Navigating the Self-Employment Roller Coaster

It has been way too long… I am embarrassed at how my social media posting has dropped, at the length of time it has taken for me to post another blog… however, that is because I fell into the curse of the self employed!

What curse? That of taking on too much work through anxiety caused by the anticipation of empty diary months (for me the academic holidays). As it so happens, everything has worked out well and I’ve had a stream of steady work come in with new clients, new opportunities and some potentially year round stability. Yay!

So, it has been a roller coaster and now I am six months into this incredible ride, I find myself reflecting and thinking ahead to the next six and what I want to try to focus on, if I should be trying to focus yet, how can I ensure the insanely busy two weeks I am currently experiencing happens with more control next year!

When I started self employment, I had two clients and one contact. I knew what I had to do and I put all my energy into building my contacts, applying for contracts and positions in which I could be freelance/self employed. My focus quickly began to change as I fell back in love with community education. I left full time employment as an extremely unhappy and dissatisfied project manager to be a professional and personal development coach, I’m very happily a corporate trainer and personally fulfilled as a community education lecturer. The increase in my mental and physical wellbeing, and confidence is immeasurable!

My projected income has taken longer to fulfil than I expected, however, I fell into another trap of relying too much on the ‘promise’ of a regular stream of work from one client. This hasn’t materialised with any work and set me back financially as I naively made space for them in my diary without any guaranteed bookings. Don’t make the same mistake!

What this did mean is that I was forced to look at large further education colleges for work, which I hadn’t intended to do, and that in itself has been a positive as my confidence has increased in my teaching ability and I have enjoyed teaching GCSE English and am currently delivering Family Learning. It has also shown me that my head is in the right place as I have been constantly working on building my network and looking for new opportunities. I have not sat back. And I’m proud of me for that!

So, as I look forward to getting my evenings back after the madness of these current two weeks, I find myself looking forward to what I want to build. I anticipate a more stable income, I already have work for the next academic year and am prepared for the multiple holidays (breaks in income flow) that come with it. I do want to deliver more professional development training and begin applying for funding to deliver my own projects on sustainability, creativity and personal development. I also want to focus more attention on my online shop and explore what I can do with this.

Regular posting on social media and blogging is a priority for me, but if I lapse please don’t worry. I’m just experiencing the usual self employment challenges and will be back soon!