Before I set out to be totally independent financially and set up my own online home business, I had been listening to the gripes and moans of people who viewed themselves as being in a vocation. They were committed, caring and professional people, but it never ceased to amaze me how much they complained about their jobs – either in terms of always being broke, the rubbish they had to deal with on a daily basis, or how exhausted they always were when they finished work at the end of the week.
I knew this frustration and dissatisfaction from a demanding government job I had been in sometime before, which I had eventually resigned from, partly because I was so tired from the relentless daily pressures of a thankless job, together with a punishing commute added to the general domestic duties for which I alone was responsible. I never seemed to have any energy left for any real quality of life and I was becoming miserable – not a good place for any woman in her forties to be.
So having made the step towards being self-employed and topping up my earnings meantime with a new part-time job, I would sit at my desk in this stop-gap towards job freedom, listening to these exhausted women colleagues gripes with a mixture of compassion and a slight feeling of smugness, knowing I would not be there forever, because I at least had a plan to be free.
Out of curiosity, I did a mini survey around the office. In no way was it representative of the whole of the public sector, but I suspect some of the truths I was told are sadly all too common. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I asked about 20 women if they had trouble getting to sleep, in particular of a Sunday night and what they thought it was that kept them awake. I asked this question after a couple of the women I worked with closely admitted to this problem and I remembered that I used to suffer from sleeplessness in my management post.
All but two colleagues said that they did tend to be “restless”, they regularly said words to the effect that they “could not seem to switch off”, or they said specifically that they were already thinking about going to work the next day. Virtually every one of them said they were only fit for bed or the goggle-box when they got home. What made me really empathize with them, was the tone in which some of these women ‘confessed’, as if they had been dying to tell someone for a long time and had not admitted it to anyone before – as if it were a sign of weakness if they did!
For the most part, many of these women were pretty ‘stoical’ about their jobs, saying: “I can’t complain really”, (but they grizzled and carped about their situations indirectly and often!). A few of the mature, ‘boomer’ women admitted that they would rather be elsewhere than in their 9-5. These older women were already looking forward to getting away from the day job in retiring, even if the economic prospects were not so great.
The answers I got were not just interesting, in what they revealed about this group of women employees attitudes to jobs – half with just above average salary – they made me secretly feel smug, knowing that finally I was making the right decision to leave that world and start a new home business, free of other peoples’ demands, expectations and schedules.
My Sunday nights were less and less a story of grasping at ‘last moments of free thought and peace of mind’ before the weekday 9-5 employee mindset set in. I was working my business on the weekends and was so tired by the time my head hit the pillow, but the difference for me was that I was going to bed in the knowledge that there was a way out for me, I was starting to get the best Sunday night’s sleeps I had had in years because I was well on my way to being in control of my own life!
What made my sleep twice as sweet and sometimes put a smile on my face as I drifted off, was knowing that there would come a time, I would actually be paid in my sleep by a home business working on semi-automatic for me and I would wake up at an hour when I was ready to and richer than when I feel asleep! How does this work? Simply put, this is the power of working in an online home business! This kind of self-employment can be fabulously surreal sometimes…
Now more than ever women are learning that it is possible to get paid to stay at home and balance their lives much easier. More women are working around their family schedules can actually help women become rich in a way that was never possible in a day job! What’s really exciting, is that even some of the best paid women in well paid corporate positions are realising that they are, they are earning more than some of the best paid corporate jobs and are in control of their working environment and professional development. The internet is changing the way women see their chances of financial freedom.