Fiona Thomas - Out of Office: Ditch the 9-5 and Be Your Own Boss

First published in Great Britain 2020 by Trigger

Trigger is a trading style of Shaw Callaghan Ltd & Shaw

Callaghan 23 USA, INC.

The Foundation Centre

Navigation House, 48 Millgate, Newark

Nottinghamshire NG24 4TS UK

www.triggerpublishing.com

Text Copyright 2020 Fiona Thomas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available upon request from the British Library

ISBN: 9781789561258

This book is also available in the following e-Book formats: ePUB: 9781789561258

Fiona Thomas has asserted her right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Bookollective

Typeset by Lapiz Digital Services

This book is a brilliant one-stop shop for all your freelancing needs its got everything you need inside to get started and give you a boost of confidence.

Emma Gannon, Sunday Times bestselling
author of The Multi-Hyphen Method

approachable, warm and humorous so she tricks you into learning all of the boring stuff that is essential to becoming your own boss. A must read

Kirsty Hulse,
author of The Future is Freelance

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona Thomas is a freelance writer who was born in Glasgow but is now living in Birmingham, UK. She has been published in Metro , Readers Digest , Happiful Magazine and Grazia . Her passion is working with female-led businesses and shining a light on the positive impact that freelancing can have on our wellbeing. This is her second book.

DEDICATION

For all the self-doubters. You got this.

DISCLAIMER

Trigger encourages diversity and different viewpoints. However, all views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this book are the authors own and are not necessarily representative of Trigger as an organisation. All material in this book is set out in good faith for general guidance and no liability can be accepted for loss or expense incurred in following the information given. In particular, this book is not intended to replace expert medical or psychiatric advice. It is intended for informational purposes only and for your own personal use and guidance. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or act as a substitute for professional medical advice. The author is not a medical practitioner nor a counsellor, and professional advice should be sought if desired before embarking on any health-related programme.

FOREWORD

Self-employment has made me unemployable. Perhaps thats a slightly odd sentence to be opening a book on self-employment with, but Ive come to consider this to be a Very Good Thing in my life. Working for myself has changed me so completely broadened my mind and my skill set so far beyond what I believed was possible that the only company I can imagine myself ever choosing to work at in future is one that I have lovingly built for myself.

The 9-5 world is one-size-fits-all. Its seems to me that its built for a prototype human whos always active, always productive, never sick, not menstruating, nor crying in the loos over some personal strife. It requires us to check our humanity at the door for around nine hours a day, and when we struggle to do this, it tells us the problem is us.

As somebody with a chronic health condition and ADHD, its little wonder I felt like a jaggedy star-shaped peg being jammed into that round workplace hole. Going freelance felt like my chance to run for the hills, and I snatched at it with tired and work-worn hands.

The reality was less romantic. Faced with my first day in The Land of No Payday, I did what all digital freelancers do in a time of quandary: I logged in to Twitter. Five years later, I still remember word for word, some of the beautiful messages I got in response to my fears.

It was Twitter that introduced me to Fiona. I cant recall how I first found her, exactly: it could have been through our overlapping circles of mental health conversations, the blogging world, Intuitive Eating or perhaps one of her #journorequests, which always seemed to be describing me. However it happened, I recognised her immediately as a buoyancy aid in the choppy seas of self-employed life. She was someone with enough optimism to keep both of our heads above water, and her no-bullshit attitude would help us to steer clear of the sharks.

They were right, those jolly Twitter commenters. This was easily going to turn out to be the best choice of my life, but it was also one of the hardest. Support for freelancers is way behind the curve, and I speak daily to creatives and business owners still miserably mired in the midst of impenetrable tax legislation, lost in the perpetual loop of government advice websites or simply struggling to get out of their pyjamas.

I suppose this is why Ive come to see running your own business as a trial-by-fire type of therapy. (Thats not, btw, to suggest conventional professional therapy isnt still a tremendous investment. Im a huge advocate, and believe every human can benefit from it.) Self-employment calls on us to come face to face with many things weve avoided previously. It means showing up, being seen, speaking out and actively selling ourselves seeing the value in our time and in what we do in the world, all while keeping enough conviction in that belief to be able to ask others to believe in it too. We have to unpack our money baggage and our attitudes to work and creativity. It took me three solid years of at-home self-employment before I could finally accept that the hours spent reading or gazing out of a window were as essential to my output as the time spent bathing in the blue light of my laptop. Nobody teaches this stuff, and its hard to navigate all on your own until now.

This book is the straight-talking life raft that I would have happily clung to in those turbulent first years. Its a shortcut to the most hard-won realisations every freelancer comes to, and a generous sharing of the nitty-gritty stuff in between. Work isnt meant to be fun, my dad used to tell me. Thats why they call it work. But what if it could be? What if it was meant to be, all along? What self-employment has taught me, above all else, is to place a much higher value on all my hours: the ones spent working, and those devoted to family and friends as well as the ones wisely invested in reading books such as this, to really equip me to get the very best out of my time.

Ive learned that my wellbeing and happiness is worth more than the minimum wage, and I believe yours should be too. Forget being the worker bee. Read on, my friend because its time to become your own queen.

Sara Tasker, bestselling author and business coach

www.meandorla.co.uk

CONTENTS

GLOSSARY

This book is by no means a complicated piece of literature, but it will feature a few freelancing terms that you may not have come across before.