From Corporate Chaos to Freelance Freedom: My Journey to a Balanced Life
How did we get to this place where every single one of my peers is burned out? How did we get to a place where the average salary of an executive assistant is on average, 1/10th of the person they support? When did trying to make a basic level of income become detrimental to our mental health?
The truth is, I think it has always been that way. I just think people didn't want to talk about it or acknowledge it. Ever since I started working my first big girl job in 2007(ish?) I questioned how people could find it sustainable. I always questioned how anyone could stay at an organization long enough to retire when I could barely make it 2 years. I regularly changed jobs, chasing the idea that maybe the next place would be better. When I say I've done everything, I mean it. Yes, a lot of admin roles, but I did a stint at a liquor store at one point, then worked at a bank, then worked for a car rental company before settling into admin officially. Everything was awful, and I truly mean awful. Small companies, large companies, global companies. Every company, a fresh new hell.
You're probably thinking, "Jessica, maybe you're the problem here!" and funny enough, I thought that for a long time too, so I was way ahead of you. After quitting that last corporate role to freelance, things changed though. You see, working for the man sucks. The hippies tried to warn us, and we ignored them. We wanted to hustle and girl boss so hard and look where it got us.
When I shifted to freelancing, my world changed. When you're a contractor, a lot of things are different. One, you set your own rate. You're a business, providing a service to another business. Think about it, when you work with a plumber, you don't tell them what you will pay, they tell you their price. The same goes for being a freelancer. Two, you set your own schedule. They assign work to you, you agree on the timeline, off you go and you do the work and meet their deadlines and everyone is happy. Three, you control your workload. Only want to work 25 hours? Amazing, you can do that. Immediately you are given the autonomy the r̶u̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶, ahem, executives, have always been granted. And it teaches you a lot.
So much so for me, that I realized that was the secret to not being miserable and still being able to pay the cost of entry that is required to live on this planet. This past week, I was in Vancouver. My husband had a business trip, and now that I run my own company, I decided to go along. As we were relaxing the Saturday afternoon, I was doing some work on my upcoming course, AI for Admins, and I told him, "I just want to acknowledge how much I love what I get to do. I never saw this path for myself and I'm just so grateful I get to do this." That is the difference between leaving the corporate world and building something for myself.