When you started your social selling business, you likely had a dream of leaving your “day job.” You probably dreamed about it so much that you ended up romanticising what your life would look like without your 9 to 5.
You may think this dream/goal is motivating you into growing a successful network marketing business, but today’s episode will challenge you on this idea.
Shifting from bitterness and resentment to gratitude and joy for your current work situation will change everything about how you’re showing up in your social selling business. And it will actually make your plan B, your reality sooner rather than later.
Don’t miss these highlights:
- Why you don’t have ‘more time’ when you quit your 9 to 5 and how you’re more efficient when you’re doing both jobs
- The intentional thoughts you need to think in order to find joy in your current job
- How much money you actually need to be making before you quit your 9 to 5
- Why setting a deadline to leave your 9 to 5 has a negative impact on your social selling business
- How to stop the feelings of bitterness and resentment from creeping into your 9 to 5
- The multiple phases of a social selling business and how that informs when you should leave your 9 to 5
- The key things that will ruin your experience while you stay with your 9 to 5 and work on building your ‘side hustle’
Having the ultimate goal of working for yourself by building your social selling business is great! But treating that goal as an escape hatch out of misery will have a negative impact on your new business.
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If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
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Transcript of Episode #36: Leaving the 9-5
Kristen Boss (00:05):
Welcome to purposeful social selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service based industry. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller, who is tired of feeling inauthentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business in today’s social media landscape. In this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way. Hey bosses, welcome to episode 36. So glad you are here. Listen, this topic I want to talk to you about today, I feel is really relevant. And even if you are not currently or actively working a nine to five job, you likely have someone on your team or someone that you are leading, who does have a nine to five job or someone who might consider working with you that is currently balancing a nine to five job. And if you are actively working at a nine to five, while you’re building a social selling business, you understand that there are unique challenges to balancing both. And if that’s not you, I want to encourage you to still listen. Because if someone comes to you with interest in the business and their hang up or their worry is, how am I going to do this while I’m also working a nine to five, you’re going to need to know how to have that conversation and encourage them.
Kristen Boss (01:43):
So I want to make this a very practical, very direct and straight forward episode for my nine to fivers out there. And I think it’s important. You know, that I actually built my business while I was also balancing a job. So I had to be very strategic around my time. I had to be very efficient. And what I noticed that happens is when people catch the bug, I’m going to call it the bug or they see the vision and they get very excited for what this business model can offer them because you do see people saying, Hey, I left my nursing job. I left my teaching job. I left hair. I left the corporate world. That that is very exciting and very alluring to people who are looking for something else. And when people finally catch that vision, they get it in their minds of, yes, I cannot wait to leave this job and do this network marketing the social selling thing full time.
Kristen Boss (02:44):
And I noticed that sometimes while that is very exciting, it can create a lot of drama and a lot of mental yeah, a lot of mental drama and some emotional heartache. So I’m going to talk about that. If you are someone who is working this business while juggling a nine to five, while also maybe doing e-learning with kids and also being a mom, there’s a lot of roles you are having to step into right now. So I think it’s really important to that. First you, as excited as you are, as seeing this opportunity for what it could be for you, it’s really important that you do not immediately look at it as a, as an escape hatch to your nine to five misery. It’s really important that you don’t adopt that story because you think it will be easier there. And I put there in quotes because there could be a lot of things for a lot of different people.
Kristen Boss (03:42):
So there could be, I’m not in my office. I have a home office at home. I have time. Or when the kids go to school, we think it will be easier, or we will be happier there. And I want to encourage you to not look at your social selling business as an escape route to a business that you’re not happy with. Because the moment we choose dissatisfaction with our job, we find reasons to stay dissatisfied and be unhappy in the job. And then what we do with that is what I see people doing is they are unhappy in their nine to five and they get antsy to leave it and they start consuming or getting their mind just set on whenever I’m going to get out of here. I can’t wait to get out of here. I can’t wait to get out of here.
