Day 20: The few things they don't tell you when you go self-employed

My very professional office and a not-at-all bored assistant

There are things they tell you will be hard and difficult when going self-employed. Things like tax returns and daily accounts and receipts and expenses and working 24/7. In some respect, they are right. These, however, are the easier of the difficult things. They are mostly all written into neat guidelines, endless websites, articles or even recorded on videos for all those who seek to find and learn.

Here are a few details they might not mention.

They don't tell you that when you do what you love doing you will always feel odd charging for it.
They don't tell you that if you seem like you love every working minute, you might be expected not to charge too much for that work.
They don't tell you that there will be some clients who will cost you more to provide your services for than you will receive for the service, be it in time or monetary currency - they will also often be those clients who you enjoy providing your services the most to.
They might tell you, but you will most likely choose not to hear this, that everything you do "in the business" must make it financially viable.

As I mentioned in my 2015 Goals post earlier this month, this year is very much a make or break for my little enterprise. It has to become as absolutely viable way to pay for my life (now and in my future as a crippled old lady) as possible. There are many ways of pursuing coaching career and working with horses. At some point one has to be honest with oneself. If my business skills don't match up to my equestrian skills, there is no chance for my own programme to be the sole income driver.

As I would hate the biz part to stay in a way of how I would like to live my life, I am spending time on analysing what costs what, how viable it is, what to do next and how to stay on the surface long term.
It's not that easy at all.

Evening invite for snacks and coffee :) 

Putting in the hours

Ball games with Woody after morning teaching followed by long hours on the laptop 

Someone asked me this morning why put so much emphasis on rider centred approach in my coaching programmes. I gave my answer but the subject kept coming back to me.
I think that, eventually, we all ask ourselves, what am I contributing to this world and how do I feel with it. .
The way I see it is that every well educated rider can educate many horses and give them a great life. This thought drives me every single time I give a lesson.
If I focused on producing lovely horses, I would not have the same sense of job/life satisfaction. If one is lucky enough to do both, great. There are many good riders out there who can bring on horses well. There are not that many good, all-round coaches.

I feel it's important to have a challenge in ones life, something that makes you feel that you are always learning, always striving for the better, giving something back and making good use of your skills. To me, rider centred training is one of those challenges.

Recently, I'd been working on getting the hang of online newsletters. I wanted to find a free service that would do the job of sending some "limited edition" content, news and advice to all my email subscribers. Yesterday, the first bi-monthly newsletter finally went into cyber space together with a little special shout out with some very interesting, unlisted videos on sports psychology that I was kindly given for use :) My aim is to prepare some special bit of content for each of those newsletters including video tutorials and advice that I would not normally put on the blog. If you would like to subscribe,then pop over to Aspire microsite http://aspir1.wix.com/aspireequestrian2014 , scroll down a tiny bit and add your email into the box :)

http://aspir1.wix.com/aspireequestrian2014

Regarding the habits and doing not-so-enchanting-but-necessary business-y stuff that I wrote about few days ago: I started with a little routine. For now, I put aside 30 minutes every day to sit on, what I call in my head, "a how not to drown strategy" ;) Apparently, it takes at least 2-3 months for a habit to form - I hope my head is still in one piece at the end of that formation process but I know once it's there I will be fine. Habits are power ;) Like in riding, training and coaching.

Until next time :)
Wiola