© 2024
Assessing Readiness
Welcome to this first module, setting out the structure of the programme, explaining what the key elements to becoming self-employed are and assessing your behavioural readiness to become successfully self-employed
The modular programme will provide advice and guidance to enable you to pursue the two main self-employment options or a combination of them, namely
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Selling your time
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Typically being paid a time based rate or a fixed fee
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Usually for you to complete tasks, projects or assignments
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Normally on an invoiced, interim or contract basis
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Starting a business
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Generally selling products, services and other people’s time
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Commonly as a sole trader, limited company or partnership
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Often with a view to building value to eventually realise
You are invited to
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Allow plenty of time to take on board and apply the wealth of useful knowledge, tools and activities provided
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Recognise the benefits and enhancements the coaching has provided by making an online charitable donation with one of our charity partners by CLICKING HERE
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Pass the portal on to anyone who may find it helpful, we need to look after each other in these challenging times
Tackle the modules in bite size chunks, don’t feel that you have to do everything in one go
To gain the most benefit from the information provided, it is important that you read and digest each section before moving on
Each module includes ‘Activities’ for you to complete, please give yourself plenty of time to undertake them and take on board the key learning points
Allow plenty of time to reflect on, internalise and apply the key messages and suggestions
Share your thoughts and feelings with the people you trust and respect to help you and don’t bottle things up
This first module will enable you to
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Appreciate the programme structure around the two main self-employment options
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Consider the pros and cons and the psychology of being self-employed
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Understand and proactively manage your transition to self-employment
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Recognise and enhance three key attributes for sustained self-employed success
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Motivation – being internally driven to make it happen and keep it happening
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Resilience – being able to bounce back from any and all adversities over time
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Courage – being willing to press on again and again despite any fears
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Assess and consider what you need to do to improve your behavioural readiness and robustness to become successfully and happily self-employed
As we have seen, there are two main self-employment options
The two streams of modules related to the two options we will be looking at are
Selling your time
Module 2 - Preparing Yourself
Module 3 - Selling Yourself
Module 4 - Marketing Yourself
Starting a business
Module 5 - Business Planning
Module 6 - Business Marketing
Module 7 - Business Mechanics
Having said there are two streams, elements of both streams may be relevant to you
It just depends on what your chosen self-employment route looks like and what you need
Let's start by considering the pros and cons and the psychology of being self-employed
Key ‘pros’ of self-employment include
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Control of what you do and how you do it
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Power over quality and delivery decisions
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Personal pride in creating a value adding enterprise
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Potential to realise capital value on exit
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Opportunity to generate employment for others
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Some (albeit diminishing) tax advantages
Key ‘cons’ of self-employment include
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Uncertainty of timing and level of income
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Never knowing if the work will dry up completely
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The only infrastructure is what you put in place
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Loneliness, especially if working from home
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An initial injection of capital may be needed
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New skills may be needed e.g. selling/marketing/financial/IT etc
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Getting the work/life balance right may be challenging
Your psychological contract is about your work expectations and aspirations
A healthy psychological contract is defined by what is appropriate for you
There are no rights or wrongs – only what does or doesn’t work for you
Some common aspects of a self-employed psychological contract to consider include
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You are in complete control of what you think, decide, say and do
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Things will only happen if you personally do them or make them happen
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As long as you are making money, you can do whatever you legally like
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If you delight the 'customer' and they pay your bill, you can step away
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Your brand reputation is only as good as your next piece of delivery
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Once domestic costs are covered, you can work as many hours as you like
Moving from being employed to being self-employed is a huge change
Whenever we experience significant change, we also experience personal transition
Change is the external event, transition is our internal response to it
Change is what happens to you, transition is what you then experience
Transition is an individual journey unique to you, involving up to seven stages
The seven stages are not chronological, you can jump around over time
It is OK to be at any stage, it is not OK to get stuck in the 'blue' stages
The remaining modules in this programme after this module focus on identifying and building your readiness across a range of key tangible abilities you will need to become successfully self-employed
However, before we start looking at them, first, we are going to look at the sets of key intangible or behavioural attributes that are crucially important to being happily and positively self-employed that you will need to have on a sustained basis to succeed