Kristen Boss (04:33):
And they start viewing their job as this prison sentence. And they’re viewing their social selling business as the ticket out. And that’s a very dangerous mindset to be in. And I’ll tell you why. Because when you view the social selling, your business, as the ticket out, you start to put urgency and expectation on this business, on social selling that’s and really the profitable model it is. If you really want to leverage this business, well, you need to play the long game. And it’s not about you getting as quick success as you can, overnight and quick success and quick cash and a quick buck so that you can leave your nine to five as quickly as possible. It’s you need to be thinking about the long game. So knowing that instead of you thinking, I am chained to this job, I don’t like. And as soon as you entertain that thought you start resenting the fact that you’re there. You start to feel bitter. You start to feel really unhappy. And now this job feels like misery. And you start to, I feel romanticize the social selling. You start to romanticize leaving your job and being home full-time because you start to tell yourself the story. I’ll have so much more time. It’ll be so much easier because I’m not going to be distracted by this job. I’m going to be happier. It’s going to be what I want. And here’s what I noticed. And they, and they start looking to their online business and that paycheck, they start looking at it as a way to fix their emotionally dissatisfied state. And the reason why they are emotionally dissatisfied is they started viewing their nine to five as an obligation, as a chore. I don’t want to be here. I can’t wait till I get out.
Kristen Boss (06:28):
It’s very hard to be emotionally satisfied and find fulfillment and find joy. When all you’re thinking all the time is I can’t wait to get out. I can’t wait to leave. I hate this so much. This is such a grind. And what that’s doing is it creates pressure for you to make your business take off or perform better. And maybe you put expectations on it to happen in a certain timeline, like, okay, I’m going to give everything I can to growing my online business. And I’m going to plan on retiring from my nine to five in six months. And now that you’ve created this expectation of leaving in six months now you’ve created this emotional tolerance of, I can only handle this for six months. And so now you show up with pressure to your online business and be like, now it has to do.
Kristen Boss (07:19):
Now it has to yield a certain result because I’m saying it has to be six months. And then what happens is now you have put a timeline on how long you’re willing to emotionally be content at your current nine to five. So, and then what I see people doing is let’s say they give themselves that six months, I’m going to leave this in six months. And their online business doesn’t perform the way they thought it would. And now they feel even more miserable because now they’re staying. When they thought they would be out by now, that is the worst place to be emotionally and mentally. And your nine to five, if you’re sitting there thinking, I thought I’d be gone by now. I shouldn’t even be here. I want you to notice how awful that feels. And then you stop loving your social selling business as much because it failed you.
Kristen Boss (08:11):
It didn’t give you the results you thought it would in the time it would. And now you’re just a miserable person because you’re like, I’m stuck in a nine to five. And I have this side hustle. Yeah. I said side hustle because I noticed a lot of nine to fivers will call this business a side hustle, and we’re going to stop that, right? It is, it is your plan B and it is your vehicle to move you in another direction in your life. You’re building a plan B that doesn’t happen overnight. What’s really important is if you want to do this well and joyfully, first of all, you have to know that you don’t get more time. Your brain wants to tell you, Hey, if you weren’t at this job, you’d have so much more time, but it’s amazing how your brain will just find ways to use that time by having more time to have mental drama, confusion, buffer, procrastinate, avoid work that needs to be done. Ask any person that leaves their nine to five and suddenly has all these hours in a day. They’ll tell you they found ways to fill them, right? So it, what if it doesn’t create more time? And I’m going to even argue that you actually are much more efficient with planning your time and prioritizing your time if you do have a nine to five and you are building the social selling business. Because you don’t have time to be scrolling for an hour, you don’t have time just to do a little design logo here and a little Canva graphic here and hide over here. You work in a nine to five forces you to be absolutely efficient in the essentials, in what it takes to move your business forward.
