Emily

Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.

Emily is a business and life coach and founder of ‘Emily Button Creative’, which aims to support women exploring self-employment in order to live a life on their own terms.

Business: Business and Life Coach

Location: Hove, Sussex

Business Owner Since: 2019 on the side and fully from 2020

Go-to Coffee Shop Order: Oat latte (iced at the mo!)

Where you can find me: You can find me over on LinkedIn, on Instagram or via my website

When people talk about BIG. CAREER. CHANGES they tend to focus on the change itself – what they did before, how they pivoted and what they do now. Rarely do I see anyone talking about the huge shifts in identity and mindset that you go through when you make these big changes.

Achieving the dream corporate position…or so I thought

So let’s take a quick look back to 2017 (oh what an uncomplicated time). I was newly promoted to a Director position at a large global financial services company, where all my peers were 10-15 years older than me. I had worked mega hard to progress through the ranks from a lowly graduate, to where I am now and thought I’d feel a huge sense of achievement and alignment, but I just didn’t.

I felt proud of my efforts, don’t get me wrong, it certainly wasn’t an easy journey – but I never felt the feelings that I thought I’d feel. Spur a few years of working with a coach and soul searching and fast forward to early 2020, where whilst on maternity leave with my 5-month-old son, I finally handed in my notice to fully focus on my coaching business and being my own boss.

I was always someone who was able to detach myself from work and because in the later years I became clearer on the fact it didn’t align to who I was as a person, I truly felt it wasn’t a part of my identity. How wrong I was!

Escaping the corporate conditioning

When you’ve worked your way up the ranks at a young age and attained that societal view of having made it, you almost enter a no man’s land when that is stripped from you as you enter into something new, with no one knowing you and feeling like an amateur in everything! I think for me, also combining that big lifestyle change (as becoming self-employed is usually much more than a work change) with becoming a mother for the first time, meant I was almost starting again to build myself up to the Emily that I am now.

As well as spending time doing the inner work to help shape my new identity, I also found I had to do some MAJOR corporate re-conditioning about how I responded to work. I think there is a societal view that “work is work”, you are not meant to enjoy it as no-one does and you just work, work, work until you retire and can enjoy life.

I think the pandemic has positively had an impact on this mindset and taught us all the value of the lives we are living today and how important the small things like friends, family and health are to each of us.

Why I left the corporate world and became self-employed

One of my main drivers for becoming self-employed was because I actually wanted to do work I love and was passionate about, not ‘busy’ work that was useless and had no meaning.

I spent time in the early days working through what that looked like for me and what my work manifesto consisted of – for me this is a set of criteria that I compare all work opportunities and packages against in order to check it aligns with what I actually want – doing work I love, supporting women, allowing me to work flexibly and 3 days a week, aligning to my inner foundation.

My tips for embarking on your own big career change

For those of you embarking on your own BIG. CAREER. CHANGES, or just looking to align the work you do with who you are, here are my top tips:

Build a strong inner foundation

This is one of the fundamentals that many miss when they are going through a change process, we tend to focus our efforts on the what but forget the why. Having a strong inner foundation is something that I spend a huge amount of time coaching my clients through, as it’s integral to living not only an aligned and happy life but also to ensure that the work you do is helping to support that.

For me, the foundation looks like exploring your why (why are you making changes? What is the bigger purpose here?), your passions and your values. Having a good understanding of these are integral and something to check in on regularly, as well as something to help centre you if you feel like you are moving down a path that isn’t right for you.

Understand your drivers for work

Understanding your drivers for work can be done by exploring questions like:

• How does my work support the life I want to be living?
• Why do I do the work I do?
• What changes can I make today to better align to the work I WANT to be doing?

Allow yourself to really get deep into your drivers for work. Quite often work is just something that is crow-barred into our life, with no real thought on how it connects, supports and elevates the other pillars. Having a deeper understanding of what you want and how you work can support can be so useful.

Map out your ideal working environment and criteria

If there were no rules or guidance, how would you best work? Thinking about how to do your best work and how you’d like to work, helps you step into your power and take control.

Sometimes things don’t need to be done the way they are done, so focus on a utopia and working through how you can build that into your day.