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Executive Summary:
The world of startups and small business can indeed be an exciting place to be.  Its commonly characterized as highly collaborative, fast pace, less bureaucratic and wildly innovative.  While this sounds great in theory, in practice the world of a startup can be rife with challenge, including heavy amounts of stress and uncertainty.  It’s vital we as professionals analyze our personalities and professional behaviors to assess whether or not we would do well in the startup world - before we actually jump in. Knowing what you’re up against before you dive in will allow you to determine if it’s appropriate for you to consider the startup space, small business and or entrepreneurship.

​Author: Travis Smith

​Read the full article by downloading the below PDF attachment

Article was written by guest writer Trisha Aure

​Many of us live two lives.  These two lives run on parallel tracks to one another yet few of us understand the dichotomy which exists by having a work life and a home life which operate separate from one another.  We’ve been told growing up these lives need to be mutual exclusive of one another where we don’t bring our personal life and issues to work and vice versa.  
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This inevitably creates a variety of issues for us at both the home and office.  The biggest issue it creates is our ability to grow as people which leads to our ability to grow as professionals.

Have you ever heard that personal growth is necessary for professional growth?  It is, I just didn’t realize how critical this was till about 6 years ago.  Some people believe separation needs to exist between work and home, or ‘work life balance’ as we commonly like to phrase it. 

I’m not convinced ‘work life balance’ is possible, especially not if you are looking to create a long term successful career which your personal life benefits from.

This ladies and gentlemen is where my career ah-ha moment began – the idea of a ‘work life balance’ is garbage.  We look at this phrase typically from the work side of things meaning we should work less in order to enjoy our personal lives more.  Yet how often are we looking at this phrase from the personal side to understand how we impact our professional experience based on who we are outside of work.  It goes both ways and to think a steady ‘balance’ between the two is possible is a dream in fantasy land.

I was in a new company and aggressively working on advancing my career.  I had a lot of personal baggage I thought I was leaving at the door before I walked into the office.  I had some deep heartache within my family dynamic that I never figured out how to live with, so I decided to act as though my life was perfect and I ignored my past.  This act forced me to live two different lives and I will tell you, this was not only one of the hardest parts of my life but it was definitely the loneliest. 

This is where I learned I wear my heart, and therefore emotions, on my sleeve.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because that is where my passion comes from, the heart.  What I learned is when you are essentially living two different lives, it starts to take a toll on both your career and personal life.  I had received some hard feedback and it was based on my attitude because I was aggressively trying to hold my personal struggles back.  If anyone has ever been here before you know that holding feelings back only creates a blow up later down the road and mine happened at work. 

Luckily, I had great people around me that cared about me professionally AND personally.  I obtained a mentor and started receiving coaching on how to deal with my struggles that I quite frankly kept pushing down for over a decade.  It was not an easy nor short process.  Then again, anything worth having or doing right isn’t easy in the first place.  I started working on building a healthy mind, body and soul, and 6 years later I’ve continued this quest not stopping once. 

Growth is an everyday event and I have built some great routines that have helped me merge my two lives between home and work. 

After 6 years of focus, dedication and some really hard work to improve myself I have lost 40 pounds (and kept it off), I’m in a leadership role with a company I’m part-owner in, I’m actively involved in the community and constantly improving my life on both sides.  I honestly do not believe I would be where I’m at today if I continued to try and live two different lives.

To tie this all together, I believe that growth within your career begins at home.  Have you ever heard, you can’t love someone until you love yourself?  I believe that this internal love for yourself will only push you to cross any and all boundaries that you put up yourself.  Stop putting up boundaries, and add some goals to your life.  Once you start pushing forward, it’s crazy how that turns into unstoppable. 

Key Take Away
You must take care of yourself in order for you to strive in other parts of your life.  In regards to work and life, this is an AND, not an OR.  We need to be confident in both in order to grow in both.  I’m continuously reading leadership books and I can relate what I read in both my professional and personal life.  We need to do away with catchy slogans like ‘work life balance’ because all they do is drive us to live a lifestyle which isn’t attainable. 
 
