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March 23, 2014 at 4:20 am #987226Up::0
Hi, everyone. I know I’m not technically a new member but it’s been close on two years since I was posting regularly, which means my original intro thread is well and truly locked!
It feels a bit odd coming back in here with little new news to offer, but since those last posts back in mid-2012… I haven’t changed much.
I’m still at my day job and I still don’t yet know just how I can help people out. I mean, I can talk into the blue sky about what I’m good at but I need to be able to marry that up with someone else’s problems. That bit’s always been tough, mainly because I’m the stay-at-home type. I went to a couple of meetings of local business groups, but though I got some promising leads for one, it’s part of an international franchise which expects members to pay some hefty annual fees. Other groups I’ve just not connected with (especially as they tend to be excuses for cheap drinks to kick a Friday night off).
As you can tell, I’ve also struggled a lot with confidence. As I wrote, I tend to spend a lot of my evenings at home, and even find reasons to not attend get-togethers of a local board gamers’ group. So I lack some of that entrepreneurial understanding of the actual issues folks are facing and how I could fix them.
I’ve been turning that around a bit lately, mainly because of two things: meditating and finding a creative outlet that I really enjoy. I was working on a novel for several years and feeling frustrated and self-critical because I wasn’t putting the time in on the thing I thought I was meant to be doing.
Then in January this year, the penny finally dropped: I actually don’t like writing novels. Not even short stories.
So I switched to drawing, a talent I’d neglected for years, and within a space of a couple of weeks was creating comic strips that I’ve been running on my site once a week. Both having and outlet that I really love doing which lets me “ship” something on a weekly basis has been a real confidence booster.
So I’m starting to think about freelancing again. I recently wrote a second guest post (the first was in November 2012) for a friend’s web log – said friend has recently ditched the nine-to-five and freelances as a blog reviewer, ghost writer, credited writer and even editor of career web logs like the Brazen Careerist – and began looking for some alternative business groups around town. Someone suggested Toastmasters and there’s a group on the way home from work that meets again in a week and a bit; I’m already a pretty good speaker so I hope I can find some way of putting that skill to use for folks in the group.
But ultimately, I think that’s what I need to do. I read an article recently which put an older Benjamin Franklin quote in a way that clicked with me – before you can be “a writer”, you need to be doing things worth writing about. And for me, that involves getting out, meeting people and finding he ones I’ll enjoy working with.
March 23, 2014 at 9:02 am #1161717Up::0Rob, it’s good to see you back again and thank you for sharing your challenges and plans so openly.
They say that sharing plans with others is a key step in really bringing about change and creating actions…and you’ve certainly done that!
We look forward to hearing more from you.
Robert and the FS Crew
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