Being self-employed can involve both pressure and stress, the difference between the two being your sense of control, the more in control you feel of any pressures you have, the less stress you will tend to feel
Lets have a look now at three of the most important behavioural attributes that will enable you to be and feel in control and assess how ready you are for a self-employed career
Motivation – if you are not truly 'up for it' then becoming self employed may prove very challenging for you, self employment demands even more motivation than being employed
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Energy, enthusiasm and engagement levels
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Self starter drive and strength of imperatives
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Emotional commitment to being self-employed
Courage – fear (e.g. of failure, rejection etc.) is a natural reaction, becoming self-employed can feel understandably daunting, so you need to
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Ensure that your fears don’t drive your behaviour
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Be prepared to be brave and to take control
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Show openness and not be defensive
Resilience – inevitably, self-employment will involve some disappointments and knock backs, so you need to bounce back and learn. Resilience isn’t about blind optimism, quite the opposite, it is about being realistic, recognising what needs to be done and being prepared to
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Learn and grow from challenges and adversity
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Build your capacity to bounce back and recover
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Be realistic, positive and practical
Nobody or nothing else on the planet can make you internally motivated – only you can do it
To become successfully self-employed you have to ‘want it’, you need to be ‘up for it’
Specifically, being internally motivated is key to self-employment because it means that you
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Want to do it for 'you and yours', not for anybody or anything else
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Are ahead of your competitors, who may only be externally motivated
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Will be driven 'from within' rather than by any external factors or forces
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Will have lots of energy and enthusiasm to find and delight your 'customers'
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Are emotionally committed and have an imperative to succeed
Motivators
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Underpin our actions, they are sometimes called our 'critical needs’
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Often reflect and influence important decisions we make
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Are closely linked to feelings of personal satisfaction and enjoyment
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Offer solid criteria for making business and delivery decisions
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Can be quite difficult to pin down as they are so ingrained in us
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Tend to just ‘be there’ and not in our conscious awareness
Below is a list of some of the most frequent personal and business related motivators
The list doesn't contain all of them by any means, there are lots more!
Being able to recover and learn from 'knock backs' is an essential self-employed attribute
Resilience has variously been defined as our
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Ability to bounce back from difficulties
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Recovery powers from negative experiences
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Attitude of mind to be both realistic and positive
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Capacity to adapt and respond to challenging events
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Aptitude to manage significant pressure without stress
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'Triumphing in the face of adversity'
Resilience is crucial to successful self-employment because you
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Inevitably, will face difficulties, some things will go wrong as well as right
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Won’t have fellow employees to support you through the rough times
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Will learn a lot from your mistakes, provided you are open and keep going
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Need to be more resilient than your competitors to ‘out-survive’ them
During adversity we focus on external reasons and external solutions
The adversity is a fact, but we can change how we respond to it
Building resilience involves looking within to changes our thinking responses and actions
Specifically, resilience is about
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Learning
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Treating every adversity as a learning experience
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Realising ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us grow stronger'
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Feeling
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Being able to emotionally 'bounce back' undamaged
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Maintaining or enhancing self-awareness and self-esteem
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Thinking
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Have 'high frustration tolerance' - not being easily wound up
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Being open, flexible and pragmatic – a good problem solver
Some of the common attributes associated with resilient people include being able to
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Welcome change willingly, flexibly and openly
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Have a positive mental attitude and determination
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Learn and grow from failure, not fearing it
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'Cut their losses' and move on positively
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React with pragmatism and realism
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Realise the battles they can and can’t win
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Maintain strong self-esteem and self-confidence
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‘Reinvent' themselves in changing circumstances
The ABC technique is an established model to build your resilience
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Adversity – the negativity, challenge or problem you are facing
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Belief – the tape in your mind that determines your reaction
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Consequence – the result or outcome of your reaction
You can’t do anything about 'A' – the Adversity – it has already happened
But you can do something about 'B' – your Belief – you can choose to change it
