The Successes and Struggles of Self-employment

Never in my life did I think I would find myself turning to self-employment two years into qualifying. In Educational Psychology, we have a term called “Emotionally Based School Avoidance” aka EBSA, which can describe students who are often absent from school or avoid classes for a variety of emotional reasons, including anxiety, home life and school issues that serve as “push or pull” factors that either push the student away from the school environment or pull (i.e. encourage) the student into school. Now that you have an understanding of EBSA, I introduce EBWA - Emotionally Based Workplace Avoidance; where push and pull factors consist of creating work-life balance, childcare, caring for adults, passion projects, increasing the variety of casework, living abroad and making time to live your dreams. EBWA is not (yet) an approved psychological term - but I may just attempt to formalise this concept. In my own words, Emotionally Based Workplace Avoidance may NOT necessarily consist of not turning up for duties or avoiding the workplace environment. But for EPs, what it often may look like is a sense of burnout, coupled with emotional challenges of loving the career we have dedicated ourselves to but also realising we have other life priorities, passions and personal goals that are difficult to balance. Thus, for many, the route to self-employment is a simple solution.

At one year of self-employment, what are the successes?

1.More time for myself. Through being able to choose the work that I want to take on and how much of it, I have found that despite essentially “doing more” casework, I have had more time. How does that work? I asked myself feeling completely baffled as though I was making sense of a complex SPSS computation. I eventually realised that the culprit and extraneous variables were meetings and emails - masses of emails. Emails from everyone! When you work in a major large-scale setting such as a Local Authority or the National Health Service (NHS), you will have meetings and receive emails from several departments, and you are expected to attend, read and possibly reply to them all. I often found this overwhelming and it often impacted on my time management; leading to excess hours and extra (unpaid) duties completed out of my “EP goodwill” allocation aka, my personal time. Underpaid staff can lead to eventual unhappiness and a sense of being undervalued in the workplace. Add all of these to the list of EP push factors... Now that I self-select small numbers of casework, I only receive a limited number of correspondences.

2. An ability to increase my income and offer pro-bono work. I didn’t think that these two concepts worked hand in hand, but they do. Having a fixed income can feel like it gives you a sense of stability. However, with the rise in the cost of living, sometimes we need room to be able to cover extra costs by taking on additional work. With an increase in income and free time, I have been able to consider giving FREE support to those who need it and who are also feeling the impact of the cost of living - and at no detriment to my work-life balance, personal time or earnings. Goodbye to the “goodwill allocation.”

3. Learning entrepreneurial skills. I have learnt a lot over the last year about finances, accounting, law and marketing. CPD is easy to complete because I am constantly intrigued about learning about the business of psychology. With the knowledge I have gained, I have also been able to help other EPs who also work independently to navigate some of these new territories. It has also taught me to value myself, my skills and my qualifications and to pitch, promote and pay myself according to this value.

The struggles (or rather, things to consider):

I decided to keep this section short, as I have had a really good year and at the moment, I do not see the following as struggles, but more things to consider... I have found that having free time when most of my friends and family work a 9-5 job can mean that meeting up with them or having company during the daytime is difficult. Those mid-day movie marathons, candlelight concerts and late-night pizza-making classes will likely be alone. In addition, you will need to learn self-discipline in putting money away for pensions, student loans and expenses which would usually be covered in your payslip. Being consistent with this can be challenging if your work varies from month to month. All in all, my successes outweighed the struggles and self-employment is certainly the path for me.