2021: Pondering the Future

I went along to a Slimming World recruitment event today, partly out of curiosity and partly because on reflection I had been feeling that it was a possible career direction for me. I say “career”; I can barely call the procession of jobs I’ve had since leaving university a “career” in good conscience, really, but what I saw today gave me pause, and a feeling that this might actually be something I want to do and that I’m interested in exploring.

Becoming a Slimming World consultant involves going into business for yourself — including forking over a not-insubstantial amount of money as a franchise fee — and having to put in a fair amount of work for promotion and whatnot. The prospect of running a business that is more complicated than I Do Stuff, You Pay Me has always been pretty daunting to me, but looking over the information today and thinking about it made me realise that it’s perhaps not quite as scary as what I’ve been imagining, and that it might well be something that could work well for me.

I make no secret of the fact that I’ve struggled with what I’d refer to as “conventional employment” over the years. Classroom teaching nearly drove me to suicide on several occasions — though thankfully I didn’t come close to even attempting it — while working retail frustrated me at the lack of progression after a certain point if I didn’t want to become a manager. Working an office job, meanwhile, was so tedious I was literally bored to tears on an increasingly frequent basis as my time with the company progressed — and, of course, I was ultimately bullied out of the place by people who don’t understand depression and anxiety as mental health issues. And freelance writing work, the work with which I’ve had the most success over the years, lacks the stability I need to feel truly comfortable that I’m “surviving” as best I can.

The prospect of running my own Slimming World business, then, although scary, is appealing. And the main reason for that is that it gets around one of my key problems with full-time positions I’ve held in the past: the fact that they monopolise all of your time, and that even when companies have explicit policies in place to supposedly maintain a “work-life balance”, you still find yourself doing little more in the week than going out at some ungodly hour in the morning, going somewhere you hate to work with people you despise, then coming home in the evening to do little more than the bare minimum required to keep yourself awake and vaguely entertained until the sun sets and it’s an acceptable time to go to bed, at which point the whole hideous cycle repeats itself over and over again.

Err, where was I? Oh, yes, the reason running my own business is an appealing prospect. Yes, with all the above in mind, the fact that running a Slimming World business, once you’re established and you get your metaphorical “machine” up, running and well-oiled, only takes up a relatively small proportion of the week means that I can pursue all the other things that I might want to do. I can support my income from Slimming World with the irregular freelance work I’ve been doing. I can continue teaching piano lessons. I can work on the magazine I’m working on with Matt at Digitally Downloaded. In short, I can balance my life, do a variety of things and hopefully not drive myself into the pit of despair that the aforementioned “conventional employment” has ground me down into more than once in my life.

I don’t know if I’m the right person for the Slimming World job in the eyes of the recruitment team. I don’t know if they’ll even interview me, so I haven’t got my hopes up or anything. But if the opportunity presents itself, I’m going to give it very serious consideration indeed. It’s a job that I think I’d be good at; it’s a job I think I’d enjoy; it’s a job that I actually feel strongly about and believe in; it’s a job that actually uses the skills I’ve built up and been trained in over the years.

There’s just the prospect of that initial start-up fee that’s a bit scary. You have to spend money to make money, or so they say, and every new business is faced with start-up costs. I’ve never had to confront them myself, though, and it’s this part that’s making me hesitate more than anything else; everything else, I feel, is something that I can handle — perhaps with some training in some areas — but all that means nothing if I can’t clear the initial hurdle.

I have thinking to do, and a decision to reach relatively quickly. Perhaps, anyway; it may be that I’m rejected outright, which will suck, of course, but at least it will let me know that I need to pursue other avenues instead. We shall see; I feel I’m on the boundary of something important here, but it remains to be seen if I’m able to make it through onto the other side or not.