Kristen Boss (09:53):
So what would it look like for you to not view your nine to five as this ball and chain as this obligation of you having to be there and instead creating it as a financial cushion that allows you to show up to your online business without hustle, without scarcity, without freaking out. Because having that financial cushion from your nine to five, you, that is guaranteed, it’s there. You can show up and you get that paycheck. Whereas there is natural ebbs and flows with your online business. So I want you to think about this. And I had to do this too. While I was working in the salon and building my online business. I had to find joy in going to the salon, because the moment I started thinking about my exit, or if I should have been gone by now, or I shouldn’t be doing this, it would be so much better. If I was just home. I never showed up to work well, and I just felt yucky. And then I started putting pressure on my online business. And when we put pressure on our online businesses, it’s less fun. It takes the joy out and we start getting into hustle. So I had to tell myself while I was still there, I said, how was, how was me being here in my favor? What lessons are there for me to learn? Because I’m still here. If I am not yet released from that, it’s because there’s still something here for me. How can I find joy where I’m at now? And I did that work so that I never allowed bitterness or resentment to creep into my job because I thought, you know what? I’m in this job. People are still in my chair. People still are seeing me. I, they deserve to feel valued.
Kristen Boss (11:47):
They deserved to have a hairstylist that is fully present for them and giving them great service. Your employer, the person you are working for deserves to have an employee who is present and doing the work with satisfaction and joy. Instead of this disgruntled obliged energy, you owe it to yourself. It’s not fun showing up to a nine to five. When you feel like it’s a prison sentence, stop treating it that way. But the more you view social selling as like this is going to fix my emotionally dissatisfied state, because you aren’t doing the work to choose satisfaction in your nine to five. So I want you to be thinking about how is this nine to five, a blessing to me while I’m growing my social selling business. And here’s the thing. When you find satisfaction, there is less of a rush to leave and you’re leaving looks better.
Kristen Boss (12:48):
Here’s the problem I see some people make, is they think, let’s say you make $50,000 a year in your, in your teaching job. And all you’re thinking like, okay, if I, you, maybe you’ve done the math. You’re like, okay, if I’m not having to pay for childcare and the kids are home you know, what could I come home with? Like, what would I have, what salary would I have to be making with my not salary, but what commissions and paycheck would, I need to be seeing with my online business in order for me to come home. And I usually see people choosing a number that’s much lower than what they are paid in their nine to five. So if it was 50,000, they’ll say, you know what? I can probably come home at 40,000. And the problem with that is, so let’s say they do that.
Kristen Boss (13:30):
Now. There is urgency and scarcity around. Now, you have to make at least 40,000. Now you have to hit that. Now you have a bottom line that you must hit and that can create scarcity and hustle and freaking out. I want to say, you actually need to be making far more than your nine to five when you choose to leave. And, and I realized that everyone is going to choose their own story and their own time. But strategically as a coach, I want to tell you, you want, if you want to work your online business with joy and without hustle, without feeling pressure, and without freaking out every month, you need to plan for a buffer. Smart business owners do this. They know that there’s natural seasons of high sales, low sales. And if they plan for a financial buffer with the ebb and flow of business, they’re not freaking out.
Kristen Boss (14:29):
So I would say if you’re making 50,000 a year as a teacher, I would say, don’t leave your teaching job until you’re making at least 65 a year, because also you are, you will be self-employed, you have to pay 30% on taxes. Like it’s really important to know your money too. And I want you to think of, you want to look at the average of what your paycheck is in a year. You don’t want to look at like, okay, in three months I made, you know, I, I had 10K checks in the company, but if you averaged it out, it was closer to, you know, $6,000 a month. You need to look at the average and actually plan on your lowest month you’ve had, because what that’s going to do, it’s going to, it’s going to create room for you to breathe. But if you planned everything of I’m going to leave my nine to five, when I’m making like 50,000, the same as I was as a teacher.
