Exploring my career ideas

I now had a list of essential career ingredients to work with:

1. freedom to work from anywhere in the world
2. freedom to choose the hours that I work
3. be able to maintain it even if I had a family
4. fund the lifestyle I want (at least 2 homes and a yurt!)
5. be my own boss
6. inspire people
7. interesting subjects
8. projects-based work
9. producing written and beautifully-designed products
10. opportunity to work with interesting and inspiring people and engage in conversations that fascinate me

I already have experience in online content and that lends well to being your own boss and working flexible hours from anywhere in the world. So that was a good place to start my exploration.

As often seems to happen when you set your mind to something, opportunities suddenly popped up out of the blue and I received a promotional offer around this time to attend a one day workshop on 'starting your own online business'. It was a couple of hundred quid, but I know that when you put your money where your mouth us you start to really take it seriously and I felt like that was the kind of commitment I needed to make and a full day immersed in learning about how to start up an online business would be a day well spent.

So off I went. The course was good - one of these self-appointed gurus that has made loads of money out of creating really crap quality websites (at his own admission). I didn't agree with his ethos of selling something of low quality for the sake of selling (it made me furious), but I learnt a HUGE amount about online businesses that sell informational products and about online marketing.

We were encouraged to look at what our areas of 'expertise' might be - it's all about finding your 'niche' these days. I braindumped about 50 different possible interest areas: learning languages, starting with spanish or portuguese, career change (obviously), more general career development, creative living (everything from growing your own veg to knitting to learning the ukelele) and so on.

Over the next few weeks I developed each of these ideas, imaginging how it would work, looking into what competition was out there, identifying who the market was and how I'd get to them etc. I love this part of it - the creative brainstorming when anything is still possible, before you have to bring reality on board.

But eventually I did have to bring reality on board and one of my biggest concerns was that if I was going to make a go of an online business, while giving my all to my current day job which was becoming increasingly demanding, I would have to give up my involvement in Careershifters to make room for my own career change...

Next post: Just when I thought my Careershifters dream was all over...