Nine Years Self-Employed: What Leaping Into the Unknown Taught Me

There is a moment I remember clearly. One ordinary morning, after six years of quiet preparation, I got an inner signal. Not a loud voice, not a dramatic sign. Just a calm, clear "and now." And I knew. It was time.

So I leapt. Away from 17 years in corporate life, away from the familiar, away from the security of a salary and a structure that had shaped me for most of my adult life. I leapt like a gazelle, as I like to say, into the complete unknown. And to add a little extra adventure into the mix, I had not long moved from London to Wantage, a town where I barely knew a soul.

Nine years on, I am still here. Still leaping, in my own way. And still very much a work in progress. That, I have come to learn, is not a weakness. It is the whole point.

It Is Harder Than Anything I Have Ever Done

I will not dress it up. Being self-employed is the hardest thing I have ever experienced. Harder than I imagined when I made that leap. The financial uncertainty, the isolation in the early days, the constant questioning of whether you are good enough, visible enough, doing enough.

And beneath all of that, the deeper work. The shadows. The fears. The worries that creep in quietly and make themselves very comfortable if you let them. The scarcity wound, that deep, persistent fear of not having enough, not being enough, has been well and truly picked at over these nine years. It did not arrive with self-employment. It was already there, waiting. Self-employment simply shone a very bright light on it.

Then Covid arrived and dismantled much of what I had carefully built. I had to start almost from scratch. I will not pretend that was easy. It was not. But I did it anyway, and that matters.

There were moments, more than once, where I found myself scrolling job listings. Sitting with the very real thought of walking away. And every single time, something in me said, "No. I am not giving up on this." That voice, quiet but steady, has carried me further than any strategy or business plan ever could.

The Inner Work Nobody Talks About

Here is the part that does not often make it into the glossy "I quit my job and followed my dreams" stories. The mindset work. The shadow work. The long, unglamorous process of sitting with your fears, looking them in the eye, and choosing to move forward anyway.

I have had to work through beliefs I did not even know I was carrying. About money, about worthiness, about whether someone like me deserves to take up space and charge for what she offers. I have had to face the parts of myself that wanted to play small, to stay quiet, to not stand out too much. The parts that whispered, "Who do you think you are?"

And I want to be clear: I have not conquered any of this. I have not arrived at some enlightened place where the fears no longer visit. They still do. The difference is that I now recognise them when they come. I understand them a little better. I know how to sit with them rather than be ruled by them. This is ongoing work.

It always will be. And honestly, I think that is as it should be.

The shadows are not the enemy. They are information. They are the parts of us that need the most gentleness, the most patience, and sometimes, the most courage to look at directly.

The People Who Held Me Together

I am not sure my support network of friends and family will ever fully understand the role they have played in this journey. They picked me up month after month, year after year, during the times when I genuinely did not believe I could make it work financially. The scarcity wound has been well and truly picked at over these nine years.

And yet, when I look at my life today, I see something different. I am rich. Not in the way I once feared I needed to be. I am rich in flexibility. In community. In friendship. In identity, courage, and resilience. The currency of my life has completely shifted, and I would not swap it.

To my friends, my family, my colleagues, my community here in Wantage. Thank you will never feel like enough, but it is said with my whole heart.

Trusting the Tingle Over the Logic

One of the greatest lessons self-employment has given me is learning to trust myself. Not the version of me that follows the sensible path, but the version that gets a whole-body tingle and says yes before the mind has had a chance to talk it out of things.

I have said yes to courses that made no logical sense. I have let go of offerings that no longer excited me, even when they were safe and reliable. I have said no to work I was capable of doing but that simply was not lighting me up. I have learned to work with the seasonal cycles of energy rather than pushing against them. To rest without guilt. To show up fully, but only when I genuinely have something to give.

A lot of this came from doing the inner work. From learning to distinguish between fear telling me to stop and intuition telling me to wait. Between self-doubt and a genuine misalignment. When you start to understand your own patterns, your own shadows, your own triggers, you begin to make decisions from a very different place. Every single time I chose felt sense over conventional wisdom, it turned out to be the right call.

Community Is Everything

Something I did not anticipate when I moved to Wantage was how deeply the local small business community would become part of my story. The brilliant, warm, creative, hardworking people I have met here have given me a sense of belonging that I actively invested in and that has given back to me tenfold.

If you are self-employed and feeling isolated, find your people. They are out there, and they will change everything.

On Dimming Your Light

I am not for everyone. It took me a long time to make peace with that, and I will be honest, there are still days when the old fear of being too much, or not enough, or simply too different creeps back in.

My work sits in a space that some find unusual, perhaps a little left-field. Reflexology, Hypnotherapy, Reiki. The quieter, more intuitive arts of healing and wellbeing. And for a long time, part of me wondered whether I should make myself smaller. More palatable. Easier to explain at dinner parties.

The shadow work helped me see that impulse for what it was. A protective pattern, not a truth.

So I will not dim my light. I will keep sharing the things that genuinely excite me, even the quirky ones, because somewhere out there they will resonate. They will land with exactly the right person at exactly the right time. And that is what this work is all about.

Nine Years On

Remember your why. Stay true to your values. Never lose sight of your joy.

That is what nine years has taught me, more than any business book, course, or strategy session ever could.

Not that I have it all figured out. Not that the fears have gone quiet for good. But that I am still here, still doing the work, inside and out, and still deeply grateful for every single part of the journey, even the hard bits. Especially the hard bits.

To every single person who has liked a post, shared my content, commented, booked in to see me, or passed my name on to a friend or colleague. You are part of this story. You always have been.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hypnotherapy in Wantage, Oxfordshire & also online