talent liberator

Simon Strong’s portfolio career #4

May 22, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is the fourth in a series of 6 blog posts by Simon Strong about his portfolio career.

Reading how people have created their own portfolio career can be useful to inspire you to create one yourself.

In case you missed them, here are parts 1, 2 & 3

Here is part 1:

https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/simon-strongs-portfolio-career-1/

Here is part 2:

Post on LLClub

https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/simon-strongs-portfolio-career-2/

Here is part 3:

https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/simon-strongs-portfolio-career-3/

The rest of this blog is in Simon’s own words.

To what extent did your portfolio career happen by chance/luck and to what extent was it planned?

Utterly by chance. But in retrospect, it seems totally planned. I was chatting to my mum and dad the other day, and they commented that they always knew I wouldn’t take an obvious route through life. They’ve never been able to predict what I would say or think on any subject on any given day! I’m contrary by nature and have an eclectic approach to my interests.

But I wonder what it must have been like to be the first lawyer. There must have been one. How would he have described himself at ancient networking events?! And even if you have a job title that people recognise, why should it define you? I remember meeting a marketing director (have you already got a picture of her – the archetype of a marketing director…?) who started her career as a wing walker in the Cadbury’s Chocolate Crunchie Flying Circus… Now then – what do you think of her as a marketing director? Or my first boss who was hard as nails – but who’d started her career as an underwear model for Lady magazine (you know that old trick of imagining people who make you nervous are in their underwear – that just made me more nervous with her!).

I’ve found that people really like to have you ‘in a box’. If I ever work with a client, they tend to think that whatever I did for them is the only thing I can do. They are surprised when I tell them all the other things I get up to. This sometimes leads to a perception that I must therefore do these things part time and therefore not as well as someone who does only the one thing. I think the diversity of my perspective makes me a more rounded thinker who brings more to each project and therefore makes me better…!

I remember I bumped into a couple of guys who were a couple of years below me at school. They were shocked that I worked at Saatchi & Saatchi at the time. ‘But you’re a meathead’ they said. Because I played rugby (I was a prop at school and played under 18 county level, before moving to the back row – and captained the English Advertising Agencies) they had me pegged as ‘an unthinking lump’. They couldn’t conceive of me as someone who had a rich intellectual life.

I think my own path has given me an appreciation of the diversity and possibility in the lives of others. I’m constantly fascinated by the incredible potential hidden within people– the kitchen porter who is learning German so he can study architecture in Berlin – the research chemist who teaches Zumba – the cashier in a Coop corner shop who brews honey mead – the learned academic who rocks a comedy set… And to see how these interests shape life. The kitchen porter is studying fine arts in parallel to his German and temp work so that he has the qualifications and skills to make the most of his studies in Germany, the chemist is now a full time fitness instructor after the pharma company closed down her research lab, the cashier now works at the best pub in the area (which also sells his honey mead), and the academic has a public speaking life opening up and is increasingly in demand for media appearances.

So I think that our lives follow the shape of our interests. And I guess it’s no accident that I have a portfolio career!

Part 5 of Simon’s 6 part guest blog series coming soon.

View Simon Strong’s LinkedIn profile:
http://https//uk.linkedin.com/in/simonstrong

View the Human Zoo web site:
http://www.humanzoo.biz/

What could your portfolio career be made up of? We help our clients create, market and manage their portfolio career.

Find out what your transferable skills are by downloading our free report:
http://careerstrategies.co.uk/changingcareersreport/

An edible portfolio career #1

May 16, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is part 1 of a 3 part guest blog by Nicky Richmond. Nicky combines being a joint managing partner for law firm Brecher with being a restaurant critic, and is a property and property finance lawyer with over 25 years’ experience. She is ‘The Food Judge’ and writes a regular column for The Lawyer magazine. As a Foodie, I think Nicky’s portfolio career is wonderful and I hope to accompany her soon to a restaurant……………!

The rest of this blog are in Nicky’s own words.

What are the components of your portfolio career e.g. study, paid freelance work, part time job, volunteering etc.?

My day job is as managing partner of a law firm, a role that I have undertaken for seven years. In my free time, I write weekly restaurant reviews for The Lawyer magazine and I have a restaurant review blog called The Food Judge. I also write articles for various publications and my other blog, Not Entirely Legal. I am also a trustee of a children’s charity, Kids Out and have recently become involved in Action Against Hunger which seems a good counterbalance to all that eating out.

