Quitting to begin. Day 1.

I’m scared.

Last month, I passed my one year mark of working as a virtual assistant. Since February 2017, I had been offering my online business skills to online business people, and I had taken that full-time a few months later and officially began interneting for a living.

Since then, I’ve worked with amazing, amazing people. As in, people I was following years prior and whose first emails to me asking if we could work together left me with I-just-downed-5-straight-coffees heart palpitations because I was so starstruck. With them, I’ve operated behind the scenes of major launches and projects, learning everything firsthand, and growing just by keeping up.

I’d finally booked out, too! Which meant that after months of experimenting, iterating, figuring out my services, trying to package them in a way that makes sense, pricing myself this way? or that way? and finding clients on The Online, and more figuring things out, I had reached the land of steady, recurring income.

I was good.

And then I quit.

It was time for a shift.

Because when my son said, “Mommy I’m sad. Can you turn off your computer and not work? You’re never with me anymore,” he was right.

I work from home. I’m with him all day. But I’m not with him with him. I was stressed all the time, and catching up on work meant I had to catch up on family time which meant I had to catch up on work which meant I had to catch up on family time which meant I had to nap but nope I had to catch up on —

I shut my computer, and the next day, I took him on a date, just the two of us.

We had ramen and mango shake, bought a bed and treats for our new puppy, and even ran some errands for the family. There were no phones allowed, except for when I had to Wikipedia the story of Hansel and Gretel (I parked so far that I said we needed breadcrumbs to find our way back, to which he replied “?????”), just a lot of chatting, playing, and eating.

Throughout the evening, he’d keep telling me, out of nowhere, “Thank you, Mommy! This is the best day ever. I love you.”

And I realized, the reason I wanted to start working online in the first place was so that I could Be There.

So I’m going to Be There.

First, by cutting my client load in half.

And then by deciding to no longer offer virtual assistant services to new inquiries. You know — the steady thing that’s been 100% of my income thus far.

What now?

Business-wise:

Cutting my workload in half (and it’s so surreal to even say this. I had enough of a workload to cut in half? Dang) has given me this space to play and experiment again.

I had a coaching barter with Maya Elious going on, and on one call, we were supposed to talk about systems. I was feeling very overwhelmed with work at the time, I wasn’t performing well, and I was so ready to answer questions like, “What are your bottlenecks?” and “What can you delegate or automate?”

But the first thing she asked me was:

“What are you doing in your business, and what do you want to be doing?”

Fam, I was shook. I was not prepared.

I know it sounds silly, but wow, that’s right, I can choose.

I do have a few things up my too-long-for-this-tropical-country sleeves, and if you follow me on Instagram, you might have peeped the story or post where I’m like ya here’s what I’m thinking.

I’ll save those for another entry, though, because there’s a whole thought process there that I’d love to delve deeper into. (It has spreadsheets.)

It feels good beginning to work on my own projects again and I’m really excited for what’s coming!

Writing-wise

So. This journal situation.

I see many before-and-after stories on the internet, especially when it comes to business. But I’ve always been curious about the during.

Jason Zook shared his process of launching ByMyFuture — now ByOurFuture — in this 60-Day Journal. Regina Anaejionu is documenting her business model transition here.

I’m learning plenty from both, and thought I’d like to share my during, too. I’ll take you behind the scenes as I’m figuring things out — with the headfake of teaching myself to write again, and to put myself out there consistently.

So this will be a daily journal, taking you along with me as I shift gears in my business, and hopefully — and to the point! — in my life.

Thank you so much for reading! And I’ll see you tomorrow.