Part 1 of an interview with Barbara Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job.

In this episode:

• Personal development and self-employment
• Building businesses limited only by our vision
• How traditional employment stifles exploration
• Finding the essence of what you want to do

Useful links:

Buy the book: Making a Living Without a Job

 

 Making a living without a job - Freelance Advisor Podcast #19 [23:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Transcript

So, we’re talking to Barbara Winter who’s the author of Making a Living without a Job. Barbara, thank you so much for coming on to Freelance Adviser.

Barbara Winter: My pleasure.

Andy White: And, I’m reliably informed, that your book – the first edition – went into, was it, eighteen printings?

Barbara Winter: It never went out of print, which was a huge astonishment to me. It was in print for sixteen years, even though when I wrote it – the first time I wrote it on a typewriter, if anyone remembers what a typewriter was –

Andy White: I remember.

Barbara Winter: – and there was no Internet: none of the things that are just basic tools to freelancers today even existed. And that’s an even greater astonishment to me, how things have changed in such a short period of time.

So, finally, my publisher said, “Maybe we should update?” And I thought that was a fine idea and so the new edition came out the end of August.

Andy White: And it’s already in its second printing, isn’t it?

Barbara Winter: It went into its second printing after five weeks. That was another lovely surprise.

Andy White: It’s incredible. Now, I grew up on things like Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill; The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz… And as I read your book – which I absolutely love, by the way – I noticed that you grew up on the same sort of things as I did.

Barbara Winter: You know, I think there’s a really strong connection even though I don’t see many people talking about it; between the interest in personal growth and development and the interest in self-employment. And I first started to realise that, during what I call my Self Help Junky Days, when I was reading all those books and going to personal growth seminars and really seeking to find out more about myself and what I could become; and I noticed that how often the conversation at seminars in the hallways kind of went to the idea of doing something on their own.

Now I think what this really is, is a reflection of when we are on this quest or journey, at some point we have to stop reading the books and build a laboratory for ourselves so we can test those ideas. And traditional employment hasn’t always been a welcoming laboratory for exploration. So, we kind of come in through the back door, and those two things are very linked together and I also now think that people who ignore that piece of the puzzle often are not especially successful in their business. Because the books you’re talking about are talking about personal success and really developing a philosophy and also a vision of what that looks like.

To each of us, that – here in America – and this is something that’s really starting to change – we have had what is called The American Dream, which is kind of a vision that has been imposed on us: “This is what you’re supposed to want. This is what success looks like here.” I think a lot of people who have created businesses like mine – which is much closer to a freelance business than a conventional building a business with real estate and a fixed location and all of those kinds of things – many of us realise that this is a really important piece of the puzzle that we can only go – we can only grow a business as big as our own vision. It’s an extension of who we are and how we think. And if we are crippled by limiting thinking about our own potential and possibilities, our business is going to reflect that.

So, the two things are very, very compatible and people who simply go at it from a left-brained approach, trying to find the formula and follow the steps, usually end up with a pretty mediocre operation.

Andy White: The thing I really enjoyed about your book was that it brings that sort of – I don’t really want to use the word old-fashioned – but that view that we were – we got from reading books like Think And Grow Rich, and it sort of brought it up-to-date. Your book is very pragmatic and down-to-earth. I was wondering, actually, what made you make the leap? What’s your early story?

Barbara Winter: Well, it wasn’t a leap: it was a crawl; I think would be a better way describe it! It was a very slow – it feels like it was a slow process to me, but when I look back, it really happened over a fairly short period of time. I grew up having no idea of what I wanted to do because there were so many things that seemed exciting to me. That was also very disconcerting to me because I have a sister who’s two years younger than I who knew from the time she was in eighth grade, so however old that was – fourteen – that she wanted to be an archaeologist. And I just watched her walk straight down that road, and I was zigzagging all over the place and every week I wanted to be something different.

And when I went to college, I was surprised because I thought I’d just kind of hang out in college and then I would be an adult by the time I graduated and then I would surely know what I wanted to do with my life. I was surprised they wouldn’t let me enroll unless I declared a major and so, on the spot, I said without any kind of thinking much behind it, that I would be and English major. So, I got a degree in literature and speech, then along the way acquired a teaching credential, so I taught high school English and speech for five years and loved it for the first two years and then really started to get bored with it.

