Q&A: Am I shooting myself in the foot by being self-employed?

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I have the pleasure of knowing quirky, colorful and emotionally intelligent Brit-in-America Mabel Bachini on a personal level…but I’ve never dug too much into work stuff with her.

But that all changed when we sat down and talked about my concerns with self-employment.

Some background:

• Mabel is a licensed professional career fulfillment coach specializing in neurodiverse clients (for example, folks with ADHD, highly sensitive people or those who just feel like they don’t fit in).

• I’m a freelance journalist who’s been self-employed for going on seven years.

Dive into our convo, coming up after this ad:

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Rachel: What would you need to ask me to find out whether I need to make changes in my work?

Mabel: There are a million things that you could do in the world, and you're always having to choose just one or a couple of those things and sacrifice others. There's always an opportunity cost. 

• Do you feel happy broadly with what you're doing? 

• Do you enjoy your work? 

• Do you feel happy with the income that you're getting?

• Is there anything that is out of alignment, that makes you go, “This is an area that I'm really missing out on”? 

• Is there something you really want to do that you're not able to with this current career setup?

In general, I'm very happy. Of course, there are tedious elements of the job, like having to manage admin. The main thing that comes to mind is just having enough leftover creative juice to pursue my own personal ventures. I try really hard to make time for creative writing, but I would like to balance that better with the journalistic work that pays the bills. 

Also, I think in recent years I've found a work-life balance, but that was hard to achieve. It can be hard to predict what's gonna put you over the edge of too much work.

When you evaluate how work feels for you right now, there are two things that come up. The first thing is creative energy. You do put a fair amount of creative energy into this work, so making sure you have enough for the other passions that you have is important. And then the other thing is work-life balance. What would it be like to have a full-time employed position with a publication?

Well, that scares me for a number of reasons. One is less control over the fate of what I actually choose to do on a day-to-day basis. I don’t have kids, but I do have two former street dogs at home who do a lot better in life if I’m there at least a couple of times a day to help them get some energy out. I fear my midday freedom would be diminished. At the same time, I’ve seen some opportunities where the compensation is enough for me to think I can manage it.

I have a couple of thoughts. I work with a lot of different clients who have ideas of careers that they think might be better for them, and so much of that is just based on their perception of what those careers are like. A big encouragement of mine is to just have loads of conversations with people who do those jobs and find out from them the stuff that no one tells you, the worst parts of the job, and really learn what that job is like so you can truthfully evaluate whether it seems better suited to you.

I don’t know why I never thought of that before. It seems so obvious!

A couple of years ago, I did ABA therapy work with kids with autism at the same time that I was growing my business. I did not realize that was a job where you only get paid if your client shows up, and these are kids with autism, so you probably only earn 70% of your hours. That's this little hidden thing that's a huge part of the job, but you don't even realize most of the time until you sign the contract. I might have spoken with people who had done the job, and they would have said that's one of the worst parts of the job. 

I feel like it's pretty clear talking this through that I lean towards maintaining what I'm doing with some exceptions, but that leads into my next question. Talking about this whole idea of long-term planning, I have considered myself very flexible in my work, and I think that's benefited me in certain ways. The economy can change so fast, which favors certain industries over others, and that impacts whether I'm getting a certain amount of work or who that work is coming from.

The most I've ever done with goal planning is month to month. For some reason, when it comes to doing a long-term plan, I just feel like I do not want to do that. What's your opinion? Do I need a five-year plan? 

What comes up when you think about a five-year plan?

It just feels like I'm pigeonholing myself. I feel like a lot of times I encounter these opportunities that I would never have anticipated. Also, I've often struggled with the idea of not being a serious journalist, because maybe I'm not an investigative reporter on the Spotlight team, but I think over the years, I've gotten more integrity, or at least I view myself better, and I'd like to continue doing that, but I'm just not sure how that's going to look. 

And with the type of work I do, I'm just not sure how I would quantify that. Is it growing X percent in your income every year? Is it writing for X amount of new publications? Is it pitching X amount of articles, hoping they get landed? Where the fuck do I even start?

