Be your own safety net

No one's coming to save you. But you can save yourself.

I’ll never forget the moment it finally hit me that I’d quit my job.

It was a Monday, my first full day as a self employed human. To celebrate, I’d woken up late and traipsed down to the local cafe, laptop in tow, to devour two eggs on toast while I casually knocked out some Very Important Founder Emails. I casually glanced at my phone. 10am. I felt a pang of something - nostalgia perhaps? - thinking about my work besties clambering around our pocket of desks to catch up on the weekend’s goss.

As my breakfast arrived I opened the laptop and braced myself for the torrent of emails, but to my surprise there were none. No one asking me to review their work. No one requesting information. No one communicating a deadline. It was just me, myself and my lukewarm poached eggs. I’d never been so sad to see inbox zero.

In that moment it hit me like a ton of rough, red, raw bricks. No one was there to manage me, no one was coming to save me and opportunities weren’t going to come knocking at my door.

Everything was now up to me.

Goodbye, corporate safety net

When I had a job my company provided the resources I needed to get shit done. I received a consistent pay cheque. My manager taught me everything I needed to know. I had access to company documents and templates, and people with specialised skills were a hop, skip and a desk away.

This whole structure went out the window when I first became self employed. No one gave me anything and a safety net didn’t exist unless I meticulously stitched one for myself and even then, it was mostly hanging on by a thread. Cash? I needed to earn it. Knowledge? I needed to learn it. Support? I needed to seek it out. Opportunities? I needed to create them.

In those first few years of learning how to run a business, more than once I spiralled into full blown panic mode, finding myself trawling LinkedIn’s jobs page at 2am. But over time as I tried, failed, dusted myself off and tried again, I came to realise that I was more capable than I’d originally thought. Slowly but surely, I learnt new skills, met new people, formed new perspectives and created new beliefs. I built a community of people who wanted to help me succeed.

The future is tight

Right now you might be where I was back then, peering over the edge of a precipice to a wide, open abyss below. From up there it may look empty but it’s not; if you squint your eyes you might spot a single thread in the distance waving in the wind, ready to be woven into a safety net of your own. With each day, each decision and each action, you’ll start to stitch. Thread by thread. Loop by loop. Connection by connection. Conversation by conversation.

And over time your net will become so strong, so dense, so wide and so tight, that one day you’ll look down to see solid ground beneath your feet.

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🎙️ How I’ve built my own safety net and support system over the last few years

• You don’t realise you have a corporate safety net until you leave [0:16]

• The two different types of safety nets [1:09]

• How I structure my week to prioritise making new connections [3:00]

• The key to having deep valuable conversations that generate opportunities for both people [4:08]

• The three questions I ask everyone I meet [5:48]

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