I was teaching in a school where there were a lot of people who’d been there for decades teaching and I could see that they were just… phoning it in… and I was terrified by that. I thought, if I stay here, that’s going to be me. So, about this time, when I am in the midst of all this turmoil, is when these books that you mentioned started to come into my life and a man who became my mentor started introducing me to this whole world of personal growth and development that I’d never ever heard anything about. I also couldn’t understand why I hadn’t learned some of these things in all the years I’d been in schools, so that was the beginning of the winter of my discontent, I would say.

So I left teaching and tried to figure out what to do next but I wasn’t getting very far. I ended up going to an employment service looking for a job and the job that I got by doing that was that the employment service hired me to be a job counsellor. So, the irony of this is really hilarious to me now: that, I don’t know how to figure out what I’m going to do but I know I’m getting paid to counsel other people. But in a way I see how this was such a valuable piece of my own life puzzle, because all day every day, all I did was talk to people about work. I realised that almost nobody knew how to figure out what they should be doing and that there had been much too much emphasis on working as a means to get money, but nothing else. So, people didn’t know what they had to offer; they didn’t even know how to figure it out, much less, how that could become their livelihood.

So, all these perplexing things started to stir up more discontent in me. And then I left teaching – or I left the employment service – and my daughter was born and the first couple of years I was a stay-at-home mum, but that’s when I really began my own personal growth journey and started reading books and exploring on my own.

And then I got a third job, which was a crazy one, really crazy: without any training or experience I became an interior decorator in a real high-end furniture store. It was during that time I read an article about two women from New York who had started their own business and they had started it in their apartment. It was a personal service business, kind of just doing projects, creative projects. It was the first time I realised that a business could be something other than a store and that you could create something that was an extension of who you were and what you were good at doing. That book really changed my life: it was called Supergirls: The Autobiography of an Outrageous Business. I probably read it six times in a row.

Andy White: Yes, that became your working text, didn’t it, more or less?

Barbara Winter: It was just profound! It’s been out of print for years and years and I understand now in London, you can get out of print books printed in minutes, and I keep thinking I should send everyone there to get their own copy of Supergirls because you can’t buy it anymore. I think that their experience still was just a – really useful to me. By this time I decided that that was it: that was what I wanted. I wanted to have my own business, but I had no idea what that was going to look like.

We moved from the small town in southern Minnesota where I had grown up to a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And I thought, “This is it. This is my opportunity. I’m in a new place, nobody knows who I am. I’m going to start my own business, and if it’s a dreadful failure, nobody will know, because I’m here kind of anonymously.” So, the day my daughter went off to kindergarten, I set up a card table and a typewriter in my TV room and I started a business called The Successful Woman. And I had had this idea that finally came to me after pondering for months what this business would be, to take all this personal growth stuff that I had been learning and using in my own life and put it into a context for women; because at that time, all the book and programmes were written by men for men. The women’s movement was starting to catch fire and they were talking about very different things than the things I was learning and I thought, “I think there’s an audience for this.”

I also decided at that time to start publishing a newsletter, because I knew in my own life I needed a lot of reminders and encouragement. I thought a newsletter would be just perfect, you know? You read a book and I had that experience, certainly, with reading personal growth books, that I would be just so confident as I was reading them but when I would finish the book, I would start backsliding. I realised reinforcement was a really important part of mastering anything. So, I just started out and Supergirls became my handbook and if I would get stuck and think, “Well, how do I do this?” I would see what Supergirls had done and then adapt it to my own situation. It was astonishing how quickly things took off. Once that happened, I knew there was no turning back.

So, that was kind of – that was a long answer to your short question.

Andy White: You mention in your book quite a lot – especially in the section on finding your passion – to try and find the essence of your passion rather than a specific role that you might want to do. Now, a lot of people listening to this podcast are freelancers or contractors, so they’re already doing something. I’m wondering what advice you’d give to quite new freelancers and contractors that maybe haven’t quite found their role or are looking – maybe they’re wondering if they’re doing the right thing. What advice would you give them?

Barbara Winter: You know, that was also a huge learning for me: learning the difference between essence and form. Essence really starts by becoming aware of when you feel the most creative and the most powerful and the most inspired, and what are the situations that lead you to feel that way. So, finding the essence often is about looking for the intangible quality.

