 Awesome. Let's get started. So I'm Kerri Caron and I am from Alamogordo which is about three and a half hours south of here. I'm a freelance online business owner since 2009 and I run an accountability and small group since 2012. My online friends know me for education, inspiration and networking. My personal friends know me as a Harley biker and a Niley hiker. Alright so slides and resources there'll be a link at the end of the presentation so you guys can look forward to that. Today we're going to identify how freelancers can move beyond surviving and begin to thrive. Who wants to do that? Awesome. How many of you are actually thriving or feel at least at some place in your life you're thriving? Oh come on. You're here right? Okay great. How many of you feel like you're just surviving right now? Okay. Alright well there's three areas that I want to focus on that need to be balanced and continually addressed as a freelancer in order to thrive. So within these areas there's specific actions that freelancers need to take. I'm going to go over what those actions are and why they're important to take them. Give me one second here my notes are not where I need to see them. Alright so the first area that I want to talk about is finance for freelancers. This of course relates to your business. This is probably one area that you hear a lot of presenters at WordCamp speak about and that's because it's really important. It's also probably the one that gives you guys the most amount of stress as a freelancer. How many in here are freelancers? Great. How many want to be freelancers or just thinking about it? Okay great. Alright let's get to the important stuff that other people talk about that I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on but do want to at least touch upon. So in order to thrive in finance you want to take actions that have a positive impact on your business. That's how you create financial security. You want to build a wide client base. If any of you were listening to Nathan Ingram's presentation a couple hours back he talked about how you want to have a wide client base. So lots of customers that have a little amount of income so that when and if those customers leave you're not going to lose a whole lot of income really fast. You can find clients remotely. You don't have to have clients that are in your area. They can be anywhere in the world. You can work with clients who are local. Or the easiest place to get clients and probably the best place to find clients is by asking for referrals from your existing customers. This is nothing new I'm sure you've all heard all this so I'm going to go pretty quickly here. The second way to create financial security is to collect regular income. Some of you may know this as mailbox money or recurring income. You want to establish some sort of process that is going to build in income that you're going to be getting on a regular basis. So a good friend of mine guess who Nathan Ingram. The more predictable a dollar is the more valuable it becomes and that's because less risk is less stress. We talked a little bit about that with your clients. If you if you have lots of clients and you lose that it's not as stressful. So the last way to create financial security is investing in your business. So a couple of weeks ago I was doing a podcast and we talked about making money and how to how to invest in your business. And the way that you do that is we identified the definition of investing in your business as strategically spending on things that will make your business grow. Some of the ways that you can do that is you can look for opportunities. If you're on any mailing lists for information that you want to collect. You can look for deals and sales that are happening. And you can think about how you want to to spend on things for your business. You want to educate yourself. You want to learn to plan to take action and then take action on the things that you planned and learned. You want to spend time spending time on this is how you can use all of those ways to spend time. So that's investing time in your business. You can also spend money to invest in your business. And when you're doing this you're going to now take the action. You've looked at those emails and you found the products or the services that you want to invest in that you've taken the time to invest in. And now you're going to take your money and invest in it. You can reinvest your income that your business is has already made. And we're not talking about just spending money to spend money here. We're talking about taking the profit from your business and then spending that profit to reinvest in your business so that your business will become profitable. You can spend time I'm sorry you can spend money on classes. You can take formal classes self education. There's all kinds of free things online as well. In this case we're talking about money. And sooner or later when your freelancer you're going to come upon a point in time in your business where you realize that paying to have somebody else do the things that you don't want to do. Don't have the time to do or no longer are interested in doing so you're going to pay for outsourcing. And of course most importantly you want to spend money on the things that are going to build your toolkit so that you have what you need in your toolkit for your business to run. Now here's an important point. Sadly investing in your business doesn't always have a positive impact on your relationships or your well-being because as freelancers we tend to overdo