Episode 243: Carve Your Career Path and Make More Money with Lata Hamilton
Have you ever been stuck in a job you hate? Have you been nervous that there's only one possible path for you to take to use your college degree, and that everything else is off limits? Keep your head down. Put in your dues. Everyone raising their hands? Me too.
Today’s guest, Lata Hamilton, is on a mission to help other millennial women carve their own paths for a change in career, leadership and life, and find the confidence and authenticity to truly earn their worth.
As you're listening to the interview, I hope you take a second to notice how her personal life has really paralleled her career path, and what she's chosen to do with the way that she opens her mind to new possibilities, and the reason she shares her salary progression.
From feeling stuck to tripling her salary
Lata was born in India and lived in an orphanage before her Australian parents adopted her. It was the 80s and the orphanage was filled with girls – girls Lata says weren’t valued.
“I always grew up knowing that I was adopted (…) it's really made me realize just what a big impact that actually was,” says Lata. “I like to say, ‘it doesn't matter where you start, it's where you're going and the lives that you change along the way that really matters.’ And so for me, that's what I'm always looking to do. It's almost like living up to my full potential.”
She watched her father, the breadwinner of the family, work at one company getting promotion after promotion and raise after raise. She says on an unconscious level, she thought that was the path to success.
Lata went to university and pursued a creative industry – media and communications. When she received her salary offer for her first job in advertising, she realized she could have skipped university and stocked supermarket shelves for the same pay.
“I went into the corporate space because at some level I was like, ‘well, corporate is the way that you go in order to get a bigger salary,’ ” says Lata. “But that's not what happened because I'm not my dad. I'm not a 50-year-old white man.”
In the first years of her corporate career Lata says she felt stuck and stifled as she came up against people saying “you’ve got to do your time.” She wasn’t getting promotions. She did graduate training for leadership and was offered an entry-level role. It was frustrating.
She did some coaching and moved to a new company that boosted her pay by $20,000 and it was there that she found change management. Change management is moving people from doing things in one way to doing things in a new way in a company through communications, training and business readiness. For Lata, because change management is project work it had that variety, flexibility and challenge that she wanted. It allowed Lata to shift into a leadership role and triple her salary by making strategic decisions about her career.
“We're not going to work for fun,” says Lata. “Otherwise, it would be a hobby, or it would be volunteering. We actually want to go to be compensated.”
Lata says the income that you're able to make starting out with whatever is your career foundation becomes that launch pad to how you can set up and live the rest of your life.
What to do if you’re feeling stuck in your career
Lata says if you're feeling stuck and frustrated right now, that is sapping your energy. That is sapping your soul. So now is the time to start putting change into action. Now is the time to start thinking about what it is that you actually want.
She says confidence comes from when you get really clear about who you are, what you want, what value you bring to the table, and then what your work is worth. So when you get really clear on those four things, suddenly you have that clarity around what your career could be.
Lata loves to share her salary and salary progressions openly because she wants to inspire people about what’s possible. As women, we often don't want to talk about money. We don't want to talk about salary. We are taught that it's rude, that it's not a polite thing to do to discuss money, but often what that means is that we don't understand what is possible out there for us, she says.
For Lata, change management was a career path presented to her only once she was already in the corporate world. She says if you’re looking to make a change, have the courage to talk to people around you. She suggests that it doesn’t have to be your leader or manager at work; it can be a neutral third party like a colleague or someone outside the company.
“There's so many ways of doing things, and often we just don't have that information or we're not aware,” says Lata.
Free gift for listeners
Get Lata's free "Underpaid and Overlooked Coaching Action Guide" with her 5-step formula to change careers with confidence and earn your worth: https://www.latahamilton.com/worthit
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