Christopher Loder, current undergraduate, BA Philosophy, Mindfulness Content Creator
- What or who inspired you to become self-employed?
- I wanted to help people through my knowledge and practice of mindfulness and wanted to earn some extra money in a way I felt beneficial to society. I also don’t like working for people so that’s a big motivation for getting my own stuff set up!
- What are your top five tips for those looking to become self-employed?
- Do what you love. That’s what you’’ be good at, and most importantly it’ll make everything much more rewarding!
- Allow yourself to be flexible- not every business requires you to sit at a desk 8 hours a day.
- Be adventurous – I only became a mindfulness creator because I went for something I felt ambitious doing. Don’t feel like anything is too ambitious, too difficult or too far away! If it is, that’ll become clear quickly and you can change what you’re doing. But you’ll never be able to change a decision you could’ve made a year ago!
- Start small. When I started this I saw it as a small side hustle until I found something else. Now I hope to make it into a proper business if I can.
- Enjoy being yourself! One of the great things about being self-employed is that there’s a lot less pressure (if any!) to act a certain way because of someone breathing down your neck. Be yourself! Do what you want, work when you want within reason, work on what you want, enjoy being you and live life to the fullest!
- What are the biggest challenges you have faced in self-employment?
- Because I am self-employed alongside my studies, finding time for them has been hard. Pushing through tracks that flop is also difficult, pushing for slightly higher viewership to help more people and hopefully reach more earnings eventually can also be difficult. Determination and resilience I’d say are really the only two things you need in order to combat this- keep them religiously if you want to push through!
- What do you enjoy most about being self-employed?
- Definitely the freedom. I hate working for other people, that’s just not how I work, so being able to run everything myself, work for myself, hold myself accountable and take every decision myself is really valuable to me. I’m not a control freak, but I infinitely prefer the stress of making my own decisions to the stress of worrying about disappointing a boss.