Mumpreneur Mistakes Number 2 – Following Your Passion When Nobody Wants To Pay You For It

I was delighted with all the comments and feedback from my post 'Mumpreneur Mistakes Number 1', especially from people who have succeeded at running a business from home around their children. But one comment from Chloe Wilson really got me thinking,  'I think it’s very hard to find work that is really what you want to do that actually pays you any money!', she says. I've had some personal experience of this when I tried to set up a coaching company. I was fully qualified by a well-respected coach training company, I got great reports from my tutors and I took their advice to find a niche I was passionate about. But it was incredibly hard to make any money. One of the tough lessons I learned from my coaching experience was this – it's great to follow your passion and to do what you really want in life, but you must also offer something that people are prepared to buy. And at a price high enough to both cover your costs and give you a decent standard of living. Otherwise you end up as a starving artist – doing what you love but  struggling financially. It's surprising (and depressing) how you can end up hating what you used to love when you feel you're failing. Another way of deciding what to do is to look at your skills, your talents and the network you already have, which is an approach suggested by many careers books. But what if you are skilled in something that just doesn't set you on fire? I'm pretty good at helping kids to make things and I enjoy doing it too, which is why I started off as a design and technology teacher. But doing this all day, every day took all the fun out of it. So the secret must be to look at where my skills and passions coincide with an opportunity. A service or product that people are prepared to pay for. I can also see that I mustn't be afraid to not make use of some of my skills , because that could keep me hanging on to my old working life when I need to be stepping off into my new one. There's no easy answer here, but the journey is certainly interesting. Stay tuned…

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