Matters
She arrived the way many people do — focused on the practical problem. The industry was changing. She needed to think about her next move. She wanted a plan.
What she got first was something different.
Before we talked about next steps, we talked about her. What she valued. What had given her energy over the years and what had quietly drained it. What she looked forward to and what she endured. We talked about the weekends. What she did with them, how she felt during them, how Sunday evenings compared to Saturday mornings.
This is the work of ACCESS — the first phase of the ACTIV™ workplace transition coaching process. Not strategy. Not planning. Reconnection. With your values, your motivations, the deeper currents of what actually matters to you. It's the kind of conversation that feels almost indulgent at first, until you realize that everything useful that comes after depends on it.
She talked about the decorating almost as an aside. Something she mentioned the way people mention things they're slightly embarrassed to love — quickly, with a small laugh, moving on.
I didn't move on.
Then, CHOOSE — Give Yourself Permission
There is a question I ask when the time is right. Not at the beginning — it only works after someone has done the deeper work of reconnecting with themselves. After ACCESS has surfaced what's actually there.
I asked her: "Is there a path you haven't let yourself consider — one you haven't even allowed yourself to think about?"
She didn't answer right away. I could see her moving through something, not searching for the answer, but slowly recognizing that she already had it. That she had been carrying it in the weekends, in the paint colors, in the particular joy of helping a friend see their home differently.
When she finally spoke, she said it carefully, like something fragile:
"I think I love interior decorating. But that's just something I do for fun. That's not — I mean, I couldn't actually..."
She stopped herself. And in that stopping, something opened.
The question in CHOOSE isn't "what should you do next?" It's more fundamental than that. It asks: what have you not given yourself permission to want? What lives in the part of you that you haven't brought into the room yet?
For her, the answer had been hiding in plain sight; in every weekend project and every friend's living room. It was in every moment she lost track of time because she was fully and completely absorbed in something that felt like her.
What Workplace Transition Coaching Made Possible
She hadn't come to coaching to discover a new career. She had come because her existing career felt uncertain. But ACCESS helped her see what was actually true about herself and CHOOSE asked the question that connected it all.
The decorating wasn't a hobby that happened to bring her joy. It was evidence. It was her values made visible — creativity, beauty, the satisfaction of transforming a space into something that felt right. It was everything her accounting work had never been.
And the AI disruption, the thing that had frightened her into the room? It turned out to be an invitation. Not a threat to survive, but a moment of clarity: the career that was contracting had never truly been hers. The life she actually wanted was already waiting, it just needed to be chosen.
Today she is building an interior decorating business. She will tell you it is the hardest thing she has ever done, and the most alive she has ever felt.
Why This Matters Right Now
Her story is no longer unusual. Across industries — accounting, finance, law, healthcare administration, countless others — AI is quietly reshaping what work looks like and who gets to do it. Roles that seemed permanent are becoming uncertain. Skills that took years to build are being absorbed into tools that didn't exist five years ago.
And in that uncertainty, millions of people are doing what she did before workplace transition coaching — waiting. Watching. Hoping the disruption passes before it reaches them. Keeping whatever lives in their "just for fun" box exactly where it is: separate, small, not serious.
But here is what I've learned watching people navigate career change: the disruption rarely creates the answer. The answer is almost always already there. It's in what you do when no one is asking anything of you, in where you lose track of time, and in what you've never let yourself take seriously because it felt too much like fun.
The work of workplace transition coaching is helping you find it. First through ACCESS — reconnecting with what truly matters to you. Then through CHOOSE — asking the question that makes the invisible visible.
If the change is coming anyway, you deserve to choose its direction.
Is there a path you haven't let yourself consider? Not the practical next step. Not the safe move.
If that question landed somewhere, I'd love to sit with it together. A first conversation costs nothing — just thirty minutes to begin listening for what's already there.
— Workplace Transition Coach, For Growth Coaching
