Leaving the Cult of Online Business.
I've found the world of online business a bit of a head f**k. It sounds extreme, but I'm really only starting to make sense of it after therapy.
I feel like I'm leaving a cult.
I came into it at a particularly vulnerable time, post divorce having just moved back to the UK, post-redundancy 3mths after moving back, mid-pandemic. What a perfect bloody storm.
Whilst my friends were buying their forever homes, or making bold life moves, I couldn't work out whether I should be buying or renting, whether it should be London or the countryside, whether I was looking for forever, an investment, or a just for now place.
At different times I did all of those things.
I also hadn't fully accepted that your standard of living has to look different when you're down to a single salary. I think I fought that for a long while.
I retrained as a coach during the pandemic (along with the world and their dog). It gave me a new outlet that I absolutely loved. Before I fell down the 'online business' rabbit hole, I was growing the business incrementally and taking on strategy projects at the same time. 'Coaching' isn't the problem.
Once you enter the world of online business and you see the promises and the confidence in the messaging that it's inevitable if you do A, B and C (no matter how good you are at what you do)... you'll start with £10k months, whip up to £20k months as standard and then you start a group programme and ostensibly retire... it's hard not to be seduced.
So you download roadmaps and attend masterclasses in a wild frenzy, because you're only ever one masterclass away from the secret. Then you follow every snippet of advice, until you have a frankenstein of other people's strategies and a sense of utter disappointment in yourself. It hasn't worked and so it must be me.
I totally overstretched myself financially, lived for two years in nervous system burnout and felt like a colossal failure - forgetting the two decades of success that went before it.
Never in the real world has someone created a successful business without an actual idea and a strategy to make it happen. It's also requires boring consistency and patience. It's the long game.
