12 things to know before quitting your job to chase your dreams
1 year ago, I quit my law job to be an ADHD Coach.
Learning about ADHD made me realise that I didn't want to be 'normal'. I knew I finally could fit in the box, but I didn't need to: I had finally the tools to do what I wanted - a question I hadn’t dared think about before.
The last year has been the best of my life. Every single day I've woken up with excitement, and gone to bed feeling fulfilled. There's nothing I love more than turning my ideas into reality, and watching them help people - most recently with the 5 minute a day ADHD course.
However, it's also been one of the hardest. Being self-employed definitely isn't for everyone, and it can be really tough to navigate, especially if there's no clearly defined path.
Here are 12 lessons I've learned for anyone thinking about joining the 'great resignation':
1. Jump and the net shall appear, even if you can’t see it yet
If you’ve got time to read this right now, you’ve got time to do what you want to do. I wrote books every morning at 5am. You have to prioritise what YOU want, because no one else is going to.
The danger zone is staying on top of the cliff looking down, debating whether to jump or not. You can get paralysed there until you can’t even remember what you wanted to do anymore. If you want change, then your comfort zone is the danger zone.
When you remove your choice, then you do what is necessary to survive. Becoming a full time ADHD Coach was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, but I had no choice: I had to make it work. It wasn’t something I could try out on the side for free.
By choosing to commit to something, you’re taking action, which means you’re growing. Even if it’s painful, at least you’re feeling something rather than nothing.
2. Listen to your gut, not other people
Around the same time I became self-employed, my best friend and I had a huge fight, and I found out I'd been cheated on (apparently me leaving my job was 'stressful', and he forgot to mention that he didn’t believe in ADHD).
Many people will not understand or respect your decision to live your life differently, especially if they have their own insecurities. If their own dreams didn’t work out, they may not agree with you going for yours. They may worry about you being able to survive, but everybody is ultimately responsible for themselves. You get to make your own mistakes. I knew that if I needed to, I could get a job in a shop or café on the side: I’d survived this long!
Fortunately, as my relationships fell apart, I had nothing to hold onto but that gut instinct screaming at me to be independent. It was incredibly lonely and difficult, but I knew that coaching made me feel really fulfilled in a way that those people didn't. It can be a very helpful (if painful) litmus test - and makes room for people who truly support you to come into your life.
3. Fake it til you make it, even when it’s awkward
One of the hardest parts about leaving my respectable job in law to become an ADHD Coach was telling people what I did for work. This wasn't especially helped by (2), such as some people insisting on repeatedly introducing me as a lawyer to new people.
Luckily, I’d spent many years previously introducing myself as a model, so it was a feeling of crushing embarrassment that I knew well. I naturally over-explained, going into detailed backstories, justifying it with ‘I studied / used to work in law / wrote a book / talked for Microsoft’, but over time, this stopped. The more and more people’s lives I saw change through coaching them made me more and more confident and proud of my job.
Now, without fail, every time I tell someone I’m an ADHD Coach they have someone to introduce me to who needs help. I don’t over-explain who I am or what I do. I just get on with the job!
4. Meet your basic needs first, even if it’s vulnerable
When I started out, I had 500 ideas of what I wanted to do, and was forever falling down distraction vortexes. It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’re ‘working’, when actually all we’re doing is distracting ourselves.
I had some brilliant mentoring which advised me to focus on making money before chasing these ideas, because I needed to eat, which I’d managed to ‘forget’ along the way. I started tracking my time and realised I spent about 90% of my time working for free.
I stopped having new introductory calls and forced myself, as painful as it was, to chase up the ones I’d already had. Once I regrouped on this and forced myself to do the things I wanted to avoid first each day, I started building a successful career as a coach.
I figured out ways to supplement my income so that I didn’t feel wholly reliant on coaching, doing everything from writing legal marketing copy to modelling. This made things feel much less stressful to have multiple streams of income. You just have to let go of your ego and remember success doesn’t happen overnight!
5. Remember that it’s not ‘mean’ to earn money: it’s just money
It’s not mean to offer someone something. It’s their choice to say yes or no. The coach I worked with reminded me that the leads I had WANTED to hear from me, and she was right. All of them were extremely grateful that I’d called!
I stopped seeing earning money for doing something that helped people as ‘evil’ after I experienced first-hand how the people I coached invested in themselves with it. When we’ve paid for something, we’re going to make the most of it! One woman wrote out a reminder on her fridge how many minutes she was paying to speak about the kitchen she needed to clean, smashing her 5 week goals in days.
Figuring out how much to charge can be really challenging, so I strongly advise getting coaching yourself. Whatever you’d feel comfortable paying someone else for the same thing is usually a good sign!
Importantly, I don’t measure my success by how much money I make. I measure it by how fulfilled I feel. I coach people who really, really want to be coached by me, because I know those people are the ones who will see the best results from being coached.
6. Find, create, and nurture a support network, because it can be extremely lonely
Coaching can be lonely, especially if you become self-employed after having had an office job. This wasn't too bad for me as an introvert, but I did really miss having someone to say good morning to every day (until my VA Beth came along!).
Having a team of people who understand what you do day to day is really important. Your family and friends may not be able to fully ‘get’ it, especially if you’re doing something quite niche. You may also need someone to bounce thoughts and questions off. I found it so emotionally tough being a coach at the start that I wrote ‘the Reality Manifesto’ to try and help the parents I spoke to!