Action Item
If you are stagnant in your career, or struggling with something personally and you see it hindering other aspects in your life, find someone to talk to, find a mentor, find a coach to help you figure out how to get over that hump.  I currently have a mentor which I found on micromentor.org.  This is a free site and it matches you with people that are looking to grow their career in various areas.  Growth is definitely uncomfortable and no one likes change, but building a strong support system will help guide us in achieving our goals and creating a well balanced successful life.  

​Perhaps you’ve already noticed.  Things are changing all around us and it’s happening at lightening speed.

The workplace, as many of us know it, is going through a facelift.  A facelift commonly referred to as ‘the gig economy’.  It is estimated that 35% of the US workforce in 2017 is now comprised of Gig’s.

Gig’s and gig users have something in common…

work doesn’t always need to be 9-5, M-F…

And many of us have been slow to adapt to this change in our workforce.

What is the Gig Economy anyways? 

It’s an alternative work approach in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements.

This doesn’t sound new, so what’s the deal?

While using temporary labor may not be a new thing, what is very new is the amount of work that is now being facilitated through Gig’s on short-term engagement. (AKA freelance, independent contractors, contingent workers, temporary workers, etc.)

Gig freelancing is taking a much wider foothold in our economy.  Today it’s common to find all sorts of work being packaged and facilitated through Gigs whereas before these jobs were considered only as fully employed roles. Management roles, engineering, software, events, cooking, the music industry, professional coaching and even academics are a few examples of work which is now being performed largely by the current day Gig worker.  It could also mean you and I having a separate part-time job which we use to bring in extra income on the side. (AKA moonlighting)

For example, there are companies and people who do nothing but provide short term support for other companies which have a need for an interim CEO.  There are just as many options for companies who want additional support in doing their product design but don’t want to hire a full time employee because it’s work that is intermittent.  These are examples of where Gigs come into play.
They serve a role for a period of time on behalf of a separate organization.  Once they’re done they’re off to finding their next opportunity, often times they may have multiple jobs/ projects going on at the same time.
 
Why are companies and people alike moving in this direction?

As our economy and technology continues to evolve we become less and less reliant on doing business face to face.  For those of us who grew up in business when you were expected to be in the office for no other reason than ‘face-time’ you should be happy to know that many companies are moving away from this model.  Why? We’re learning, slowly but surely, that ‘face-time’ isn’t productive.  Employees can be just as productive from home, at a coffee shop or at the local water hole (not that I recommend that) rather than being shackled to their four foot cubicle for nine hours a day. 

Productivity soars thanks to the usage of Gigs because it offers people the ability to do work and do so on their own accord.  We often hear people who are Gig’s say they “like working this way because it’s more creative, allows for a better work/ life balance and gives them the ability to choose the work they want to do.”  The benefit to the employer utilizing a Gig approach is they can reduce their overhead on costly brick and mortar facilities (estimated at $12k per employee per year) while having work completed by true experts in the field.  Employers are also able to onboard new talent and off-board unneeded skills without the burden of employment taxes and paperwork.

Why it is important for me to be aware of ‘The Gig Life’?

The reason you should care about what is going on in the Gig Economy is because very soon we will all need to adjust to this new work style in order to remain competitive. 

Now I’ve got your attention!

It’s time we gave some good introspective thought on how we do things at the workplace and whether or not that is the right way to do it.  Perhaps your business, your department or your team could benefit from using Gigs to handle freelance work.  Maybe in doing so you’ll be able to facilitate a wider volume of business which means more customers, more money and more margaritas on the beach in Acapulco.  Maybe your employees are tired of seeing your face on the daily and could use a little R&R while working from home.
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Either way, it’s time we all jump on the wagon because whether we like it or not the Gig Economy is here to stay and it promises to only grow as time goes on.