I Made a Decision …

February 17^th I made a decision, I went back to working full time from home. I was armed with maybe one client on the table and the possibility of more. As I reviewed the loss in business income from the shift to a full time and then part time position at a local office, I realized I lost nearly 15K in revenue from a business I had worked hard to build. Was the loss worth what I was gaining from having an employee type position? Was I truly living my own dream of success, happiness and fulfillment? No. I was not. I started to watch my health disintegrate, my demeanor went downhill, I wasn’t fun to be around and I started to just want to sleep often. It felt as if depression was kicking in.

What could I do about this feeling?

You see I am someone who makes decisions based on what I feel is going to have a positive end result, sure the in between is scary. Think about it: I live as a single mom with three kids. Leaving a job that had a steady biweekly paycheck to run back into the world of working from home, a world that has inconsistent pay structures and no social interaction in person with people, scared the crap out of me. I was allowing fear to keep me moving in a direction where I was just another employee working for a larger firm. I knew I had more in me than just that, while the steady income was great, I kept having that loss of 15K flowing in my mind.

I was blown away that my job was not replacing the business income, it was giving me a place to be social and practice my customer service skills as well as other office skills and for about a year that was sufficient. I felt fantastic, but as time marched on and the business loss increased, I knew that I couldn’t allow my dreams of being a freelance writer and work at home professional go to the way side.

Working from home is my passion, I started it as a means to be there for my kids without losing money. When working as an employee, not only was I losing money from my business but I was losing money whenever I took time to go see the kids in a concert or attend a field trip; those were not paid off hours.

Losing money was all that kept happening, while I struggled to make rent payments and keep food in my home, I was working 30-40 hours per week most times and it was killing me. The end result was that I became more poor working as an employee than I did struggling with a work from home income. That wasn’t okay. I decided it was time to live my own dream, to come back home full time with arms swinging. I was ready to get out there and bring back old clients, have new ones come into my world and take this work from home position further than I ever had. I was ready to be the success story I wanted to be, to be the example to my children that you can juggle it all efficiently and be happy doing it.

And I did it. I came home, got to work and haven’t looked back. I am now looking at working less hours while making a consistent income that is more than double what my employee paycheck was, and there is still more hours in the day to increase that income!

I live to be an example. Whatever you gain from me sharing my stories doesn’t matter, it’s all about the hope that my risky business of leaving a steady job to come home and be a successful entrepreneur leads another person to have the thought put in their head, “I can do this too”.

If all you walk away from this post is a mission to live your own dreams and create your own success story then my sharing this personal information is worth every key stroke I took to write it.