The Solopreneur’s Toolkit: Career Coach
How to find your direction at work and beyond
Meet Lauren 🙋🏻♀️
Lauren St. Germain is a corporate leader turned life and career coach based in Connecticut. Before becoming a coach, Lauren worked in Corporate Finance for over a decade. Always drawn to work that allowed her to connect with and help others, she was always more interested in building relationships and developing as a strong leader, versus the technical aspects of her Finance work. She especially loves helping someone go from feeling overwhelmed and unsure of themselves to feeling calm and grounded in their own life and career path. Outside of work, Lauren gets her energy from time spent in nature, game nights, deep conversations, and cooking and trying new foods.
What are the best resources that make life and work as a solopreneur better? 🤔 Here’s Lauren’s Toolkit:
How do you create connection as a solopreneur?
I am a big fan of a virtual coffee chat or an in-person coffee meeting. I think over the last few years where we’ve had to be more intentional about getting together, some people may be over the, “do you want to grab a virtual coffee?” But not me. I am all about it. Even this meeting — I love those quick touch points and being really intentional about it.
I think the biggest thing is just being intentional about a 15 minute video meet up, if it can be in person, even better. I like to have something on my calendar to connect with someone else outside of work, just get out of my own head. I do that through Groove a lot, too. One of the best things about Groove is if I do have a day that’s lighter on the people connection, I’ll hop on and say, “I’m frustrated by this.” I really need to tell someone what I’m going through, and I really just need someone to be on the other side.
Groove provides that quick moment of connection. It’s simple, but it’s what I go back to over and over.
How do you manage your finances?
With a background in corporate finance, you’d think I have all of these crazy tools for you, but it’s like that example of the person who’s a professional chef and then they don’t like coming home and cooking.
With the stability in my corporate job, I never got super serious about my own personal finances. After leaving my corporate job in 2021, along with the stability of a paycheck, and having a company that was contributing to retirement for me, my husband and I hired a financial planner. That has been the biggest thing and the best tool for me.
It goes back to getting out of my zone of genius. I didn’t work in personal finance. I wasn’t good at it. I wasn’t particularly interested in the personal finance side of things. Working in corporate finance is so different than how to manage your own money personally, despite being similar concepts.
If you can, outsource to somebody who just knows it better and who gets lit up by it, the gentleman that we work with has been fantastic. He knows his stuff and it makes me feel good knowing that I’m taking care of without having to give it too much energy.
How do you like to get creative?
I put a lot of pressure on myself to be creative. I have a blog on my website, and I want to make sure that I’m always coming up with new ideas and stories. I’m also trying to figure out how I can be a more consistent presence on social media to grow my business.
Often, I get caught up in this idea that I have to be sitting at my desk to create. But what I realized is I have the best ideas walking outside without any headphones. I need to be more open to the flow that sometimes hits you, and put less pressure on myself to create in a specific environment, in a specific zone, at a specific time.
You know what I need to explore? Voice memos. I don’t use this enough, but I need to be able to record to myself when I am walking. Maybe that’s a tool yet to be discovered for me because right now my best tool is just no headphones, going outside for a walk. That’s where I get my best ideas.
What does self-care look like as a solopreneur?
As I was thinking about certain things for my toolkit, I wanted to be really creative and offer something that no one’s ever said before, but at the same time, there are certain things that just work really well. For me, it’s journaling.
When I was younger and really leaning more into healing I always heard the experts say, “you gotta journal, you gotta reflect.” And it’s something that I loved, but I never did consistently. I put a lot of pressure on myself: Well, if it’s not an everyday thing, then you’re not a “journaler.” I just let go of this expectation that I had to do it every day.
It’s probably every few days, some days there are times I do it multiple times a day because something’s really bugging me, or I do have this light bulb moment where I get really excited or I’m learning something. I think it’s just being open to what works for you and not putting pressure on yourself.
So maybe I’ll tie it together this way: don’t put pressure on yourself to do any one habit or any one self-care practice everyday in order for it to be “successful.” Do do it when it fits with you, when it’s meaningful for you. Once I took that pressure off, I wanted to journal. It wasn’t something that I felt like I had to do, but I wanted to, because I was seeing the benefit.
There’s definitely something to be said about consistency and self-discipline. But I think with regard to this specifically, it’s helped me to relieve a little bit of pressure and do it when it feels good. And I ended up doing it more because of that.
