Design A Life You Love
Jessica Fearnley
10 Years+ Helping 6 Figure B2B Consultant Women Get To 7 Figures | 180+ Podcast Episodes | Work less, earn more, and be seen as a trusted advisor | Author of "Too Much"
Welcome to today's edition of the Seven Figure Consultant LinkedIn Newsletter for Women in Consulting. Don't forget that you can get daily updates from Jessica in your LinkedIn news feed by accessing her LinkedIn profile and hitting Follow. She will be sharing insights and discussions through the week that she would love to hear your views on.
When you have left a corporate career where you were working 80 hours a week and set up your own consulting business, it can be tempting to make your working life look the same.
This is what ‘work’ looks like to you. Long hours and lots of pressure. You might be telling yourself, “I ‘should’ be working late”, or “I ‘should’...” insert thing you used to hate but were told was part of your job.
So much of the issue around corporate expectations of women is because everything about those workplaces stems from when men worked in an office and women stayed at home.
Women are now allowed to take up roles that traditionally would have been reserved for men - but only if they squeeze themselves into a man-shaped mould. Putting in the long hours, making sure they’re the right balance of competent and confident without being too aggressive or threatening. If they have a family then essentially pretending they don’t have kids because it means no one will take them seriously.
When you contrast that to being CEO of an independent corporate consulting business - where you can fit your hours around your family responsibilities or the lifestyle and hobbies you choose to have - we’re talking about a way of doing life and work that IS woman-shaped.
It’s such a stark departure from the demands and pressures that corporate life puts on women. As women consultants, we have an amazing ability to set the terms for how we do life.
The biggest problem I see women having with this is literally realising that they CAN set their own schedule, work fewer hours than they ever have previously, and make more money in the process. The biggest issue for women in this regard isn’t the constraints of their daily lives, it’s MINDSET.
Because realising you have the ability to choose the lifestyle and work/life balance you want is one of the most empowering things you can experience. It changes women’s relationship with their work and their business on a permanent basis.
If you haven’t stepped into this already, imagine how liberating it is to have a life without ‘shoulds’. Where you don’t set up your work schedule around the demands of your clients, but around your own priorities.
This is an absolute game-changer. You don’t have to feel like you need to choose your career over your family, or where you want to live, or your health. You can design the life you want and make your work part of that.
Let me know in the comments, what do you want to be able to do more of?
Free Report - The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Consulting Business
I've created a free PDF report called The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Business. It’s my most popular free resource and in it I outline the 6 areas of unscaled businesses that need to change in order to move past being ‘booked up and burned out’ and shifting into that higher gear that gets you cruising again.
It’s the framework that helps consultant women like you find their feet and get back to leading the business, rather than being buried in client work and back-end business operations.
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To find out more about the work I do, visit jessicafearnley.com or message me here on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear more about private coaching and how I can help you transition from booked up and burned out to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure consulting business.
Journalism, strategic design, co-design
4 年Hi Jessica, my challenge is there's just so much to do. I need and want to work, and want to do post grad study and there's also my family... in the end I feel just as pressured as I did when I was working full time even though, technically, as a freelancer I am in charge of things!
Regional to National Marketing Growth Whisperer ? Accelerate Your Big Leap Blueprint ? Midmarket $50M-$1B ? People. Plan. Processes. ? Change Catalyst
4 年Sage words. It can be so easy to fall into recreating what you've done before - after 20 years of corporate career and it's hard to undo those patterns! It's a great reminder to take the experience forward, but not go into autopilot and include the stuff that you don't want from c-life. Working on it!