How did your portfolio career come about?

I have always been a little bit obsessed about food and eating out; in fact I thought that I was going to be a lawyer for about 10 years then open my own restaurant. Real life got in the way. I started writing in a non-legal sense when I wanted to do some publicity for my firm and because I had only written like a lawyer for the previous 25 years.

I wanted a little bit of practice and to try and find my own writing voice, so I started writing restaurant reviews for myself. The Lawyer magazine tweeted that they were looking for restaurant reviews and it seemed like a gift. After a little bit of stop/start, I ended up being their weekly reviewer. The charity work came about because I have always had a strong interest in giving something back. I never quite found the right charity but then I think I never really looked properly, or hard enough. You have to find something that chimes with you and where you can really empathise.

How has your portfolio career changed over time?

For about 25 years I did very little other than law, partly because I was simply too busy and partly because I didn’t actually make the time to do anything different. When I started doing the restaurant reviews, I had no idea that they would take off in the way that they did, or that I would meet a whole new network of people through doing it. And whilst I always did pro bono work for charities, that was under the banner of a law firm and the charity work that I do now is nothing to do with the law firm although my legal/management expertise is useful.

Part 2 of this 3 part guest blog series coming soon.

Nicky Richmond, Joint Managing Partner, Brecher:
http://www.brecher.co.uk/people/nicky-richmond/

The Food Judge – Never Knowingly Underfed.
http://thefoodjudge.com/

Blog – Not Entirely Legal
http://strictlylegal.me/author/nickyrichmond/

Interested in a portfolio career and liberating more of your talent? Get in touch with Rachel Brushfield, Talent Liberator.

Rachel is doing a talk about Portfolio careers on 12 June 2015 at a Law Society Women Lawyers Division Portfolio Careers event in London.

Simon Strong’s portfolio career #3

May 4, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is the third in a series of 6 blog posts by Simon Strong about his portfolio career. Reading how people have created their own portfolio career can be useful to inspire you to create one yourself.

In case you missed them, here is part 1:

https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/simon-strongs-portfolio-career-1/

Here is part 2:

https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/simon-strongs-portfolio-career-2/

The rest of this blog is in Simon’s own words.

How did your portfolio career come about?

It certainly wasn’t intentional. In part it came about because I find it hard to say no. In part because I’m always having daft ideas (my outdoor cinema for the football world cup was an unmitigated disaster!). And partly because I started to give myself permission to do things if I thought they were interesting.

How has your portfolio career changed over time?

It started with a business focus underpinned by the arts. I left advertising and got involved in using improvisational comedy as a tool to facilitate creativity, professional development, culture change, and branding workshops. I discovered there was this world of amazing people who did extraordinary business work: horse whisperers who did leadership development, a poker player who taught risk assessment and decision making, a Tai Chi master who taught negotiation skills etc.

For a short time I drifted away from a business focus to a more arts based interest with a business underpinning, partly due to the impact of the recession when the budgets dried up and companies found it difficult to justify working with someone like me!

I have now come back towards the business world and seem to be finding a way to combine my interests in really productive ways. I feel creatively potent and productive at the moment.

When people ask you ‘what do you do?’ – what do you reply?

Ummmmm…

My mum is really happy about the coffee shop – it means that she actually has an answer! But it is something that I have struggled with and angst over. Probably unnecessarily. It has been especially difficult at networking events when I think I should have something smart and concise to say.

Really, it depends who asks. Sometimes I say I am a barista or that I run a coffee shop or cafe. Other times I say I run a creative consultancy. Mostly I laugh and say I do stuff, for people, for reasons!

Part 4 of Simon’s 6 part guest blog series coming soon.

View Simon Strong’s LinkedIn profile:
http://https//uk.linkedin.com/in/simonstrong

View the Human Zoo web site:
http://www.humanzoo.biz/

What could your portfolio career be made up of? Find out what your transferable skills are by downloading our free report:
http://careerstrategies.co.uk/changingcareersreport/

Simon Strong’s portfolio career #2

April 16, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is the second in a series of 6 blog posts by Simon Strong about his portfolio career. Reading how people have created their own portfolio career can be useful to inspire you to create one yourself.