it. A lot of us are workaholics and it's very common for us to spend all of our time or all of our money on our business especially when we're first beginning. And it's really not a good way to thrive when you have nothing left. So remember there's more important things. There's more to thriving as a freelancer than just your business because you really actually can have a life. That brings us to section number two which is fun for freelancers. This relates to your relationships. Making time to interact with people who need to have relationships with. Let's identify who those people are. You need to have a relationship with friends and family and the more importantly you want to have a relationship with those people. You also need to have a relationship with your clients and customers. Now sometimes we don't want to have those relationships but we have to if we're going to have a successful business. So how do you create time for life? Once again we're going to be taking actions that have a positive impact on our relationships. Let's take a look at what that looks like. Number one we want to build beneficial boundaries. If any of you know me, have listened to my podcast or read any of my posts you know I am the boundary queen. I have learned how to say no. I have a reputation for not answering my phone unless you have a scheduled appointment with me. I don't give out my cell phone number. People don't call me after hours. I take time off and I schedule time off especially if I have a day where I have meetings scheduled with clients or I have doctor's appointments, dentist appointments, whatever I schedule time off. You need to learn how to create boundaries. Let me tell you about my experience when I was working, let's call it my all work and no play experience. I worked 18 hours a day on my business when I first started. Six to seven days a week and I noticed that my relationships with my husband and my family and my friends was rapidly deteriorating. Not good for my personal life. So I decided I had to be the one to change and that's when I began to schedule my work my regular work days. Now my regular work days are Monday through Friday 8 a.m. till 4 p.m. At 4 p.m. okay sometimes it's 5 but at 4 p.m. I start cooking dinner and I have dinner on the table and we eat as a family at 5 o'clock every night. That's strengthening my personal relationships. I also schedule regular days off. I schedule weekends off and holidays and birthdays because in our family we do things for the birthday person when it's their birthdays. The fact of the matter is and the reason I schedule that time off even if there's work to be done is because there's always going to be work that needs to be done and that's not what is the most important thing. So another way to create time for life is to build healthy relationships. How can you do that? The same way I did. You schedule work hours, plan for and have fun. I schedule my weekends to go Harley biking and hiking. That's what we do. Another little thing to touch on here is you need to have relationships with people where you respect one another. We've all heard the golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated but let's face it how many people do you know or come in contact with that instead of them treating you the way that you want to be treated they're treating you the way or let's say that differently. You want to treat others the way you want to be treated not the way they're treating you. There's jerks out there. They're going to be jerks. You can't change that. But you can change your attitude on how you treat them because you can treat them the way you want to be treated. Respect one another. Be consistent and dependable. Try helping someone educate them with something you know. Every one of us in here has something that someone else wants to know. Share it with them. They'd love that. Most importantly provide clear expectations that have boundaries. So a great relationship benefits everyone. Communicate regularly and honestly with family and friends, clients and customers. Pretty simple. So wrapping up in the relationship areas. Your boundaries are going to apply to both your business and your relationship. Setting and enforcing and living by your boundaries will have a positive impact on your relationships. Improving your relationship building is also going to have a positive impact on the growth of your business. So it's two fold. If you can thrive in this area, you're going to thrive in your business area as well or at least impact it in a positive way. But to thrive as a freelancer, it still doesn't stop there. That brings us to fitness for freelancers. And this is the part I'm going to focus the most on because this is the part that most people at word camps don't focus on. And I had to be different. This relates to your personal well-being and is a very pivotal area when it comes to thriving as a freelancer. How to create a better you. Once again, taking action. We're going to take action on things that have a positive impact on you or on yourself. There's two things that freelancers struggle with in the area of mental health and that is isolation and stress. And so the first part of being fit is to have a strong mind. So we're going to address mental health just a little bit. And this area actually has been covered recently in word camps and it's been a wonderful addition to helping people out. So let's worry about the isolation. Let's overcome isolation. Find some ways to overcome isolation. You can surround yourself with comfortable things. If you're isolated