Kristen Boss (15:25):
And you made that decision based on having one or two months that were high numbers, and you didn’t plan around the lower numbers, it’s going to create so much stress for you. This is when I see people suddenly freaked out scarce and miserable because now they have to hit a bottom line. Whereas if you stay in your nine to five, a little longer, you can build financial cushion as your business stabilizes. This is really important. There are, there are multiple phases in the social seller’s business. There’s the growth phase where you are growing, growing, growing, and you’re going to have some attrition. You’re going to have some, some customers fall off some new team members, and then you’re going to have a stabilization phase. That’s where you, where you solidify the foundation of your business before you scale up to the next pay round.
Kristen Boss (16:22):
But I see people making decisions in their growth before the business is stabilized and they end up freaking out when the business starts to stabilize and maybe there’s lower months than what they planned. There’s, there’s a lot of nuances to this, but, and I don’t want to give so much strategies. I want to give you some thoughts to think about with your nine to five. And I really want you to watch the thoughts you’re entertaining about it, or are you treating it like a ball and chain or like obligatory or I have to, or, oh, I can’t wait to leave. Also. We’re in a time where unemployment is at a record high. And by the way, if you are a woman who is working a nine to five, right now, you are fortunate because I think, I think I saw somewhere that since 1983, the women in the workforce has taken the largest hit since COVID with unemployment, with the number of women voluntarily leaving the workforce, because they felt like they needed to be home e-learning handling all the things. So right now you being a woman in the workforce, you are blessed. I really want to encourage you to see that as wow. I’m so thankful in the time of COVID when people are unemployed and having to do Instacart runs and Uber and dash to figure out their finances that I have, this stable income that I can count on. I really want to reframe, because I think sometimes there’s a lot of language saying like, you know, nine to five is crap. That’s the real scam. We’re not serving anybody when we’re having that conversation. We’re not people aren’t like, well, I’ll totally join you because you’re bashing my nine to five, the nine to five is a necessity. And some people, by the way, some people are going to love it. And they want that predictability. And it’s not our place to judge them or shame them because they want to be in that business model.
Kristen Boss (18:19):
That is fine. But I really want you to look at today’s like today’s economy in all of our situations. And if you have a job you get to show up for, and I’m saying, you get to consider yourself fortunate and look at it as now. Here’s the thing. There’s, there’s this great kind of balance that happens between a nine to five and growing an online business for a while, while you’re building, you know, 80% of your income is going to be from your nine to five. And the 20% is going to be from your online business. And as things continue to grow, eventually it will be 50% of your income comes from your nine to five and 50% comes from your online business. You want, I would encourage you to consider leaving your nine to five when it’s the opposite. When 80% of your income, or at least 70% of your income comes from your online business, and 30% comes from your salary, then you can very easily and joyfully leave that and come over into your online business with financial room for you to breathe.
Kristen Boss (19:29):
So you’re not freaking out every month so that you have cashflow to invest in yourself as a business owner, so that you’re getting education. You’re going to trainings. Maybe you need to work with a coach, right? Having cashflow to invest in your business and invest in your team for marketing or incentivizing with products or gifting them with gifts. You have to be thinking of those things. And if you were leaving, when the scale is barely tipping in your favor of the online business, it’s going to create some scarcity for you. And maybe you’re there. Maybe you’re like, Kristen, I’ve already done that. What do I do now? I am the girl that left the nine to five. And it things feel very tight. Well, first of all, I would tell you, if things are feeling tight, that thought isn’t serving you operating in that scarce.
Kristen Boss (20:22):
It’s not enough that is making you white knuckle your business. And it actually scares off your prospects and business because no one likes a business owner who needs their business. That is so unattractive to your potentials and to your audience when they sense that you need a sale from them, it feels off to everybody and we are to serve and give the most value when we don’t need anything from anybody. And we are just happy to show up and serve. But it’s very hard to have that mindset. When you feel like you, when you are encouraging the thought in your mind that my finances are bleeding out, everything’s gone wrong. Really? It starts with what can you be thankful for today? What do you have? What is working in your favor? How do you want to keep going? This is the number one thing I teach in the academy all the time is people learn how to shift out of scarcity and work with gratitude and a sense of calm and not needing things from people.