I strongly recommend cultivating your own ‘team’. I have many different coaches, a VA, an accountant, mentors, and friends who can support me in different ways. I have almost as much ‘support’ for myself in a week as I provide to other people!
7. Set structure and boundaries and stick to them, even if you don’t want to
As your own boss, you need to decide your own frameworks and boundaries. This includes things like working hours, rates, and who you want to work with. When I started, I was coaching 7 days a week, with no particular boundaries. I had to quickly overcome my RSD otherwise I'd burn out pretty quickly!
Now, I am a lot tougher on my boundaries. I have a maximum number of clients and different types of appointments I can have each week, reviewing them every Sunday. Without boundaries, you end up a puddle of emotions on the floor: it's not sustainable. You have to give yourself the same structure a 9-5 would provide, with daily routines planned out in advance. Otherwise your head WILL explode.
Just because you’re self-employed, doesn’t mean you should work 24 hours a day. You have a right to switch off as much as anybody else. Work can mean anything from posting on or checking social media, ‘creating’ content, chatting to new people, and anything in general we may enjoy. It’s brilliant to enjoy your work, but it’s not who you are as a person. Have a break.
8. Set yourself tangible goals to measure your success by, and get a coach to hold you accountable
Having coaching has been so powerful for my business, because it’s helped me to set short term goals, stick to them, and build. If we’re flailing around with no clear direction, we don’t know where we’re going, which means we don’t know how we’re doing. Breaking down goals into action plans helps me with day to day focus.
Setting goals also helps me say no to the things I don’t want or need to do. When you’ve got your own priorities sorted, it becomes much harder for others to make their priorities yours. I can put things on the backburner or redirect them to someone else, but I know what my goals are, and do these before making someone else’s happen.
It’s important to define how you measure success, because if you don’t, our society will do it for you. I recommend making your goals as specific and relevant to where you want to be in the future as possible - NOT arbitrary numbers like followers!
9. Avoid comparisons as much as possible
My Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria can be so bad that I try to avoid looking at what other people are doing in similar areas to me. Social media is a terrible vortex for this, as it’s designed to evoke these exact feelings of shame and anxiety in us.
Having clear goals helps you to focus on what YOU want, not what you think you ‘should’ be doing. There are billions of people that need what you’re offering and more than enough room for everybody. I used to happily share manuscripts of the book because I thought if someone else wanted to steal the idea and publish it, they’re more than welcome to! It’s a LOT of effort!
If you’re comparing yourself to someone else, I’d suggest getting to know them a bit better. You’ll quickly see how they have all the same insecurities, if not worse! Nobody can do exactly what you do, because they’re not you. Owning who you are is key to being sustainably successful and happy.
10. Own your mistakes, failures and rejections, and try again
Becoming self-employed is vulnerable, and it can be hard not to take things personally. However, the sooner you stop measuring your success by arbitrary metrics such as ‘engagement’, the sooner you will embrace failure, which is the secret to success.
I make mistakes every day. I've had extremely mean comments (including my favourite from a top model agent calling my book trying to help models avoid exploitation ‘victim tripe’). Now, I embrace them by turning them into learnings or conversation starters for other people. Someone recently told me Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria wasn’t real and my book wasn’t ‘academic’ enough, so I’ve made an entire course on RSD to coincide with the global launch of my book. 😊
I’ve had so many failures I can’t keep track of them, but they’re not failures: they’re lessons. Redirections. Learnings for next time. When you start expecting failure, you can manage it. When you try to avoid it, you’re sure to fail.
11. Remember that nobody really cares about what you do – they’re all too busy worrying about themselves
The ADHD book sat on my computer for months because I was afraid of what people would say if I published it. I was terrified being ‘cancelled’. Ironically, after I was coached into finally going for it, the response was ridiculously underwhelming. So much so that I almost unpublished the entire book, my own anxieties reverberating back to me, imagining the judgment that I just wasn’t hearing.
The people who vaguely care enough about what you do to tell you how much they disagree or cheat on you because of it are ones you definitely don’t need in your life. To the other 99% of people who know you, you publishing a book, writing a social media post, launching a company, quitting your job, or running away to join the circus is probably no more engaging than the latest episode of Love Island.
This can initially be a bit hard for our egos to handle, but also frees you to do literally whatever the hell you want to do. I was so terrified of setting up an ADHD retreat and course, but reminded myself that literally no one cares, except the people who want to do it! 1 month later, both were sold out!
12. Experience is the best qualification you could have, so do it now
The biggest challenge I see for people in wanting to become self-employed is fear that they’re not ‘enough’. That they don’t have enough experience, qualifications, followers, knowledge, or anything else.
Here’s the secret to how I do all of the things I do: I just make it up as I go along, and recognise what I don’t know. I’ve never run a retreat before! But I know someone who has. I had no idea how to set up a course! But I found someone who does. I was rejected by countless publishers when I wrote the Model Manifesto, but I found someone I could pay to do it for me. It ended up on the cover of the Times, Lorraine, being a best-seller, and prompting the Government to set up a working group which I sit on with Rebecca Ferguson to end exploitation in the creative industries. (hashtag#victimtripe).
Coaching people was absolutely terrifying at first, but the more I did it, the more I realised how good I was at it. Just like I eventually realised about all of the scary official Government directory-type-people I worked alongside in my law job, all of us are making things up as they go along. Some people are just better at hiding it!