and you're working from home and you have your home office, get yourself a comfortable chair. Get a desk that is at the right height for you. Put pictures of your friends and family right on your desk so you can see them and you know why you're there. You can remote work remotely. When I first started freelancing, I had come directly out of the work environment and I was used to having a lot of people around and it was very quickly I realized how isolated I felt. So one day a week I would go up to the local coffee shop and I would work remotely from the coffee shop. This accomplished a couple of things for me. It first got me out of the house and made me actually get out of my pajamas maybe. It also made me have some interaction with people. It got me to talk to the people who owned the place. I got to know the staff members. I got to know the regular people who frequented the coffee shop. And to this day when I go back there, well I still earn a lot of reward points too and get free drinks, but to this day when I go back there I'm considered a regular and a lot of those staff people and a lot of those regulars have become clients of mine. So it was a way to expose myself to potential leads and even better than that because it was local some of these people became my friends. Some of the other ways that you can get involved and relieve yourself of isolation is to join and participate in chat groups online. If you can't get out of your house there's plenty of great online type of chat areas like Skype or Slack. I personally administer and participate in a Slack channel or Slack group and it's designed for like-minded web professionals, web designers and developers who have information to share with one another and we all get together every day and we have channels that are within our Slack and my favorite channel in there is the Rant channel and that channel is great for when people just have to unleash and because we have a specific channel for that they come and they just yada yada yada yada and they just let it all out and they feel so much better and then it doesn't overflow into all the other channels. So it was a great addition. Another channel we have is the water cooler channel and it's just like the work office water cooler. You go to the water cooler and you talk non shop stuff. So those are some ways that you can not feel so isolated. You can attend online events or even in person events so I'm really happy you all are here because this is one of those in-person events and you're not isolated. There's people around you. How many people here met at least five new people since they came in today or since they arrived? Awesome. Anybody who hasn't raised their hand? Who hasn't met at least five people? Okay I want all you guys after I'm done go introduce yourself to this gentleman up here. Okay that way we're not going to be isolated and we're not going to let that happen. Great. There's word camps. There's WordPress meetups. You can even create your own group. If you don't have those things in your area start a group at your library. Go to the library or your local college. Any of those places you can find a place to get together. Maybe it's even a church a church group or something like that. Lastly and another way that you can join in with other people is to join an accountability or mastermind group. When you visit the slide page I'll have some information on there for you on my website as well about an accountability group or mastermind group if that's something you all might be interested in. So we are going to conquer stress. One thing I want you all to realize is that there are millions of freelancers out there who are probably or have felt exactly how you are feeling right now. We have all been through it and it's kind of like a rite of passage for lack of a better term. Everybody goes goes through those feelings so if you're feeling stressed out let somebody know because they're gonna know exactly what you're going through and they're gonna be able to help you with that. It's important you know that you're not alone. There have been a lot of recent word camp presentations addressing mental health and getting help so it most certainly doesn't need to be ignored but I want to leave you with this. Suicide is a really bad option. It should not even it shouldn't even be on the table. So let's take it off the table and if you are feeling like that it's okay to ask for and seek help. We need to we need to help one another with that. So don't feel like it's a stigma that's going to be negatively reflected on you because it's not. You're not alone. Alright so the next part of building a strong mind so is to work on personal development and improvement. How can you do this? I read somewhere that you can if you read 52 books a year you're going to like really learn a whole lot of stuff but 52 books a year is probably pretty daunting. So start with one and okay it doesn't have to be when you hold in your hand it could be an e-book. It could be something you want to read about for your business to help you learn more about your business. Start with one maybe move to four maybe then 12 you know work your way up. Continue learning formal education self self-learning whatever it takes. I have a motto that I kind of apply to my own life and that is if I don't learn something every day it's I probably should go to sleep and wake up again because it the idea is to learn something new every day every day. And lastly regardless of your belief system work on your spiritual growth whatever that may be as involved