024. What do you want to learn next?
Every issue of Moment comes with a question designed to gently nudge you towards working well: making your mental health part of your self-employed business plan.
024. What do you want to learn next?
It’s very easy to focus on the task at hand, the todo-list, and the immediate requirements of a project, but what comes next? When you are self-employed, there’s often no clear career path, and certainly no boss to give you a promotion. This is something you need to make sure you’re doing for yourself, so you don’t stagnate as a professional. Ensuring you have a sense of progression is not only helpful to your income, but also your emotional wellbeing.
Learning is a huge part of this - and can be challenging for the self-employed.
When in employment, there’s often more opportunity to get involved in projects where you’ve not done the task before, and learn on the job - your employer has a vested interest in your skills developing. But as a freelancer, it can be hard to take on projects where you don’t have proof in your portfolio that you’ve done this before - few clients are willing to take that risk.
Having an idea of the next thing you want to learn helps you to identify new opportunities to develop that skill or work in a space where you can build those new capabilities - whether as a personal project or professionally.
Learning isn’t just about new skills and capabilities - it could be about a new sector or category you’ve not worked in before, it could be about a new challenge, it could be about growth in an area you’re less strong in, but having an idea of the direction you want to point, and a sense of what you want to learn next helps you be more aware of those opportunities to do so, and writing it down somewhere, setting yourself the goal of the next thing to learn, can help you do it.
Including your learning goals or even simply areas of value or interest for you, in your working wellbeing plan, means you can turn to the chapter when you’ve time to focus on your own development, or even commit to creating the time.
So use this Moment to consider what you want to learn next, and how you might go about including it in to your working plan for the rest of the year.
Leave a comment below to share your reflections,
or visit Leapers to discuss the question further.
Things we read this week:
Ikigai venn is misunderstood - ikagai tribe
How our brains might encourage pessimism - Medium
Why digital therapeutics are destigmatizing mental health treatment - MedCityNews
Anti Hustle Hustle Club podcast
What are you reading? Share in the comments.