In case you missed it, here is part 1:
http://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

The rest of this blog is in Simon’s own words.

How have some of the projects in your portfolio career come about?

Engaging students in learning

A couple of years ago, an ex-colleague from advertising days contacted me. She’d started teaching German at Radley College (boys public school just outside Oxford) and was intrigued as to how we could do something creative with her students. So for the last couple of years we have run the Radley Business Challenge in which we give the students a real business issue (Stabilo pens in the inaugural year and the German National Tourist Board last year) so that the students have to learn about German culture in order to create a marketing campaign. Last year another 6 schools took part in the challenge and I got the former Head of Sales and Marketing for Diesel UK and former Brand Communications Director of Orange Mobile to run workshops. Last year, for the first time, all her ‘A’ Level German students got A*, and more students have signed up for German than ever before. This year we hope to get extend the project to even more schools.

Coffee shop

My wife commutes to London every day for her job (CSO at ad agency Ogilvy and Mather) and she wanted a decent coffee on the train. So, because I love her, I opened a coffee shop at our local train station. The Zoo Café at Milford Train Station opened just over 6 months ago, and it’s just doubled in size when I took on my first member of staff three weeks ago. We serve 100’s of cups of awesome every day with clients including Lord Seb Coe and my very happy wife. I plan to develop a deli for commuters to pick up their evening meal on the way home, and also offer a dry cleaning service so they can drop off on the way in and pick up and the way back out. I’ve also go permission to set up a semi-permanent photographic exhibition on the platform, and I also want to run a pop-up restaurant out of the café (I’m in contact with Kerstin Rodgers of the Underground Supper Club who I met at a KFC workshop a couple of years ago who I hope to entice to cook at the café).

River of lights

A couple of years ago I organised an event in Guildford I called River Of Lights. It was inspired by a memory I had as a child of watching an event on TV (probably John Craven’s Newsround!) where tens of thousands of candles were thrown off a bridge like a waterfall, and which then floated down a river. In 2010, and again in 2011, I invited the community around Guildford to celebrate the winter solstice by floating candles on the River Wey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvdBbMqy6NQ

It got flooded off in both 2012 and 2013, and last year I took a break. Next year I am planning to do it in the village of Witley where I live.

Other projects

I chaired the PTA for our local infant school where my two boys went (Lucas is still there). Although I stepped down almost 2 years ago, I still run the annual fireworks event that I initiated, as well as dad’s poker night!

There are lots of other projects that are simmering in the background (a community energy project, Shakespeare in the park, something to do with pants, a Quidditch tournament, “hats for cars”, and I have a strange desire to direct ‘Waiting For Godot’…). And I’m sure other stuff will crop up…

Part 3 of Simon’s 6 part guest blog series coming soon.

View Simon Strong’s LinkedIn profile:
http://https//uk.linkedin.com/in/simonstrong

View the Human Zoo web site:
http://www.humanzoo.biz/

What could your portfolio career be made up of? Find out what your transferable skills are by downloading our free report:
http://careerstrategies.co.uk/changingcareersreport/

Simon Strong’s portfolio career #1

April 11, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is the first in a series of 6 blog posts by Simon Strong about his portfolio career.

Reading how people have created their own portfolio career can be useful to inspire you to create one yourself.

The rest of this blog is in Simon’s own words.

What are the components of your portfolio career e.g. study, paid freelance work, part time job, volunteering etc.?

I don’t really have components as such. More a load of stuff that I’m doing. Some I get paid for. Some I invest in. Some is just because I want to. Interestingly, it’s often the stuff I do just because I want to that leads to the most satisfying and lucrative work opportunities. Probably the easiest thing to do is tell you what I’ve been doing recently and what I’m up to now.

I ran Pecha Kucha Night in Guildford for a couple of years which allowed me to connect with so many amazing creative people and their stories. This led to being asked by Ellen Dowell (who runs Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man Festival, and whose academic work is based on interdisciplinary collaboration) to help set up Bright Club Guildford – where University Academics do stand-up comedy based on their research. Ellen and I ran Bright Club for 3 years before we stepped down in January this year. We have handed over to a fresh committee who we hope will be able to take it on to the next level.