What do you do for fun outside work?
A couple of years ago, when I was really down in my career, I knew I wanted to make a change, but I was really discouraged. I realized I was living for the weekend and I know a lot of people may relate to that where if you work a traditional job. That the five days, Monday through Friday are the workdays — and fun happens on the weekends. So, a few years ago I started to get really intentional about making weekdays fun. Just little things like trying a new recipe on a Wednesday night.
The big mindset shift and what I want to pass on to everyone is to incorporate fun on more than just weekends, or on more than just the days where you’re not working. I know that we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs and freelancers in this crowd who make their own schedules, but the times that you’re not working aren’t the only times to have fun and be intentional about scheduling fun throughout the week and not just the off periods.
My current favorite is Chinese checkers. My husband and I will sneak in a quick game after dinner.
Which work related groups are you a part of?
In early 2020, I realized what I was craving most was connecting with peers. When I was in a corporate environment, I had built-in friends, coworkers, and peers. I’ve definitely found a little bit of that through Groove, but in 2022 I created a “mini mastermind” group with myself and two other female coaches who I’ve never met in person. We’ve met online. That’s the power of social media and the internet.
We meet once a month for 90 minutes and we each have 30 minutes for our own space to talk through what’s going on with us in our businesses and where we need help. We’ve done certain exercises together, and it has been so impactful. It’s free and it was something that two other women also felt they really needed in their life. It’s been game changing.
What tools do you use to learn and get inspired?
High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard. When people ask me about changing careers, I point to reading a chapter in this book. One of the habits is increase your productivity.
He talks about this concept of “prolific quality output,” which is like, what do you want your thing to be? What do you want to be known for? What do you want to be your primary task or thing that you focus on most? For him, it was marketing. At the time I was was doing finance — like technical numbers, finance. But I wanted my thing to be teaching and coaching.
In reading that book I had a big lightbulb moment. I realized that I was not doing my thing, which was why I was feeling unfulfilled and unhappy. Now, a lot of the work that I do is helping my clients to see that they might just be in the wrong thing, they might be chasing the wrong thing. I help them find fulfillment by doing their thing. There’s so much more goodness in High Performance Habits, but that one chapter was just wildly profound in my life.
How much time and energy do you spend on promotion for your business or career? What has been your most effective channel?
I’ve been in business for a little over a year, and it is primarily referrals. It started with being active on Instagram. Instagram stories and the way that I showed up in stories and video was engaging — I started sharing my journey and my career transition there. And then from there, it’s been a lot of referrals.
I have been trying to leverage LinkedIn a bit more. Due to the nature of my background in the corporate world and the type of clients, professional driven women is usually the clientele that I support and work with most. And a lot of them are on LinkedIn and I’ve experimented a bit with some content there and have got some good results there so far. So, I’m hoping to be active and become a thought leader even more there.
What was your best hire for your business?
The biggest investment I made was on my branding and my website, which was so worth it. The woman’s name is Tracy. (She’s my sister-in-law.) It was a fantastic partnership from the beginning because I knew, this is not something I want to learn, this isn’t a really solid investment for me to make.
I mentioned the financial planner being something in my toolkit for my finances. That is also, while not technically a hire in my business, it has really put me at ease. I think the best hires are ones where it’s going to take away stress. I can picture the weight lifting from my shoulders and the feeling when you hand it over to someone you trust.
What advice would you give yourself at the start of being a solopreneur?
Direction is more important than speed.
I don’t know who said this, but I remember reading it right around the one year anniversary of starting my business. I was feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, and I wasn’t far enough along. But the universe delivered that quote to me and I thought, I’m moving in the right direction.
Get in touch with what you want in your career and life first.
I was so focused on doing what others wanted me to do. I was so focused on status and outward appearance. Sure, I brag about a recent promotion, but my ego was driving the show for a long time. Now my soul is in the driver’s seat.
What is something you want to intentionally make more time for?
I want to plant an herb garden. I would love a little bit more time to just do something fun like that with no reason other than to learn and be.
In my business, I want to make more space for free flowing creativity and my own thought leadership — without my inner critic getting in the way.
If you liked this article, check these out:
- The Future of Work (as we see it)
- How to Take a Vacation When You Work for Yourself
- Or, if you’re on a solopreneur looking for more support, accountability and focus join Groove’s online coworking community to get sh*t done and have a good time while you’re at it ➡️ groove.ooo
