Grow With Soul - Episode 139: In The Beginning - The Evolution of my Work Podcast Series -
I am writing this at my desk at home, in the second week of April and outside it is raining like it’s October. By the time you are listening, however, it will be May, and I will be in Lisbon, hopefully walking along sun-dazzled streets in a floaty dress. Although I will be writing on the trip, it now no longer occurs to me to take my podcasting equipment away with me, even though that is something I have definitely done before. So, for the beginning of this new season on the podcast, I’ve put together a three part series of solo shows about the Evolution of my Work.
What I talk about in this episode:
The early pursuit of ‘growth’
How I transitioned from a salaried job to a business of my own
How work obsession led to burn out
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Read the episode transcript:
I am writing this at my desk at home, in the second week of April and outside it is raining like it’s October. By the time you are listening, however, it will be May, and I will be in Lisbon, hopefully walking along sun-dazzled streets in a floaty dress. Although I will be writing on the trip, it now no longer occurs to me to take my podcasting equipment away with me, even though that is something I have definitely done before. So, for the beginning of this new season on the podcast, I’ve put together a three part series of solo shows about the Evolution of my Work.
This summer will be six years since I started the Simple & Season blog, and five since I began turning that blog into a business. I say “began turning” because it is still a work in progress, still an unfolding, unravelling thing with no completion date. The way I would describe the last five years is doggy paddling through deep, broiling waves, interspersed with a few brief periods of standing on spits of land. Every time I heaved myself onto an island I thought “this is it, this is where I’m going to live forever” - but always, always, I get back into the sea.
But I am getting ahead of myself. My intention with this series is to share the behind the scenes feelings and motivations and the actions they inspired - because I always think the hardest thing about this work is managing the emotions that come along with it. If you are a fairly recent listener to the podcast hopefully this series will catch you up on the story so far, and if you have been here a long time it may fill in some gaps for you. And, more than anything, my hope is that wherever you are with your work, this series will get you thinking about what it is all supposed to be like. So, let us begin.
In the beginning
In the beginning there was… what I thought was light. I started a blog because I’d always wanted to have a blog, and aside from a few posts that no one read on a Tumblr when I was 19, I’d never properly gone for it. At the time I was a marketing manager - my job was stressful and I was doing a lot of things that definitely weren’t in my job description, and then I was coming home and blankly watching whatever I could find on TV all night before going to bed. I was in my mid-twenties, at that point at which you just start to feel the shiver of mortality in your spine; no longer are you a graduate spinning about the place trying to get started, you are in your life, and mine wasn’t much of a life at all. So I started a blog, because I thought, at the very least, I would have to do things to write about, and maybe I’d get some free stuff out of it.
I quickly became consumed by blog growth. I read other blogger’s posts about growing blogs, I listened to podcasts about growth, I went to every Twitter chat about blogging I could find. After two months I started an Instagram and the obsession with growth spread there too, although even more so because it was quicker and easier to see progress there - each day there could be a new photo with more likes, rather than a blog post that wasn’t getting traffic. I remember that on summer evenings I would take the dog up to Greenham Common but I would not be there at all, would not see the trees or smell the gorse; I was completely wrapped up in thinking about the blog, imagining what I’d say in a podcast interview, thinking of ideas and what I could do to get more growth.
Of course, when you are reading and researching about growth online, you are generally reading about people who have online businesses. I grew up in an environment where the only people who were self-employed were someone at school whose Dad had an IT company, or people who were “dodgy” (and definitely also men). Everybody just had a job and that was the right and proper way to do things; it wasn’t even conceivable that there were any other ways of existing. But then I was immersed in the words and lives of all these women who were using the internet to work for themselves and have success, that it wasn’t just the household name influencers but real people who were making a good living and having a good life. And I wanted a part of it.
After a year I had grown to a few thousand followers on Instagram and some of these people were also reading my blog. I was getting offers of free products in exchange for posts. Growth wasn’t happening at the speed I would have liked but it was happening, and it felt fairly easy. Sure, I was posting every day and spending my lunch breaks and most of my evenings commenting and engaging in all the hashtags I could find, but it wasn’t that there was anything else I was wanting to be doing because I only wanted growth.
I thought I might start to offer a few freelance marketing services, some copywriting and social media, on the side of my job. Just to dip my toe, because I was sure it would take a very long time to be able to build anything that would get anywhere near my £30K salary - if it ever would. It felt like such a big risk when in a job you were given money for essentially turning up, I couldn’t fathom how you made money just by yourself. And yet. There was also something about the way someone else decided how much money I could earn, what my ceiling was, how no matter what I did I was only taking home as much as they decided - there was something about that that felt wrong. I wanted to decide for myself.
I posted on my blog that I was thinking of doing some freelancing, and I hired Jen Carrington as my coach because I wanted to be serious about starting a business and I wanted someone to tell me what to do (spoiler alert, that’s not how coaching works). A few days later my boss asked me to come and have a chat outside while he had a fag, and this wasn’t unusual; we were a little partnership and were always going off for little chats to talk about people in the company or customers or ideas or anything else. Outside he said “so obviously I read your blog”, and I thought that was a strong use of the word “obviously” because I had no idea how he would have even known about it, I was hardly Zoella. He continued “I saw you said you were thinking of doing freelancing” and I was nodding and he said “which is a big concern. I want people here who are committed and who are only doing this, not doing their own thing. So if you’re going to be doing freelancing, you can’t stay here. It’s your choice.”