Kristen Boss (21:25):
And the students are shocked when they’re like, who knew that the more calm I am and my business and the more I serve and add value, the more people come to me and ask me about my business and I make more money. It feels so counterintuitive. And when, and when students in the academy see that working, they’re like, I can’t believe it works, but it does. And it feels so good for them and their audience. So if you are staying in your nine to five right now, if that’s where you are, I want to tell you the things that will ruin it for you, putting the timeline on your exit and say and almost like putting an emotional timeline on it. Like I will emotionally stand and tolerate this for six months. And then I’m out doing that is setting you up for a lot of drama.
Kristen Boss (22:16):
Resentment will ruin your nine to five for you. Because then again, it’s going to feel like a prison sentence, constantly looking for the out, viewing the, your online business as the escape, hatch is not serving you. It is your plan B. It is your residual income. It’s the job that will pay you today and years down the road. If you play the long game, this business is for the long game. It is not for somebody that wants to do a 90 day sprint and make out with a bunch of cash. Okay? Another thing that will ruin your nine to five for you. And I touched on this earlier is believing that somewhere else would make you happy, believing that other circumstances would change your emotional state. But if you’ve been listening to this podcast long enough, you, you now know that circumstances cannot influence your feelings.
Kristen Boss (23:08):
It is your thoughts that create feelings. It is your thought about a circumstance I chose. I felt joy and gratitude going to my job because I had the thought, this is serving me. There’s still lessons for me here. There’s still people for me to meet. I’m not yet released from this. I’ll know when the time is right. It will happen for me. I had a very loose timeline, but I did not create a timeline of like, I can only emotionally handle this for six months. I very much remember thinking, you know what? I’d like to be out by this, but if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. But a lot of you aren’t willing to say to yourself, and if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. You’re almost saying like, if I end up having to go back to work this fall, I will, I will just throw a fit.
Kristen Boss (24:03):
I just, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll hide in my pantry. Right? But what if you going back to work, isn’t the worst thing in the world. Again? What if it offers financial cushion and safety and allows for you to breathe and enjoy and serve in your business? And by the way, when you have that mentality, it just attracts more people to you find a reason to love where you are. Avoid the thought. I’ll be happier when I leave this job, or when I am home, when I have more time, those are just thoughts. You have listen, when I was still doing hair and it was hard and tedious on my body and I would work 12 hours and come home and bathe my babies and put them in bed and wake up and start all over. I had to tell myself every day I’m here because there are still lessons for me.
Kristen Boss (25:02):
And there are people for me to serve right here right now. I really believe I found joy in the journey because I was willing to find joy where I was at. So maybe that’s for you today. If you’re balancing between the nine to five, watch your thoughts about how you were choosing to see your nine to five and you can learn to work efficiently. I blocked my day. I blocked certain hours of my day to work on my business. And because I was limited on my time, I was incredibly efficient and I found joy. And eventually I was able to leave my job. And what’s crazy is I left it eight months sooner than I thought I would. And I really believe it’s because I kept my head down and showed up to do my online business. And I found joy in the journey. I didn’t put pressure on it. I loved what is, if you haven’t listened to the episode, loving what is, maybe you need to listen to that about your nine to five and not making it the worst thing in the world that you’re selling. It’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s just not happening as fast as you thought it would. And that’s okay too. All right, that’s all I have for you this week. We will catch you guys next week. That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you love today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with a review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done a different way. And if you’re ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the social selling academy, where I give you all the tools, training, and support to help you realize your goals.
Kristen Boss (26:53):
In the academy, you get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are new in the business or been in the industry for awhile, this is the premier coaching program for the modern network marketer. Go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.
