The COOLEST BOSS I’VE EVER HAD
Last week was the first time I've taken an entire week off of the blog since starting it a year and a half ago. Honestly, I don't have a good reason for why. I spent last week on vacation at the beach, but being on vacation has never stopped me before. And I spent almost no time on the beach during that vacation because we happened to go the same week as Hurricane Debby. It's hard to relax on the beach while a hurricane blows massive amounts of wind and sand your way.
This is the problem I run into with a lot of my dreams. I am excited about them until they become work, and then the realization sets in that I have a job. And at this point, it is a job that requires me to work for free. Here's the biggest problem: I am, by all accounts, unemployable. Between the fact that I am a military spouse and the fact that my parents were business owners, I have never had a "traditional" job.
I've either worked in commission-only sales (meaning I was entirely in charge of my schedule) or as a nanny. While being a nanny definitely fits closer to the traditional job role, I was always with a family where I was a "nice to have" rather than a necessity. If I had something pop up that I wanted or needed to be at, then it was usually relatively easy to get that time off, even if it was a last-minute thing. And I was very fortunate throughout this time that earning an income was not a necessity because we lived comfortably off my husband's.
That time has come to an end, though. The military provides us with a stable income that allows us to fund our existence, but it does not fund our lives anymore. By that, I mean we can pay our bills, keep food on the table, and go out for an activity a few times a month. But we can no longer comfortably pay for the vacations that we want to take. Between the increased cost of things, adding a member to the family, and some more significant necessary purchases (like PCSing and getting a new car), our "fun" fund isn't as big as it used to be.
That's where my decision to return to work has come from, and again, I am not working a traditional job. It's been about a month back at work, and I am seeing the results that I wanted. But the fun of new things is wearing off and starting to feel like work.
Work is not a bad thing. We all need to show discipline in our lives, and life is better because the things we want don't always come easy. We all have to work for something. I am self-employed in every aspect of my work, which is great and exactly what I want. The problem with that, and I'm sure many of you see it when working on your personal dreams, is that being our own boss is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, we are entirely in control of our schedule, and on the other hand, we are entirely in control of our schedule. Hopefully, you will read that with two different inflections. I find myself quickly becoming the coolest boss I could ever ask for. In what other job could I just not show up to work for a week because I didn't feel like it? What boss would say, "no big deal, just get back to work whenever you want to."
In my blogging, there is no immediate consequence for not doing what I need to do. I don't see website numbers until the second day of the following month, and those numbers are all over the place enough that I wouldn't necessarily be able to attribute them to skipping a week unless they are truly abysmal. I don't see any income (which I am not expecting to see income for many years), so skipping a week doesn't affect my bank account. I almost certainly delayed the time it would take for my dream to come true, but I didn't know the original end date, so it's hard to feel any loss on that front.
It's the same way we can skip going to the gym for a week and see very little difference. For most people, it would take multiple weeks or even months to see a change in the scale or how clothes fit. Often, those changes are so gradual that we don't notice until things get more out of hand than we were planning.
Being self-employed and chasing our dreams means we actually have to work. Dreams don't come for free; achieving them will take time, energy, and money. The trick is figuring out how to get ourselves to work when we don't feel like it. We know how to do it for a job, but how do we do it for ourselves? It doesn't matter how I feel about waking up early; I would still do it if I were committed to showing up for a family. But when I am committed to myself, it is so much easier to put it off until motivation strikes.
The problem is motivation rarely strikes, and if it does, it sticks around for about as long as a flash of lightning in the sky. The other problem is that neglect compounds. Taking one day off probably isn't a big deal. Taking a week or a month off may not be an issue, but those days off will build on one another, and we won't realize how much progress we have lost until it is too late to get it back.
I want to be clear that last week's problem was not that I took a break from work for vacation. We need balance in our lives, and if I were in a traditional job, I would have gotten time off approved so that I could ignore work for a week guilt-free. I didn't work last week because I didn't feel like it. I had all the time in the world because my beach week was rained out. I just had no motivation. How do we keep our motivation when the going gets challenging (or boring)? Obviously, I don't have a perfect answer to this question, but I will try tackling a new system this week that will help keep my activity in line with my dreams.