I was due to go on holiday a few days later and I said I’d think about it on holiday and I think he was a little taken aback that I even needed time to think about it but he said OK. On that holiday to North Wales my then-partner was offered a job in a local hotel and that cemented it - I’d leave my job and we’d move to North Wales. The irony is, if my boss hadn’t given me that ultimatum, I would never have considered leaving.
Take off
As I worked my three month notice, I shared about the move and began pivoting my content towards marketing and when I finally moved up I put all my services live. I say all, because there really were a lot. I had a page of freelance service options, one offs and ongoing copywriting, social media, email and more or less every channel I could think of. And I also had some marketing coaching packages. And I was getting no enquiries, for months.
Eventually I ditched the freelance options - what I enjoyed about marketing was the thinking and strategising, rather than the actual doing, and I realised, from my own experience, that when people had a business they wanted to do it all themselves - they just didn’t know how. When I focused on the coaching, things began to take off.
I know now why in those early days when I was setting up the blog so many bloggers had “how to grow your blog” posts - because this kind of content is magnetic for growth. I had so much to say about marketing. I was posting on Instagram every day with tips, writing twice-weekly blog posts about how to do various kinds of marketing and my numbers were racking up and I was getting attention and I was getting asked to talk on podcasts and then I was getting enquiries and the enquiries never stopped.
I look at those first two years and see myself as an addict. The idea that there was no ceiling, that the only limit to what I could achieve was what I decided was intoxicating - I wanted to do everything. I didn’t set a limit on the number of clients I would have at once, just saying yes to everyone, fitting in more call times. I remember one April I did three workshops in different corners of the country, while running my Campfire content course for the first time and also working with clients. I didn’t read or listen to anything that wasn’t business-related, I didn’t talk to anyone about anything that wasn’t business-related, I didn’t do anything that wasn’t business-related, I didn’t think about anything that wasn’t business-related. I only went for walks with the dog and even on those I was mulling over new ideas, we didn’t have a holiday, I didn’t read any books, I just planned and strategised and dreamed - constantly seeking the Thing that would explode my growth.
There were on-paper successes: in my first full year I turned over 65k, I won Business Influencer of The Year at the Blogosphere Awards in 2018, my Instagram following had leapt to nearly 30K. But this was never enough; there was always more money I could be making, bigger accolades to be winning, more numbers, more achievement. I resented people who were publishing books or having chart-topping podcasts, the people who were being asked to speak at big events, the people who were getting brand deals. I had done so much in such a short space of time but all I could see was every success I didn’t have - so I had to keep working.
The irony is, of course, that Simple & Season started as a way for me to do something more than just work, as a vehicle for me to have a little more life in my life. But by 2019, I had less life than I ever had. I didn’t really have friends, the only people I really spoke to were clients. I frequently had back pain. I only ever bought things if I could take photos for them for Instagram, if they went with my colours. Because I was only ever at home at my desk I stopped wearing clothes I liked, fading behind shapeless jumpers. I only went out to walk the dog or go to the supermarket. And increasingly, I felt all around me the pressure closing in. I have spoken about it before, the glass box. I felt like I was stuck living inside a glass box, one where the air was slowly being sucked out, one where the silence was thudding in my ears, one where I could look out in the world but not touch or smell or participate in it because I was trapped in my work obsession. This was burn out. Something had to change.
Overcorrecting
I didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a neat pivot but a collapsing on the ground. I stopped taking on new clients and let the clients I had run through their contracts and I ran the courses but I was just trying to make it out to the other side into some light and space where I could actually think about what to do next. I couldn’t think in the glass box. But it turned out I couldn’t think out of it, either.
I had shifted my obsession from business growth to having a life - always when we make a change we overcorrect. I was focusing hard on what I wanted, how I could be happy. At this time, I didn’t want to look at what that might mean for my work, because the work was what had burned me - the happiness could only exist outside of it. And I decided that if I wanted to be happy I had to buy a house. I had to buy a house that was closer to galleries and cinemas and cafes, I had to buy a house so that my hobby could be decorating that house and gardening. If I had a house I had something to do that wasn’t just work. I had saved a lot during my years of doing nothing but working, and I took on a few extra clients to get me to the threshold needed to secure the dream house and then we moved in.
At the start of 2020 I decided I wasn’t going to take on any more clients. I was going to be a course-based business instead, I was going to ride the passive income money train. Ever since the burn out episode I had been (and still am) afraid of appointments; the sight of commitments in my Google Calendar brings the dread and pressure up like bile. I didn’t want to feel like that, so I wasn’t going to have any more appointments - in fact, as I’m writing I have a vague recollection of an “appoint-free after 2019” catchphrase I had for myself. Because I had the house and the garden now I thought that courses and passive income would mean I would be free to indulge all my time in the interior design hobby I wanted to have. It would mean that I had got There - that place where I could now be happy because I’d ticked the life boxes.
But as you probably know, this wasn’t the happily ever after I had expected it to be. But more on that, next time.