Trusting Your Gut to Come Alive in Your Career (w/ Courtney Paré)

May 8, 2023·25 min·2 clips

Courtney doubled her salary in UX/UI, allowing her to afford her dream wedding and move back to family.

The pivot starts quietly. Courtney says music school was never about becoming a performer. She already wanted the business side, and that choice ended up mattering. At Berkeley, the music-business track brought her into marketing, then into a web design class that lit something up right away. She noticed it, even if she did not have the whole career map yet. At a small marketing firm, the work got practical. Client website redesigns. Small graphics. Social media pieces. Enough hands-on digital work to show her where her attention kept going. The host reads the story as a connect-the-dots moment: the pieces looked scattered at the time, but in hindsight they were pointing somewhere. Then came the gut check. Courtney heard people describe staying in similar roles for 15, 20, or 30 years, and her body basically said no. That discomfort was useful. The host frames it as self-knowledge, the kind that can move a career before every next step is tidy or proven. Courtney did not know everything. She just knew the next 10 or 15 years could not go toward a path that already felt wrong. That opened the door to TikTok, UX/UI, and the slow confidence that comes from trusting one next move, then another. The story stays grounded too: Courtney is now a product designer at Earnest, and the host notes that UX/UI essentially doubled her salary. She points listeners to her website and portfolio, then leaves them with a plain reminder: time spent somewhere that is no longer serving you is time you do not have to keep wasting.

As heard by us

A grounded career-pivot story that turns instinct into something practical.

Courtney Pare's shift from the music business into UX/UI is the point this conversation keeps circling back to, and it lands clearly. She talks through a music business track at Berkeley in Boston, an early web design class that clicked right away, and a small marketing firm…

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Why you'd press play

You want a pivot story that starts in music and lands in UX/UI.

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