I typically help clients to create some kind of longer-term vision that they can attach to. I don't necessarily call it a strategic plan, but something that is further out than now that they really want. There's something to work towards, and I have found that that is very grounding and motivating to help you keep going when shit hits the fan, which inevitably will happen. 

For me in my business, having a bigger vision of where I want to be in five years time, 10 years time gives me more motivation to do the boring stuff, like do my taxes when there's 100 different things that would be fun to use my brain for, like looking at Airbnbs for the weekend. For a lot of my clients, it's like, “Oh, I really wanted the job, but they never got back about an interview,” and that can be a point when you can either go, “Maybe I shouldn't do this,” or “I'm going to keep going, because this is the vision I'm working towards.” 

How specific are you getting in your vision? Is it more about your business or also about your life?

The reason why we are building careers that work for us is so that we can have a life that works for us. Your career is like a puzzle piece in your whole life. I start with my life, and then I move to my career. For example, a big thing for me is, I want to be able to have some kids and be really present with them and also have a business that I really enjoy. Knowing that influences the decisions I make now. I personally always have this thing in mind: What I'm doing right now, can this be transferable to having kids and only working 20 hours a week?

I like to have an intention statement, or a paragraph of the vision I have for my life in 5-10 years time, and it gets really specific. You get into manifesting territory here. If you're really clear on what you want in the future, you're going to more clearly see the opportunities now that will help you get there.

It’s just a simple document! That looks a lot less scary than I thought it would. Do you revisit it every year?

Yeah, I love doing a big January rehaul. There’s so much stuff you can spend your time on, and I think it could be more effective by getting really clear on what you want in the future, and then focusing on actions to help get to that.

I’m willing to try it. And I’m thinking I might want to try it with colored pencils and make something cute and silly. Does that sound weird? 

That sounds fabulous. Another thing that I really like, if you’re multi-passionate, is career maps. You're in the center, and then you just slide a diagram with all the different things you would love to do in your career. It’s like a mind map. Some of my clients can get stressed by so many things they want to do, but there’s only now. Just having that somewhere is calming for them.

One last point I wanted to touch on is this idea of learning opportunities that allow for growth in your career. Each month I'll do a few chapters on an online learning course or take a webinar. How do you think this compares to what you know of peoples’ in-house education opportunities? And how can I maximize that for myself? 

If you're working full time, you can potentially have really good education opportunities. Also you might not. And in my experience, they will plateau after a couple years. If you want to keep on learning, you would want to move roles. If you're self employed, my personal favorite things that you can do are basically all about connecting with people. Whether it's working as a contractor or just a business that you can partner with, you have access to their network, their training, that kind of stuff. For me, it's the university that I'm partnering with, and I get access to all of their university content, and I get to go to their trainings for free. 

If you’re self-employed, constantly having conversations with people you find interesting is a really good learning opportunity because it’s learning out in the real world.

I can trace back some experiences that have been like that for me. I got a grant because someone told me about it, and then I told someone about it who ended up getting it too.

That's so cool. What that makes me think of is, if you are part of a company, those learning experiences are often baked in. If you're self employed, you have to go out and meet people and get those real-life experiences. 

Networking at the basic level really is how business operates, like it or not. I think it's really important to find a way of doing that that works for you and doesn't make you want to cry in a corner. Structured networking events are really good. If you are going to go to something unstructured, having an intention for it can be really helpful, and that intention can just be to connect with three people and have genuine conversations and learn about them. People love feeling like an expert and sharing their opinions.

I do hate the phrase pick your brain though. But if you say, I’d love to hear your opinion on this, it’s totally different.

Is there anything else you’d like to add to wrap up this conversation?

The important thing is, how do you feel about how your career is going? Everyone's going to tell you that you should do this, you should be saving this much for retirement, XYZ. But I really think it's just about what feels good for you, and being really brave in letting that voice speak louder than the voice that's like, “Everyone else is doing it this way, so I should too.”

Thanks,