Changing 'B' enables 'C' to change – the Consequence – with a new potential outcome
The principle can be usefully illustrated by the following diagram
The original belief has resulted in the original consequence that happened
However, by changing the original belief next time, you enable a different consequence
Consider the following scenario
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Adversity – you receive a rejection email following a sales meeting
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Belief – you believe you embarrassed yourself and won’t seek feedback
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Consequence – you fail to learn and repeat the same mistake at future interviews
Now consider the following alternative scenario
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Adversity – next time you receive a rejection email following a sales meeting
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Belief – your new belief is 'this is a learning opportunity' and you seek feedback
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Consequence – you discover info that significantly improves your responses
Deciding to become self-employed takes courage – making it happen takes even more
One dictionary definition of courage is 'the ability to do something that frightens one’
Another definition is ‘the ability to control your fear in a dangerous or difficult situation’
A third one is ‘to do something difficult or dangerous, even though you may be afraid’
So courage isn’t about not being afraid but, rather, the ability to manage your fears
In particular, self-employed courage is about the ability to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’
The most common fears around being self-employed (but there are lots more) include
Fear of rejection
Fear of ridicule
Fear of change
Fear of losing ……
Fear of uncertainty
Fear of looking undignified
Fear of reduced self-respect
Fear of being demotivated
Fear of making mistakes
Fear of embarrassment
Fear of blame
Fear of failure
Being courageous often involves being open, non-defensive and prepared to fail
Most successful entrepreneur have stories of business failures before becoming rich
They embraced and managed their fear of failure as part of becoming successful
Another common trait being their ability to learn and resiliently bounce back
More on resilience in the next section – for now, let’s focus on courage
Our fears can be very powerful and influential in what we do, say and think
Courageously overcoming our fear(s) can be incredibly empowering and liberating
Let's look at why it is so difficult to overcome our fears and what can we do about them
When we feel fearful our brain tells our body to produce adrenaline
It is a perfectly natural, normal and safe auto reaction that you can’t stop
It is your brain’s primeval way of preparing your body for ‘fight or flight’
Although you can’t stop it, you can manage and harness your response to it
In self-employed terms, you need to ‘fight’ a campaign, not take ‘flight’ from it
Successful self employment involves feeling the fear and still make the campaign happen
Our response to a fear related adrenaline rush can be managed via two dimensions
Namely, our response to fear consists of our feeling response and our thinking response
Our feeling response to fear or an adversity or challenge can be either positive or negative
Similarly, our thinking response to the same adversity can be either positive or negative
Our positive or negative feeling and thinking responses drive our subsequent behaviour
AMBIVALENT
ENTHUSIAST
TRAPPED
CAPTIVE
KEEN
ACHIEVER
ANXIOUS
DOER
Lets look more closely at our feeling and thinking responses and how we can manage them
The adrenaline fear generates makes you feel anxious and uneasy or perhaps worried
Naturally, your brain attributes the sensation to the fear that generated it
However, the same adrenaline is generated when you are excited or enthusiastic
Bungee jumping generates adrenaline, sometimes even just the thought of doing it
Some view bungee jumping as exciting, others see it as a fearful activity to be avoided
It's simply a matter of how your brain works and how you interpret the adrenaline rush
So you need to retrain yourself to attribute the feeling adrenaline gives you differently
In essence, you need to change your attribution, something like this for example
Original attribution
The adrenaline is making me feel fearful or anxious
New attribution
The adrenaline is making me feel excited and enthusiastic
When you experience an adversity or something you fear
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Your thinking response is driven by one underlying thought – ‘I can’t handle it’
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If your driving thought was ‘I can handle it’, then you wouldn’t think it was fearful
Either way, the thought is rooted in your level of belief or trust in your own abilities
Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, famously summed it up
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‘Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you're probably right’
So the solution to thinking less fearfully is in having more belief and trust in your abilities
It is about truly believing that you are ‘good enough’ to deal with the adversity or fear
That is very easy thing to say, but much more challenging to actually make happen
Below are a couple of techniques to help you to build your belief in your ability to cope
Use either or both, whatever works best for you and for the adversity or fear you’re facing
Technique 1 – keep repeating one of the mantras below or another of your choice
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‘I know I can do this’
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‘Doing it will get rid of the fear’
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‘I will feel better about myself if I do it’
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‘Doing it is less scary than living with the fear’
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‘If I do it I will be in control of my fear and situation’
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‘I can handle this’
Technique 2 – redefining how you measure success and failure by truly accepting that
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‘I’m not a failure if it didn’t work, I’m a success for trying’
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‘Failing is just part of my journey to get to where I want to be’
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‘Failing is painful, but I can handle it to achieve my goals’
This module has
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Set out the framework of subsequent modules for the two main self-employment routes
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Examined the pros and cons and the psychology of being self-employed
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Talked through how to manage your transition to becoming self-employed
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Explained and shown how to improve your motivation, resilience and courage
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Enabled you to assess and consider how ready you are to become self-employed
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Provided you with key tools and techniques to improve your self-employed readiness