I run a creative consultancy, Human Zoo, named after a book by the amazing Desmond Morris with whom I had the great honour of working when in advertising. We work with our clients across a broad range of projects including branding, innovation and culture change, running lots of seminars and facilitating workshops and conferences. We act as Ambassadors for the University of Surrey Business School and are involved in delivering seminars on their MBA and executive MBA programmes. I’m currently consulting with a global print company and am about to go out to Dubai to run a conference.

Last year my business partner in Human Zoo and I got bored of expending so much energy on client projects that went nowhere, so we decided to start investing time in our own innovation projects. We’ve got three projects currently underway:

1) We won a funding competition from the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) under ‘Re-Imagining The High Street’ for a feasibility study on an innovation we developed and we’ve just been asked to apply for phase 2 funding for a market test which we are just about to submit.

2) We are working on developing an accelerated learning platform which has been proven to deliver the same learning outcomes as 27 hours of traditional classroom based learning in just 1 hour. We are working with the University of Surrey Business School to run a learning tournament to compare different learning techniques in one of the largest studies of its kind – and we are engaging the top 1,000 businesses in the UK on how this will impact on engaging Gen Y and creating ‘Business Ready Brains’.

3) We are working with one of the University MBA students to take a charity start-up idea to market. We are about to go into a funding round…

Part 2 of Simon’s 6 part guest blog series coming soon.

View Simon Strong’s LinkedIn profile:
http://https//uk.linkedin.com/in/simonstrong

View the Human Zoo web site:
http://www.humanzoo.biz/

What could your portfolio career be made up of?
Find out what your transferable skills are by downloading our free report:
http://careerstrategies.co.uk/changingcareersreport/

Banking of a different kind

April 10, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

During the downturn years, I have been doing some serious banking. Not financial banking, but banking of a different kind. I have been banking insights, self-awareness and tools to make myself more useful for my clients and kinder to myself. In a world of uncertainty with disruption the ‘new normal’, this has been an excellent investment, with far greater returns than the interest in a saving bank account would have yielded. Self-interest is not selfish, it is wise and make you resilient and resourceful. More kind to yourself and more useful and self-aware with others.

I have been banking a number of useful commodities that I am sure you can relate to easily; new high quality contacts now tagged connections on LinkedIn to create ease in future, thought leadership with books, chapters and articles published, content to share for a content hungry world, trend digests to help me make focused and sound business decisions and to add additional value to my time-poor clients. But I have also been banking something that many people ‘poo poo’. Insights and tools from personal development, that soft fluffy thing that is so hard to prove the benefit of or justify in business. Or is it?

The personal development that I have done on myself in the downturn years and indeed throughout my life has given me a rich treasure chest of useful tools for lifelong use. If such a qualification existed, it would equate to a PHD. In a coaching market that is currently unregulated, isn’t that reassuring to know?

As I sit writing this, I picture you reading this, cynical, sceptical. Am I being unfair to you? You need evidence, I know, practical tangible evidence.

Ok then, here you go. Some examples of how personal development has been useful:

• Staying present and achieving a complete turnaround of an outcome in an hour with a stressed HR law firm client. Closing gambit – “I apologise, I took out my frustration on you, we do want to continue working with you.” Opening gambit “We think you are too expensive, you are not giving us what we want and we are not sure we want to work with you any more.”

• Making decisions in line with my personal values, the things that are important to me, so that I am always authentic and fulfilled

• Staying resourceful and resilient when my back has been against the wall at the darkest time post 2007 crash

• Preventing a high potential employee from derailing their career. They were physically running out of the room before delivering a training. In 4 hours of coaching, I helped them understand why their fight or flight mechanism was kicking in and to develop a detailed strategy and plan to feel comfortable and choose to stay in the room. It worked first time.

• The instant disappearance of anger in a client by working out the insight that the anger was caused by frustration. The cause? Conversations were always moving on to a different topic because an introverted and reflective French speaking father was thinking in French, translating into English and preparing what to say, compared with his extroverted fast thinking and speaking English wife and children.

Why have I made personal development a priority? The future has been firmly in my sights – a happy inner future as well as a prosperous financial and reputational outer one.

