Mini Episode: Five Things Before You Leap: Lessons From The Self-Employed

[00:59] Paul: Want to talk today about the 5 things I've found in working with people take a leap to self-employment, freelancing, basically anyone that's carving a different path. So the first thing you need is a friend. This can come in many different ways. For a lot of people I talk to who are carving a new path, going out on their own, they often have family influences. Who they've looked up to early in life. Sometimes they know they're entrepreneurs, or later they'll look at them as entrepreneurs.

I talked to a couple people on my podcast and they looked back after they had taken the leap and said, oh, actually my grandmother was kind of a badass entrepreneur, um, or making money doing several different things. Um, other people have had a one powerful, meaningful conversation. Uh, they've met somebody that is a digital nomad, is a freelancer, is an entrepreneur. And they have a meaningful conversation that in which that person shares the vulnerability of the path and you can start to say, okay, this makes sense. I can connect with this person and perhaps even reach out to this person as I'm taking the leap on my journey. The third way is just to find a partner.

If you're trying to start a business venture, you can find somebody that wants to go down that journey with you and that can make it a lot less lonely. The second thing you need to do is redefine your relationship with money. This is one of the most emotional charged issues for people that are going out on their own. Often there's a shift away from a steady income, a life in which you're getting paid to show up to work. You show up and a steady, consistent paycheck and benefits come at the end of every month. And that's not guaranteed if you're going to go out on your own.

Some people are more successful than others and can prove out that they can make money before they take the leap. But taking a different path often involves questioning that relationship with money. So one shift is away from thinking about a steady income coming in, showing up for your ability to perform the duties of an employee, and instead saying, okay, all the work I do, that's what I get paid for. And then also making the shift of looking at your expenses and saying everything additional that I spend, that's more work that I need to do. One exercise that can help with this is fear setting. And this is an exercise I've developed with people that forces you to put down on paper, what is failure for me?

How much in a year will I make such that I consider that a failure? Or how long am I comfortable with going without an income? So third is an F.U. fund. You need money or savings such that you can say no to things. And this is where people get in trouble.

If you don't have that money as a way where you're going to say, I have the ability to say no to certain projects and I can tap into this savings to essentially kind of like pay yourself, you're going to have a hard time because you're going to look at everything as I need to continually make money. You're going to start saying yes to projects or ventures or creative things you're doing that you don't want to get involved with. And the power to say no starts with having the savings and a fund that enables you to say no to things, or even just take a few months to work on a creative project that you know you want to put out into the world. Fourth is teach something. Everyone has about 100 things they could teach almost everyone in their lives, but we underestimate the knowledge and expertise and insights that that we have.

A good way to do this is just make a list of 25 things that you could teach other people. And how do you put this into action? One way is you could start writing, start writing about what you know. This will have two benefits. One is it's going to force you to make sense of what you know and learn it a second time. Two, it's going to communicate to potential people that want to follow you on your journey that, hey, here's somebody worth following, here's somebody I might want to connect with, and it helps you build that community that's going to help you sustain your journey.

Fifth, you want to have some proof that you can make money outside of full-time employment. This is often really uncomfortable for people, one, because people are either scared of asking for money, or two, just they've never had to do it before. I think a lot of people in a jam, if they really needed to make money in a short period, could do it, but we're not used to making it through our own acts, our own service, our own products, our own initiatives. So a good way to do this is try to test out some side hustles on the side if you're working full-time, and this can take many different forms. One thing I've done in the past is host a dinner, charge people money around a different topic. People are usually looking for these intimate, deeper events where they can come and be part of something.

Frame it around something you can teach. Another way to do this is just basically email out to your friends. When I first started coaching people, I wrote up the pretty short post, maybe 300 to 500 words, and said, here's why I am becoming a career coach. And people resonated with it. I ended up getting my first two clients from it. But people are often afraid to ask.

I think some of this makes sense, right? You don't want to just be hitting up all your family for paid services, but a lot of people are just waiting to be asked because they're looking for help. When I sent my post out, I emailed it to 100 people I knew, friends and family, and I ended up getting a couple clients through referrals from those friends. So I didn't actually have my friends or close connections hiring me. And that built my confidence that I could do more. I tried more experiments such as group coaching.

It basically had 3 or 4 different scenarios which I was able to earn money before I actually took the leap that told me, okay, this is something that can actually work.