If your goal is to one day work at home and enjoy extraordinary benefits such as having a flexible work schedule, enjoy what you do, spend more time with your family, and have true personal freedom, then the first step is to stop telling yourself that this isn’t possible for you.
There are plenty of ways to accomplish this goal… such as starting a small business, running an online business, etc. but that’s not what this article is about, because there is no possible way for me to predict how you plan on achieving your goal of being self-employed.
Rather, this article will explain what you need to do no matter what course of action you decide to take. So whether you’re starting your own local service in your hometown, or launching a new website, all of these things apply.
Know Your Goal
The best way to achieve what you want, is to start off knowing exactly what you want. Be specific. I’ll give you an example of when I was “aspiring” to be self-employed, before it actually happened:
“I intend to earn $5,000 per month from my online business THIS month.”
I put it in the form of a positive affirmation to get my mind moving in the right direction (“THIS month” to put emphasis on “as soon as possible”). My goal was to earn at least $5,000 per month and that would allow me to quit my job and work full-time online.
Once you have your goal specifically defined, you can then “backwards plan” and know exactly all of the steps you need to take. I suggest you drill down as close as possible every single in-between step it will take until you reach that goal.
Baby Steps Are Still Steps
You may have a demanding day-job (or in my case before I was able to quit, a night job) and feel like you have very little time to work on taking steps towards your goal some days. In fact, many of the days you work, you may feel able to take any steps at all. Just keep in mind, even if it’s just planning on a piece of paper what you’re going to do the next time you’re able to work toward your goal… that counts as a step too, even if it’s just a baby step.
Before I decided to go full-time with my online business, I worked at a local warehouse and I would write down notes, notes, and more notes on napkins during my breaks—notes that allowed me to organize my thoughts so I could get as much done as possible when I did get time to work on my business at home.
You should make it a point to at least do something each day to work towards your overall goal. This will ensure that one day, after lots of persistence, the baby steps will add up and you’ll be self-employed.
Taking the Ultimate Action
If you’re working a day job and your goal is to be 100% self-employed, then one day you’ll have to take the leap. Self-employed income is never guaranteed, so it really doesn’t matter how much money you made last month, you’re still going to feel some anxiety when it comes to giving up your so called “guaranteed” income your job provided you with.
Only you can decide this, but when you know that the time is right, have courage and jump right in. You may feel anxiety, especially if quitting your job to go full-time being self-employed gives you a pay-cut at first.
It may take a lot of courage to face your fears, but as long as you do your best to tackle your fear head-on, be persistent, and have patience during the hard times you will get through it—and you’ll one day admit to yourself that quitting your job was the best decision you’ve ever made.
Remind Yourself of the Good
When I quit the job at the warehouse to pursue my online business full-time, I experienced a lot of anxiety because I was taking a pretty big pay cut, but I reminded myself that the vast amount of time I’d be pouring into the online business would accelerate the performance (which was already on the rise at that point) by leaps and bounds.
At first I was experiencing so much anxiety that I took out a sheet of paper and wrote down all of the reasons why I made the right decision, and wrote down as many of the positive rationalizations as I could think of. For example, one of the things I wrote on the paper was, “My products have already proven to sell, so all I need to do is use the extra time I’ll now have to drive more traffic and my sales are virtually guaranteed”.
I made it a point to make everything overly positive to leave out any unnecessary doubt. However, all in all, it was a very exciting time—and despite any stress or anxiety I felt, I was very happy that I was finally at home full-time.
I also have my wife to thank for my decision to leave my job as well, because she was amazingly positive during the whole process and her support helped me through it tremendously—so if it’s possible for you, find someone to give you support and make you feel better about your decision whenever you’re experiencing un-productive worry or anxiety—or even worse, when your peers try to convince you that you made a bad decision.
Conclusion
So to summarize everything I went over, the key things to remember is to know exactly what you want, take at least baby steps towards that every single day, and when the time comes to take the leap into the “self-employed” world, be courageous and learn to live without that imaginary security blanket that was branded with your day-job’s logo 
About The Author: Jonathan Beebe, The Author and The Creator Of Develop Minds Blog. Jonathan created Develop Minds Blog for the purpose of providing free, valuable content aimed at helping people improve their lives by increasing their intelligence, consciousness, reducing unnecessary stress, and fully developing their minds in a positive way.
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