We’re all familiar with the adage “you have to love yourself” – it’s almost become the catchphrase of the 21st Century…well that and “Google it”! But what about the way you earn your living, your job, your business – can you honestly say you love that too, or do you see it just as a means to an end? A way to earn enough money so you can retire and live a lazy life!
Let me tell you a story about me and how I ended up LOVING my business and the work I do. I wasn’t always so in love with it – heck no! In fact, when I first set up on my own (this time around anyway) I quickly realised the path I had chosen really wasn’t rocking my world – in fact, it was making me miserable. You see, I had opted to buy into a virtual P.A. franchise (and it wasn’t cheap, let me tell you!) partly because it seemed “the safer thing to do” and partly because of the assurances and promises the franchise company made to me, and others. Having had various office manager type roles over the years, I believed helping someone else run their business was all I could do…talk about a limiting belief.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed the training which was part of the “package”, but the promised guaranteed clients never appeared, and I quickly realised, that to people on the network scene I was part of, I was “just a secretary”. I know, I know – there is absolutely nothing wrong with secretarial work…it just isn’t me!
Fast forward a couple of years to 2018, I was still just going through the motions with the business – and then I started to do more internal self-development work…and POW! Literally overnight, I changed my thoughts and beliefs to what I really wanted to be – A WRITER. By the end of that year, I had completed a novel, met a certain lady by the name of Sharon Brown (some of you may know her too <grin>) and switched my business to being that of a content creator.
Over time I’ve built up a steady flow of clients, other business owners who want me to write their web content, social media and blog posts, and I coined the phrase – “giving business owners a written voice”. These smaller pieces of work have developed into ghost-writing entire books for business owners who lack either the time or inclination to create their own material. And I’ve even found the time to publish another book of my own, this time an anthology of short stories all written in May 2021 during one of the lockdowns.
So, my message to all of you this Valentines month, is to love your business, love what you do, and I promise you it won’t feel like work. You’ll want to show up every single day and give your very best to your clients, your business AND yourself.