Finally, one last thing to share. One of the things that has stuck in my mind when I researched and wrote an article for Managing Partner magazine on emotional intelligence was the insight that a feeling is faster than a thought, neurologically speaking. Now that could give you a serious competitive advantage. Not so soft and fluffy perhaps.

To follow us on Twitter, follow @talentliberator

Guest blog: Nigel Haddon – creating my portfolio career

April 4, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

A portfolio career which is where an individual has multiple works strands, is a fast growing trend, with the majority of people predicted to have one by 2020. (Source: Professor Lynda Gratton, London Business School). I help professionals and executives to create, manage and market their portfolio career and sharing current portfolio careerists’ stories in their own words is a great way to inform and inspire aspiring portfolio careerists. Could you be one of them?

This is the first in a series of three guest blogs by Nigel Haddon about his portfolio career – this blog is about how he created his portfolio career. The second two guest blogs by Nigel will be about how he manages and markets his portfolio career.

The rest of this blog is in Nigel’s own words.

The start of my career

I qualified as a solicitor back in 1981. Then, it wasn’t unusual to be a generalist, a ‘jack of all trades’, and that was my first career in the law, working out of a market town in Cheshire. Specialism caught up with me eventually, and I became a Family lawyer. It’s too long a story to go into here, but by the turn of the millennium I’d morphed into a Construction lawyer!

In the mid 2000’s, the opportunity came my way to assume the role of Managing Partner at the firm – I’d been with since 1995. I took the firm through a merger in 2006, and became Managing Partner and later CEO of that firm. Leading over a hundred people across a number of sites and through the worst recession of our lifetimes was no ‘walk in the park’, and one of the first things to suffer was my legal practice – which I gave up in 2008 to concentrate on my leadership and management roles. My fourth career in the law was under way, and it was one which I knew full well would end at some point with me probably either unable or unwilling to revert to practising as a solicitor.

Career crossroads

So when the end of my time as a law firm CEO came, what next? Well, like so many people, I initially sought out the comfort blanket of the familiar. I talked to a number of law firms and other businesses about CEO and other leadership roles. That talking process went on for several months, involving some interesting challenges and potential opportunities. But nagging away at me was this question, do I really want to do that again? Being CEO had been in many ways the most rewarding of all the positions I’d held, but it was also at times the most difficult and frustrating. And that’s saying nothing about the relentless, 24/7 nature of the job, that sense of being permanently responsible.
My present portfolio career really came about by accident. As months went by, I had to do something to ‘earn a crust’.

Deciding what next

I began to discuss with my contacts in the law how I might be able to use my experience to their benefit. I launched a management consultancy for the legal sector which is now my principal occupation. My experiences of and interest in law firm mergers then led to the formation of Mosaic Legal, a joint venture with a Chartered Accountant to help professional services firms acquire or be acquired by other firms. And then my experiences of and keen interest in pricing for lawyers led to my teaming up with the UK’s leading Pricing & Costs consultancy Burcher Jennings to deliver pricing training to law firms.

Transferable skills give options

Many former law firm Managing Partners try their hands at consultancy, but most will have more to offer than that. They have transferable skills which are valuable not just to law firms but other professional service firms and indeed former client businesses. I am also an executive committee member of the Law Management section of The Law Society and a chartered arbitrator.

The pros of my portfolio career

My fifth career is the most varied since my first general practice role. Variety is without doubt the principal joy in having a portfolio career. There is a profound sense of liberation to be enjoyed from the lifting of the burden of full time management responsibility. And you’ll have time for other pursuits, e.g. family, friends, hobbies or trying new things. I’ve managed to re-engage with a voluntary role which had become a chore but is now a pleasure once more. And I’ve gone back to school, where I test the teacher’s patience with my terrible attempts at Latin & ballroom dance!

Guest blogs parts 2 & 3

I will look at the challenges of managing and marketing a portfolio career in later blogs. For now, when I’m asked what I do, I reply that I wear a number of hats, and then sit my interlocutor down for a cosy chat…

Contact Nigel Haddon

Nigel Haddon, Management Consultant, Haddon Consult
http://haddonconsult.co.uk/

Follow Nigel at Haddon Consult on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/haddonconsult

Nigel Haddon, Principal, Mosaic Legal
http://www.mosaicma.co.uk/

For insights and news on M&A, follow Mosaic Legal on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/mosaic_ma

Pricing & costing Consultant, Burcher Jennings
http://www.burcherjennings.com/people/n/

For insights and tips on pricing & costing issues, follow Burcher Jennings on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/burcherjennings

Career evolution or revolution?