as it could be in your life or as little. It's just important to know to grow spiritually whether that be church reading devotionals or spending time in nature. Alright so we've built a strong mind now we need to build a strong body brings us to food and nutrition. This is a big one for me food yeah we all need it don't we we need to eat. So ideally we're supposed to eat three to six meals a day and we're supposed to drink 64 ounces of water how many people are doing that three meals a day and 64 ounces water great job awesome awesome I didn't do that no so we're probably familiar with 2,000 calories a day in a regular diet generally average of course you have to adjust that based on your height and your weight and your body mass index whatever. Here's my story I'm going to refer to this date throughout the rest of this presentation May of 2017 okay and prior May of 2017 I was skipping breakfast skipping lunch working not drinking any water and I was eating one meal a day and that meal was a big meal because I hadn't eaten all day I was not watching what I was putting into my body I was not eating for nutritional value I was eating because I was eating and I over ate and I gained a lot a lot of weight and got very unhealthy very quickly although it didn't seem quickly because I'd been doing it for so long it landed me well into the obese category I weighed over 200 pounds which for some of you may not seem like a lot but I'm only like just over five foot so it's a lot. Here's what worked for me monitored convenient meals food that was delivered right to my door couldn't get any better things like home chef blue apron let's see what are some others hello fresh sunbasket these are great things for freelancers they're fast you can prepare things from from the from the time you start preparing them to the time they go on the table 30 to 60 minutes the food is restaurant quality fresh food and it is portion-controlled and it is so good it is so good it got me to try things I wouldn't normally eat and it provided a new hobby for me to learn to cook here's an example before before I started doing home chef I would cook dinner try to cook dinner and my husband would take a bite and he'd go and then he would just push the plate away and he would go find something else to eat it was horrendous needless to say now the dogs will be sitting at that date they sit and they just wait for us to finish dinner right now they used to get all the food I cooked I was a great dog food cook okay so now they sit there and my husband will be eating he'll be going mmm and he'll look at the dogs and he'll go nope mama did it again she's too good a cook you're not getting any so now I actually can't say I'm not a cook anymore I I can cook and I cook well and it tastes awesome some of the other things you can get delivered to your door is a graze it's a healthy snack thing that can come right to your mailbox that actually comes your mailbox not your door the other thing that I did was I started doing meal replacement shakes with Herbalife there's other things like juice plus they have great tasting gummy vitamins and minerals and things like that just ways that you can put the right foods into your body at the right time and still manage to have uninterrupted work time that you can do what you do as a freelancer all those fiber one bars are good too they have a great amount of fiber and they make a great like between meal snack great stuff and Starbucks you gotta have Starbucks I work that into because well designers and developers just need coffee physical activity is the second way we need to build a strong body so now I was putting the right foods into my body and I was drinking my water I forgot to tell you about the water story so here's a really good trick about about drinking water if you don't drink 64 ounces of water day the way to start is before you sit down at your desk drink 12 ounces of water and then go to work and when you need to go to the bathroom get up walk this is to the farthest bathroom that you can that way you get an extra steps in see then you go to the bathroom but before you go back to your desk go back and drink another eight ounces of water and then go back to work I can guarantee you you will be making lots of trips to the bathroom but you will get your 64 ounces of water in so let me ask you this how long have you been how long how long are you sitting how many hours a day I want you just think of a number just really think about literally how long are you sitting during the day because here's my point the effects of prolonged sitting include altered posture and alignment tight muscles weakness decreased cardiovascular health risk of diabetes diabetes obesity cancer and here's an interesting one it increases your chance of depression now this is going back to that to that healthy mind thing the depression it also alters your digestion and reduces your overall mortality so we don't we don't want to not be there for our clients we need to start taking care of our bodies so back again May 2017 I was before this I was sitting at my desk all day only getting up to go to the bathroom and I didn't use the one that was farthest away and I didn't get up very often because I wasn't eating and I wasn't drinking water I had chronic neck pain I would have days of bouts of vertigo where I would be bedridden my body ached I wasn't sleeping well my muscles were weak and I was just feeling miserable I attributed most of my ailments to getting older and yes I'm probably a lot older than most of you think let's just go with my