For instance, one day I was doing something very mundane, like baking cookies, and I suddenly had this revelation, which – I mean it’s really funny to me that it was such a startling epiphany – and I realised I’m happiest when I’m making things. But the second part of that epiphany was, it doesn’t much matter what I’m making. It’s the act of being creative that really enchants me. So, writing an article or baking cookies both give me satisfaction even though they’re very, very different kinds of activities. So, as we can identify those kinds of things that really enhance what we’re doing, all of sudden, the possibility starts to explode because it goes way beyond just a single way of making that happen. And we realise, for instance, that we – the essence of what I love to do is help other people. Or the essence of what I love to do is inspire other people. Or the essence of what I love to do is teach other people. And then we can start asking ourselves the question, “How many different arenas can I create for doing that?”

So, it’s a really important part of the process and it takes us away from that singular thinking that is how we often go about thinking about careers because that’s what we’ve been taught to do: to pick that thing. If we instead go for the essence then we realise, “Oh my goodness. This really opens up the world for me.”

Andy White: Your book has lots of stories in: that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. What would you say is your favourite success story, Barbara, from your book?

Barbara Winter: Oh my goodness! You know, somebody just asked me that and I hear so many good ones. In fact, I think that that is perhaps the biggest pleasure of what I do I do: is that, I get to share people’s stories and they tell me about all the changes that have come about in their lives because something I said or wrote that was helpful to them.

But, I’ll tell you one of my favourite stories, about a guy named Al who called me up one day. He had taken my Making A Living Without a Job seminar in Minneapolis and he said he was starting a handy man business. He had some questions about insurance and bonding and things like that and then he said, “I want to tell you how this all happened.” He said, “I graduated from college, my parents insisted I get a real job. I got a job working in a computer chip manufacturing company” – I think in administration or management, or something like that: he wasn’t working in a factory. He said, “I was very unhappy there and I was afraid I was going to be stuck there for the rest of my life and so I started taking career assessment tests.”

He said, “I took every test ever invented. I worked with career counsellors trying to figure out what it was, what I should be doing with my life.” And he said, “While this was going on – while I was out there looking for ‘it’ – I remodelled my house three times.” And I said, “Oh! Kind of hiding in plain sight, huh, Alan?” And he said, “Yes. I realised that I really love to do projects that have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

The he went on to talk about how in any job he’d ever had, he’d never felt so appreciated as he did now with his customers who entrusted him with their houses. Besides the fact that he just loved doing the work, he also got paid on top of that. I just love Al’s story because I think that – it certainly has been true here in the US and I know it’s true also in the UK – there has been a lot of snobbery around careers and that there are like good careers, or ones where you didn’t sweat, and bad careers, or ones where you had to be physically engaged. And so, I think that stories like Al’s really get me excited because it’s about being authentic and true to yourself and not listening to all that conversation around good and bad work. It’s only good work if it makes you joyful to do it.

Andy White: It’s work you’ve got to be passionate about, isn’t it?

Barbara Winter: Exactly. And you know, it’s interesting to me now, Andy, that so many writers and seminar leaders talk about passion because when I started doing my Making A Living Without a Job seminars over twenty years ago, I had people who would say to me at the end of it, “I never heard anyone use the words work and passion in the same sentence.” Now, we throw it around and that makes me nervous: it’s like the first time we hear Joseph Campbell say, “Follow your bliss,” we all gasped. Then it became such a mantra and was used so often that it took away the power of it. I feel the same way about talking about passion is that it’s become denuded because it’s become thrown around so much.

But we’re really thoughtful about what that means, all of us know when we are working with passion and when we’re not. If we allow ourselves to spend our lives working in ways that do not generate that feeling of excitement within us – and I think also passion brings with it curiosity to go farther and attain more mastery – it’s kind of got a built-in catalyst there. If we don’t make that our quest, to find the work that we’re passionate about, we never can really fully maximise our potential. We’ll only be just okay. We won’t be fabulous.

Andy White: Well, we’ll leave it there for part one of our two-part interview with Barbara Winter. To make sure you don’t miss part two, then go to www.freelanceadviser.co.uk/subscribe or subscribe in iTunes. See you next time.

Useful links:

Buy the book: Making a Living Without a Job