Stress to Success The Transition from Recruiter to Blogger IM HIRED

Stress to Success The Transition from Recruiter to Blogger A Year in the Making! How times flies Ive been blogging now for almost a year which includes hours of thinking of ideas, days of pondering whether what Im publishing is any good and months of worrying if I should just go back to full time recruitment. It has been a year of ups and downs, highlights such as getting my first payment for doing what I love, getting awarded as one of the top 100 career advice sites and getting recognised by larger sites willing to publish my work .. yes little old me got published on Classy Career Girl and CV Library! How did all this happen!   The Lows The lows are just the realistic factors of any freelancing work, the months of  earning nothing, the time waiting for responses to my proposals and the days of no views. But all the time Ive spent thinking Am I doing the right thing? or Will anyone actually read this? its almost instantly over turned by the realisation that I am doing it. I am actually doing something that is my passion, I am actually making it happen. I dont have to answer to anyone but myself and yes, I would probably earn more as a full time recruiter but there is always potential to grow in earnings. ____________________________________________ When you are going through hell, keep on going. Never, never, never give up. -Winston Churchill ____________________________________________ Go Back to the Start When starting my blog, my first post was to be about my reasons for doing this blog, why I moved from a successful career to go in alone.  I wrote that post a hundred times over, every time leaving it in drafts before eventually deleting it. I decided to take away the personal and just give you advice instead, remove my story from the picture and focusing on helping job seekers. Whilst that will always be my blogs purpose, I think I could help more people who have that stuck in a day job feeling by sharing mine. The Career I am going to steam through this part or we will be here for hours! I started as an administrator, I probably didnt entirely appreciate it at the time but that job gave me so much, straight out of college, it gave me training, opportunities and a glimpse into the career I wanted to pursue. Looking back I progressed quickly, from admin to resourcing, to account manager to consultant and skip a few years to managing a recruitment team. My career goal was to manage a team by 25 and I got the promotion just before my birthday. The odd thing was I never thought of anything after that and then the huge realisation of what happens next? I suppose at 18, 25 seems so old but then you quickly grasp that if youre lucky enough to retired at 65 (I think Ive come to terms with the fact that by the time I get to that stage, retirement will probably be about 100) then at 25 Id still have 40 years to go. Did I want to do this for the next 40 years?  I wasnt sure I could but I had no idea what else I could do. ______________________________________________________________________________________ “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Confucius _____________________________________________________________________________ The Turning Point Well like anything, the people around me realised things need to change well before I had the courage to do anything about it. I spoke a lot (I mean I discussed it daily) about my desire to be my own boss, to offer career advice but I always made plenty of excuses why I didnt do, why it wouldnt work. But one day everything changed I quit my job. It was that feeling of every built up piece of pressure bursting out and maybe I didn’t do it in the best way but I instantly knew I made the right decision. A Year Later I bet you’ve read a lot of posts about bloggers making six figure salaries in 3 months or getting a million followers in 6. Well I not going to lie I am not a millionaire and I work a lot of hours with my freelance writing but I wouldn’t change a thing. Like everyone I have good days and bad but I have enough good days to make the bad seem insignificant. So why I am sharing this a year later? Because I want people to know its possible to get a career you actually enjoy. You don’t have to do it my way but you need to realise that there are options available to you, so just do it.