What you ought to know about working for yourself

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.

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.

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.