oldest son was born in 1988 and I have a grandson who was born in 2011 so I'm not a spring chicken so the point is get moving American Heart Association says take 10,000 steps a day 10,000 steps a day will reduce the risk of the number one killer of men and women in America which is heart disease 10,000 steps a day is equivalent to getting 30 minutes of exercise most most days of the week or the equivalent of walking three to five miles that's pretty substantial but 10,000 steps a day really seems like a lot it'll also lower your BMI and make your waistline get skinnier all that stuff so it's a good thing so how can you work at getting 10,000 steps a day schedule activity and use technology and automate your habits back before me 2017 I would not have been able to walk 10,000 steps a day but I could do 250 so I got myself a Fitbit great little technology you there's a setting inside your Fitbit that you can set how many hours a day you want to try to attempt to walk at least 250 steps per hour and it ranges from you can set it from 5 to 14 hours a day so when I first got it I was like well I can't do 10,000 steps a day so I said it for well just try it five hours a day and I would get up and I'd walk my 250 steps I get up when I was on my way to the bathroom that's why I started walking to the farthest bathroom and I did that and then I got done after the first week and I was like wow 250 steps for five hours isn't bad let's increase that see if I can do 500 steps every hour so I did 500 then I did a thousand but pretty soon something happened I realized I was walking more than I was working and it started interrupting with my business life so I'm like okay something here I need to do this for me but I need to work so I thought okay I'm gonna cheat the system I'm gonna figure okay I'm gonna figure out a way where I can walk 250 steps two hours at a time so the little silent alarm goes off at 10 minutes to the hour so at 10 minutes to the hour I would get up and I walk and I wait till on the hour and I just keep walking for another five minutes until I knew I had another 250 steps so in that 15 to 20 minute period I would walk the 250 steps for the first hour and the second hour now I could go a whole time around before I had to walk again but I was still getting my steps here's another example you're in the car because you're on your way to a meeting or something like that and it's a long way away and your little thing beeps at you and there's no place for you to pull over and walk I'm getting my steps I'm getting my step so I had to ask myself was I cheating was I cheating because I walked in the 20 minute period and counted both hours am I cheating because I'm why I'm getting my steps this way well the point is I'm moving you're moving so that's the point you have to get up and you have to move the has a little red dot on the app that tells you when you make that 250 steps per hour eventually I set my thing to 14 hours a day and I try to get 250 steps each hour and you become it becomes obsessive you have to get that little red dot so when I miss my little red dot I'm like dang I missed my little red dot so of course I have to make it up but you it doesn't put the little red dot back in but mentally it's a game and so I'm I'm automating my habits I'm changing my habits and before long I'm walking and walking and walking and I'm gonna have to hurry up because I know I'm gonna go long otherwise so the point is a better you is a strong mind paired with a strong body developing healthy habits for your mind and body not only impact you it will have a positive impact on your relationships and on the growth of your business investing in yourself will have the greatest impact in every area of your life thriving in finance is only great for business thriving and fun both benefits our businesses and our relationships but thriving in fitness impacts the business impacts our relationships and allows us to become better people so be it the financial the fun or the fitness aspect of our financing life our freelancing lives investing in ourselves is the key to moving beyond surviving the bottom line and final takeaway is this it's only once you invest in yourself that you can truly thrive and my challenge for you is to go out there make a plan take action and experience your success that's it there is the link that you can all go to the top one is the page on the website the second one is the slack group that second one will also be on the web page so I really hope you guys enjoyed it are there any questions or comments that anybody would like to task thank you so you're talking about in the beginning you were working like 18 hour days yes do you think you could like in the beginning of getting your career off the ground be able to work that nine to five schedule or nine to four schedule or do you think at some point it is necessary to kind of put in a bit more I think the important thing to do there is to find the balance of what is going to work best for you for me there was a specified amount of time I was willing to do that and I did tell my husband that I was going to be working 18 hours a day for a while but it was when I started to realize that it was negatively impacting our relationship that I said okay I can't do this anymore I have to cut back it's all it really is all about finding that balance it's really no different than when I was walking more than I was working and I had to adjust and make that work anyone else does anybody else have any great stories they want to share about how to thrive all right thanks guys