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The Hidden Side of Self-Employment

Steve Gardner

In the first of our series of articles to help you succeed in enterprise, business coach Steve Gardner looks at how a lack of self-discipline and social interaction can affect you when you start working for yourself from home.

So, you think you’ve got self employment pretty well sorted out? In my case, I had a good business plan, eight years experience as an employee in a similar business, a whizzo new computer, and enough skills and qualities for two people, including charm, shyness and modesty.

And yet after about a week I found myself feeling out of sorts and lacklustre; I just couldn’t understand it. Then my wife started complaining that, when she came home in the evening after a hard day at the office, I was machine-gunning her with words because I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day.

Doing All the ‘Good Things’

You do what all the books tell you are ‘Good Things’: cash flow spreadsheets, marketing plans, writing to potential clients. I was also ringing up all my chums to tell them how glad I was to have left the old company and set up on my own (aka networking), constructing a sophisticated database of contacts in case anyone ever returned my letters and calls, and learning about accounting for small businesses.

True, I was also playing computer games and working my way through a catering pack of chocolate cakes each day, but hey, I’m my own boss, I don’t have to ask permission. So this malaise just didn’t seem to make sense.

You find excuses for postponing doing things. I found I was "too busy" and "didn’t have the time" for such essential tasks as following up speculative approaches with a phone call. And when my wife asked me, in her own peculiarly penetrating style, what I’d accomplished during a day, I found I had difficulty remembering anything significant, and tried to justify my apparent lack of activity by falling back on excuses and generalities. It was only when I caught myself one day watching a daytime TV chat show – surely they’re actors? - that I got scared enough to question my behaviour.

I realised that I was lonely.

The Need for Feedback and Support

Full-time-employment involves lots of social activity. No-one working, especially your boss, will admit this, but it’s true.

I realised how much I missed having a quick chat with colleagues by the coffee machine or as I walked around the office; I missed having a whinge about life and the universe with mates in the canteen at lunch-time; I missed being able to collar my boss at inconvenient times to discuss my latest Bright Idea; I missed general office chit-chat around me, and I missed being able to discuss the semiology of the images in pre-Columbian Hopi Indian cave paintings with similarly well-informed colleagues. (Actually we talked football, but I’m trying to impress here.)

You need feedback and support. Although I found it great that I didn’t have someone whose IQ was only slightly larger than their shoe size telling me what to do – and this was one of the key reasons why I went self-employed in the first place – I realised that it was less than great that there was no-one to tell me that I had done, or was doing, a good job, no-one to bounce ideas off and no-one to tell me I was making or about to make mistakes.

Finding Solutions

For me, what made the difference was doing the following:

I started a Business Buddies group with some friends locally who were also working for themselves (and who weren’t competitors!). We met once a fortnight for support and business socialising.
I joined a couple of networking groups, one on-line and the other in real life.
I forced myself to go out at least once every day – partly for exercise and partly to break the routine of being indoors.
I put on a suit every day.
I cut the plug off the TV.

The result? Within about a week of putting my solutions into action, I found I was back to feeling positive and enthusiastic about myself and about my business. As a result of my different approach, and probably some luck, shortly afterwards I got my first client and realised that I was actually in business.

Bear in mind that if you intend working for yourself from you, you need to be:
Self-reliant
Confident in your own decision making
Tough-minded
Very, very self disciplined
And you need to get out and talk to people – e-mail and telephone are not good substitutes for good ol’ face to face meeting-people-in-the-flesh.

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May we be strengthened with the ability, willingness and capabilities to be good ambassadors of Nigeria contributing to its uplifting, rather than its detriment. - Cxsm