In the last two weeks I’ve started to take decisive action about moving out of town and using social media to take my business in a new direction.

Suddenly I’m showing prospective tenants round my London house one day and looking at cottages in the country the next. All this at the same time as doing the Teaching Sells course, which I signed up for at the beginning of the month, and which is blowing my head off. I am at once exhilarated and terrified.

As I’ve been driving round the M25, establishing things in my new life at the same time as paying attention to and honoring the commitments of my old life, I’ve been thinking about some of the challenges of being someone who works outside of the traditional system.

• You’ll get bored at times.When I started out on my own ten years ago, I naively believed that once I’d defined my initial offerings, those would be what I’d deliver for the rest of my life. I didn’t build into the picture the fact that I can do things enthusiastically for big chunks of time, but once I’ve cracked the challenge, need to move on to something new. The reality, however, is that my current evolution is at least my fifth.I was pretty confused the first time I got an inkling of wanting to change things. Had I got it wrong in the beginning? Was I failing somehow by not being able to keep doing what I was doing? Had I misled others, especially my clients, into thinking I was one thing when now I felt like I was another? Would I still make money if I dared to move away from something that was successfully earning, but becoming a bit humdrum?As time has passed I’ve become more comfortable to venture into new things that appeal to me whether I’ve got a fully baked strategy for them or not. Take this blog, for example, I created it because I love writing and I had a sudden desire to blog. It’s still a baby, but spending time on it, getting acquainted with other bloggers, and joining Twitter have all pulled me in a direction that even six months ago I could not have seen myself taking. Some of my ideas fly and some of them fail. Knowing that me and my ideas are two different things has helped in recent years to keep me bouyant, especially when things some things haven’t gone in exactly the direction I’d have hoped.
• It’s up to you create each iteration of your work.Working for yourself gives enormous potential to invent your own work. I must admit that this is something that has taken me years to wholly understand. The corporate system sees things in conventional terms; job roles are defined similarly across different companies and if you’re in a job and you want a bit of variety you shift role either within or outside of your company. Even outside the corporation there are professions, largely occupied by self-employed people, that define themselves very tightly. Consulting, coaching and psychotherapy are three such worlds that I’ve spent time inhabiting at different times. I understand why there are rules, but what if you don’t quite see yourself in exactly the way the profession demands? Nevertheless, if your mind has been hardwired to survive and indeed thrive in these environments, seeing the immense possibilities that lie beyond their boundaries can be quite dazzling at first.But the reality is that self-employment gives us the opportunity to define what we do in very individual terms and indeed to morph it as times change and new opportunities appear. We might struggle sometimes because we can’t see many people who do exactly what we do. Or, conversely, we see lots of people, and find it difficult to define what’s different about us. This is all part of the challenge and may take you some time to figure out. But stick with it.My next evolution is being driven by the realization that I am a synthesis of many things. First, there’s my passion for, and indeed experience of knowing that work can be a different, more livable experience to the one that’s often sold us and the one we often unconsciously fall into because that’s what we’ve somehow been programmed for. Then there’s my experience of coaching and consulting and my ability to affect profound life change. Then there’s my entrepreneurialism and my belief that there’s a business to be grown around helping people break their own working molds. And, the most recent addition, my interest and increasing awareness of the power of the web, the communities it creates, and my sense that more and more people, searching for something different, will find themselves online. For the moment, I’m calling myself a different kind of coach.
• You need to nurture and support each incarnation of your work.One of the things that has kept me alive to my self-employed journey is my commitment to my own training and development. Maybe it was the experience of having worked for some major brands, but I understood early on that I was my brand, and that if I was going to stand the test of time, I’d have to stay current. I’ve invested tens of thousands of pounds on training courses, books, conferences, networking groups and professional supervision. I’ve also used a variety of coaches along the way, including my blog coach, Michael Martine. The upsides of all of this significantly outweigh the money I’ve spent. I’ve met some great new people, made some life time friends, learned new skills and transformed as a person. All of which has helped me leverage myself from one manifestation of my work – and indeed, life – to another.This is a tough, new transition for me to broker, but I’m well up for it and am feeling more excited about it than I did when I set off on my own ten years ago.