We’ve all been there. It’s Sunday night and you just had a wonderful weekend. Now you’re anxious and depressed just thinking about going to work Monday morning. My sister used to go to bed early on Sunday nights to cut her Sunday-night agony short. I, on the other hand, was more likely to stay up late to squeeze as much as I could out of my weekend.

Now, in Make Every Day a Friday! author Marina Spence is offering helpful advice and strategies for any woman who’s ever wished that every day could feel like a Friday. Marina teaches what she has learned herself. She broke away from a high-pressure Wall Street career that often left her in tears and went through a transformative life process that brought her full-circle back to a fulfilling career in alignment with who she is.

The recipe for making every day a Friday

The recipe is simple according to Marina: connect who you really are with what you do. When you do that, you can express your inner self through your outer work. The gap between who you are at work and who your true inner self is disappears.

“High-achieving women often make their job their life — it’s that good girl conditioning to please. I had to learn to detach and start listening to myself,” says Marina.

As she took baby steps to break away from her high-powered, high-stress job, she had to figure out what she wanted to do. She decided she wanted to be a writer and started taking writing classes. She found a woman author who’s writing she admired and, more importantly, whose “energetic” style she liked.

Coming from a very masculine industry, Marina had experienced that “there’s a lot of women who are too masculine.” So when she thought of being an author she wanted to embrace a much more feminine style of success. As she says, “We have more ways of being now. We can invent a feminine style of marketing that involves more ease and grace.”

Be gentle yet challenge yourself

According to Marina, each woman should start with her own individual situation. She took one and half years to develop her system for listening to her personal power and intuition. Along the way she tried the exercises herself along with many other women considering career change. “I wrote what would have helped me. I was gentle with myself while pushing myself into nervous places, fear. You have to visit those places to realize you don’t have to stay,” she explains.

During this process Marina moved back to Marin County in Northern California, started to write full time, began guiding women through career change and developed her website, www.PinkEdge.com.

The career change process doesn’t need to be hard

In How to Make Everyday a Friday!: The Joy of Connecting Who You Are with What You Do, Marina discusses career myths, how to decide if it’s time for a career change, defining what you don’t like and what you do, alternatives to a career change, tuning in to your intuition, going through a discovery phase and then zooming in on your choices through fact gathering. Quizzes and exercises facilitate the process so it’s a step-by-step process that doesn’t feel overwhelming.

Marina says that many women feel: “I want to do something different.” Yet they’re afraid to explore doing something different, because that would mean they would have to actually do it! Her tuning in exercises are a gentle way to unite heart and mind to making a change.

She not only assures you that “it’s normal to be scared when starting a new career.” She encourages women to try her three inner keys as an antidote to fear: tuning in, noticing (mindfulness) without judgment and intuition.

Relearning how to tune in to self and intuition

“We’re trained out intuition from childhood” states Marina. “As women we have a strong access to intuition, but as we climb up in our careers we train ourselves out of it. There’s not many practices that develop a contemplative mindset.”

In her book Marina writes that people typically receive intuitive information via:

• a gut instinct
• a feeling that you just know something, and always have
• an image or other visual clue
• feeling of lightness or buoyancy
• feeling of rightness or certainty
• reaction or response in your body

According to Marina, she knew she had hit on a gentle, user-friendly process that doesn’t scare women off when her Texas-Baptist cousin said she wanted to start tuning in. She advises women to start small by listening to their intuition about “relatively unimportant matters” like the right outfit to wear or the best route to work.

Also, Marina taught meditation classes for five years when she lived in Manhattan and she recommends that women try it for ten minutes a day for one month to see how it feels. She see a career parallel for this process. Try on a career for one month through exploration and follow intuition. Explore all the different aspects of the career.

How to Make Everyday a Friday! never leaves the realm of common sense and practicality. In fact, the intuition development exercises and recommendations reinforce the practical tone by simply asserting that we use what we have easy access to.

A changing career path is the new norm

Marina is a perfect example of listening to her intuition and responding to her own individual needs and preferences.

As satisfying as her life as an author has been, she finds that she misses being part of a team. She knows this clearly about herself. When she starting looking for a job recently, she got an offer that her intuition told her wasn’t the job for her (too time and energy demanding). She had learned when to say “yes” and when to say “no.” So she turned it down despite the bad economy and told herself she would look again in mid-May. Within a week, she found a more ideal job as a management consultant in the healthcare industry that she’s excited to begin.

Whether or not you are contemplating little changes or major career changes, in essence, Marina encourages women to #1) Do what you love and #2) Be more than your job. And, that’s good advice for anyone, whether you’re a new college graduate, re-entering the workforce after being a mom, looking for a corporate joy or contemplating becoming an entrepreneur.

So what are your career change challenges?