Not sure if anyone else normally thinks about what it looks like inside their minds, but I Imagine mine as a cozy living room. Thoughts come and go, spending some arbitrary amount of time chilling on comfy couches in the dim lighting of a crackling fireplace. Some of them enjoy this space very much and others are there simply to make a mess. Why such an intro? Keep on reading to find out :)

In late spring of 2021 – during that weird limbo period between “people being hyper-aware of the daily COVID statistics” and “everything slowly returning to the way it was before” - I found myself thinking about a specific question ever so often. “Am I happy?” was a new guest, who seemed to pop up out-of-nowhere one day, started to feel comfortable in my living-room-mind and kept on spending more and more time there. At first I didn’t really notice it there, being preoccupied with my usual routines and such, but over the next few weeks it transformed into a regular visitor.

Bit by bit the thought started to find its way into my daily life and I, on the other hand, found myself thinking about how it came to be: what exactly was not feeling right and how did I arrive at this conclusion? It turns out that being “preoccupied” with a stale topic for a longer period of time is something I don’t enjoy at all. There was no more excitement in my “usual routines” and the learning curve for new things has pretty much topped out. I felt stuck – something needed to be done... And this something was change. Arriving at this conclusion, I then did something waaaay out of my comfort zone: I set my LinkedIn profile to “open for new opportunities”.

After a while, the opportunities did start presenting themselves. Heading into interviews, I had very concrete ideas about what a new work place should include: an active communication culture, friendly and helpful colleagues, an absence of old company structures and a strong drive to deliver - in other words, it should be cool. Of the companies I talked to in the process, all 100% did fulfill my criteria - if you were to believe their HR-people. Which made me think of another metric: “how does talking to the interviewer feel? Does it make me happy?”. As expected, most of the 100%-ers failed with the applied 2nd metric.

The feeling of me being “just another date on the agenda, whom the interviewer relays his company’s story to for the 12th time that day” came across more often than I hoped. (HR-persons seem to also have the issue with stale routine :) ) This did discourage me quite a bit and I put the whole thing with change on hold; leaving forthcoming message requests unanswered and unread, including one coming from a nice HR-lady of a small company I never heard of before.

The initial thought kept on bothering me, though. “Which would it be; stay in the unhappy state or move on to new, exciting things? It just doesn’t make sense to stop halfway, duh.” I revisited my LinkedIn inbox after a few weeks and messaged back Daniela of craftworks, apologizing for the delayed answer. She replied that she just returned from a few weeks of vacation and saw my reply. As if there was no delay at all. The initial calls/meetings went as expected, again 100% of the first criteria were covered. But the difference to my previous experiences was that, since the first call, I could tell that this company's way of dealing with candidates (= actually I could not, but from my own subjective standpoint I hoped that this was true for everyone) was not because of some company policy, but due to real, mutual respect.

In fact, this sense of respect and sincere interest was met by each and every person in craftworks I talked to. Needless to say, I felt like I scored a jackpot. And the feeling did not stop there - since starting at craftworks, there have been many moments where I felt like that. Some of those you’ll be able to read in the other stories.

A few months in, a former colleague messaged me and asked 3 questions out of the blue, which inspired me to write this story: What are the new colleagues like? Did they accept you for who you are? Was change the right decision? Answering these questions made me realize that I had already subconsciously found a positive answer to the question from Part 2 that was on my mind for so long...

Sooo, long story short, I can only encourage you to never stop trying to stick to your intuition (yes, trying counts too!), whatever situation in life you are facing.