March 15, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

Work can start to get a bit repetitive after a while; a bit ‘same old same old’.

Some people find this comforting, others brain numbing. I am the latter. How about you?

Many many people have been sitting tight in the same job during the downturn years. Staying put for security. A wise strategy. Or is it?

If your career is starting to feel a little stale there are 5 strategies to explore:

• Portfolio career
• Job sculpting
• Sabbatical
• Attitude shift
• Secondment

An interesting book about the revolution of work shaped my thinking 4 years ago. It is by Lynda Gratton – ‘The Shift: the future of work is already here’.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Shift-Future-Work-Already/dp/0007427956

My decisions during the downturn years have been the opposite of most people. They have been shaped by Lynda Gratton’s predictions and other reading. 2020, about which the book focuses, is now just 5 years’ away and it really concerns me that most people don’t have a career strategy, they leave it to chance.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Abraham Lincoln and Peter Drucker. (both have been credited with this quote).

The rest of this blog gives an overview of portfolio careers, a major trend according to Lynda Gratton.

Portfolio careers have been growing for a while. Some people have them because they have to as a source of work is going out of fashion or cut-backs are being made, others because they want variety and stimulation. I am the latter – it fits my values.

What is a portfolio career?

A portfolio career is when your work is made up of different components which you flex, in response to changing market conditions and/or changes in your personal circumstances or life stage. This makes your career future-proof too.

Portfolio career components

The components of a portfolio career might be a part time job, volunteering, consultancy or freelance projects/contracts, travel, study or a non-exec directorship (s).

My portfolio career

My portfolio career is made up of career coaching, executive coaching, events, content creation, content curation, books, chapters and articles and consultancy work. It can be very full on but never a dull moment!

Employers and portfolio careers

Companies are starting to take note about portfolio careers for a number of reasons.
– Flexible resourcing – as needed
– Generation Y/Millennials demand flexibility
– Talent/skills shortage in business critical areas

I am writing an article on this topic next week and one recruitment agency I interviewed predicts that recruitment will not look the same in 4 years’ time. I agree. Why then are so many people carrying on as though nothing is changing?

Portfolio career example

Read about our client Jon’s portfolio career:
Part 1:

Portfolio careerist – Jonathan Green #1

Part 2:

Portfolio careerist – Jonathan Green #2

How do we help?

Here are 4 ways:

• We offer early bird and weekend Skype appointments.
• We help you create, edit, market and manage your portfolio career
• We define your personal brand
• We assist you in creating a career strategy

What next?

If you are interested in exploring a portfolio career, want to create or review your career strategy, or know someone we can help, get in touch.

Don’t wait until the General Election result in May 2015, start future proofing your career now. Get in touch.

Portfolio careerist – Jonathan Green #2

March 13, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

This is part 2 of a 2 part blog by one of our clients – Jonathan Green. We coached Jon to create his second career – a portfolio career. The rest of this blog is in Jon’s own words.

To read the first part, please click on this link:
https://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/portfolio-careerist-jonathan-green/

Time out for reflection

In 2010 I had a year-long sabbatical, six months of which were spent in the Outer Hebrides where I spent time writing my first book and working on songs in my recording studio. We then moved back to the mainland to have our second child. By this time I was growing as a recording artist and author but we also needed to get a regular income as publishing wasn’t paying yet – partly because I gave my music away for free! Looking back now, I don’t think that I valued my craft enough and that was something I had to confront and work through.

New beginnings – my portfolio career

I found a job working for the Methodist Church nationally to develop chaplaincy, a role that required someone who could start things from scratch. The role involved me speaking, travelling, writing a lot of material, including a course which has been published and used all over the world. The job also required us to move twice. However, in the midst of the demands of that role I managed to set clear boundaries around the time that I gave to the work, a discipline that coaching helped to develop in me. This allowed me to continue to record and release music and write. I was feeling really good about the balance between my church work, music and writing – everything was finding space, including my family, by this point my wife and I had three children under the age of five.

