Think About How You Want to Spend Your Working Time
Before you get too deep into building your business based on your brand and your expertise, think about what you want your lifestyle to be like. How do you see yourself spending your days? Lifestyle planning is one of the most important things you can do for yourself because working for yourself can quickly feel like any other job if you’re not careful. Remember as you build your business to think about how you want to spend your working time.
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Ask yourself the right questions:
Do you want to travel and speak across the country week after week? There is nothing wrong with this. Some people love traveling and speaking. If this is you, go all in right now by getting amazing headshots, branding your business with more pictures of you in action, and putting yourself forward as a speaker and expert.
Do you want to go work long hours with a company consulting them on your area of expertise before taking a couple of months off? Some people don’t really want to work 365 days a year. It’s totally possible to do that as a consultant that works with one company at a time at a high price and then takes time off between projects. This happens a lot with new marketing campaigns for products and people.
Do you want to spend a lot of time one-on-one with your ideal target audience, coaching and consulting with them in person or online? Some people feel most productive when they are coaching and consulting with people one at a time, and others prefer to organize things with technology and automation and focus on an entire group. You can do both or just pick one thing.
Do you want to be flexible with your time and schedule and work on the written content or pre-recorded video content instead of doing it live? You can even build this business totally behind the scenes without focusing on yourself by creating written content and pre-recorded videos about your topic instead of your face appearing or doing speeches.
Do you like the idea of being in the public eye, or do you prefer to be in the background? Not everyone wants to be the face of their business. You can be an expert without being the face and without having to be in the public eye much with a good blog.
What do you see yourself doing when you’re not working? How you want to spend your downtime is important, too. Will you generate enough funds to live your best life when you aren’t working? What about time? Will you have enough?
Are there potential roadblocks to getting what you want? It’s time to be super realistic about yourself and your situation. What barriers can get in your way? List them now so that you can combat them and find solutions. For example, if you want to write a book and publish it, but you have an infant, what is your plan to do it anyway promptly?
When you know what type of lifestyle you want to live, you should also have a number in mind in terms of the income you will need to generate to live the lifestyle you are working toward. For example, if eventually, you’d like to be the manager of your business and only work on idea generation while your team does everything else. That is a goal you can work toward, but you should know in advance what you really want to achieve so that you can build the business around the rest of your life and your lifestyle goals.
