After you have been working at your own home – based business for a while, you may come to find that you are experiencing benefits that you did not even anticipate when you made the move to working from home. Last night I was thinking about how owning my own businesses gives me an unlimited opportunity to grow both personally and professionally. Even though I never really had a long term career track job before I started working for myself, the things that I have heard from friends in the world of traditional work have made me realize that professional growth opportunities are not always a given when you work for someone else.
That is kind of a big deal, if you think about it. After all, when we are children we spend much of our time learning and growing. Learning new skills is encouraged, and we are often told that “the sky is the limit”. Once we enter the world of traditional work, there may seem to be opportunities for us to keep growing, to “climb the ladder” within the profession of our choosing. Then again, we may find that those opportunities take place over a very long time frame or that in order to keep our career on that track we must make enormous sacrifices that we may not want to make.
For example, I am a lawyer. I have never worked for a law firm, nor do I intend to do so. There may be some wonderful firms out there, where lawyers enjoy a comfortable balance between work and life and where taking time to start and raise a family does not derail them from the partnership track. Often, though, that is not the case. It’s not just law, it happens in the financial sector and in plenty of other professions, too.
When you work for yourself, you get to choose when and how you grow as a professional. Not only that, but you get to choose how you balance work with other things in life, such as your family, without giving up opportunities for professional growth. How have you grown as a professional while working from home?
Photo by Penywise on morguefile.com.