Career crossroads

Eventually, last summer I was made redundant, the Chaplaincy Development Project finally ran out of money. On the one hand, being made redundant was hard, because there was still so much work to do. However, on the other hand it was tremendously liberating. I felt like I had been given the gift of space and I really believed that I shouldn’t rush to find a new job. I realised that this was the perfect opportunity to jump with both feet into a portfolio style of work. My wife was offered a great job which meant that I didn’t have to find a full time paid job. I was approached by a national organisation to develop something from scratch… it was for two days a week, was home based and time limited. PERFECT! For me this was also a profound personal statement – for the first time in my life I can genuinely say that I write music for most of the time and work for the church part time. I have given myself permission to not make “working for the church” the main thing – and you know what? The world hasn’t stopped turning!

Money from music

My wife said to me recently, that if I treat music like a business then it will pay like a business. So that is what I have done. I released my first commercial single in January 2015 and I am currently working on an EP scheduled for the summer. I also have two albums in development for 2016. It has taken me eight years to get to this point, but I feel that the songwriter in me has been truly liberated and more importantly, I feel like I am being true to myself.
I am super excited about arriving at this point in my journey. So much of the thinking and insights about who I truly am: my values, priorities and vision for my life stems from the coaching I received all those years ago. I also picked up and learnt to work with a number of tools that helped me get here! Coaching has been so valuable and was worth every penny and I apply the insights to everything I do.

You can listen to lots of my music over at www.soundcloud.com/recreativemedia for free and you can buy my first Single – Rest in My Love from every online store and streaming service in the world! I live on Twitter @recre8ivemedia

The joy of freelance – a personal story

March 11, 2015 By // by DigitalJenIPC

I can still remember the heady excitement of becoming self-employed over 17 years ago. I had planned it for 6 months, the market was ripe and I was ready.

I have always been independent, the no 2 child of 4, my Dad was self-employed, my Mum worked from home most of the time, so it felt like she was self-employed. I detested politics and ‘playing the game’. I didn’t and wouldn’t, it felt fake and realness and authenticity are important to me.

My career heritage is in marketing and brand strategy and communication, useful in marketing myself, and something I now help my clients with. I had researched the market thoroughly and knew that there was a shortage of strategic planners due to a combination of lack of training and recruitment in the late 80s/early 90s downturn and more communication agencies wanting to get bigger higher value strategic projects from clients.

I has also set up a database of contacts in Excel, my Mum created my first logo on her computer, I had saved a financial cushion of 6 months’ money to cover bills and I had low outgoings as I rented a room in my sister’s flat.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” I told myself. “You can always go back into full time employment.”

I especially enjoyed thinking through the strategic options for my business and what to call it, something I ended up doing a lot for clients as a freelancer. All the company names I liked and wanted were taken and I felt like I was going down a cul de sac with this important issue to sort.

Then one day, I was reading a document and this word jumped out at me: ‘Energise’. That was it. I then did an exercise with a career coach which helped me identify what motivated me and then distilled this down to ‘energising connector’. This later evolved into my personal brand ‘Talent Liberator’. I use this exercise with my clients today.

I crafted a letter and posted it to my database. I can still remember the joy, the relief, coming back home 2 days after mailing the letters to see my answer phone red light flashing. Not flashing a little, but flashing a lot; 18 red flashes in fact. I had not even done any follow up calls to the letter, and they were chasing me, wanting to speak and meet! It was going to be alright. Woo hoo! That moment, sending out my first invoice and being paid for being me and what I offered were wonderful moments that made all the hard work worthwhile.

The only thing I missed about being employed was my company car and the IT help line! Life as an independent contractor and being self-employed isn’t for everyone, but it does give you freedom, choice and the opportunity to control and influence your own future. That, for me, an independent spirit, is priceless.

3 ways we help our clients.

• Defining your personal brand – this is vital with more competition and a growing trend
• Crafting a compelling CV which helps you stand out and be noticed – we have 35 years’ experience doing this
• Self-awareness to maximise the fulfilment from your work

Read our client testimonials:
http://liberateyourtalent.wordpress.com/energise-client-testimonials/

View our LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/energiseliberateyourtalent

Discover your transferable skills with our free report:
http://careerstrategies.co.uk/changingcareersreport/