Self-Help

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Self-Help for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs that Work Online

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Do-it-yourself and self-serve resources for freelancers and independent contractors. From things about how to get started as a freelancer, independent contractor, or entrepreneur, to growth topics like scaling and empire-building.

On this section of the website, you will find articles, guides, how-tos, examples, and other content that will help you start, operate, and optimize the different processes involved in a freelancer, independent contractor, or entrepreneur business.

Along with the business and technical content in this section, you will find self-help, health, fitness, and well-being content that will help you to cope with the increasing self-imposed pressure, stress, and overwhelming situations that you may encounter when going into business by yourself.

Does being a freelancer, independent contractor or entrepreneur overwhelm you? Are you in a moment when you fear for your physical or mental well-being due to your entrepreneur or freelancer occupation?

Business Self-Help and Personal Well-Being

Are you afraid that becoming a freelancer or entrepreneur without anybody to follow and tell you what to do is going to be a shock, and you will not know where to begin?

Have you already started working for yourself and are you considering giving up because you think it is too much work, there are many things you need to do and that it’s not worth the pain?

If you answered yes to the first paragraph, let me tell you that you will never know if freelancing is not for you if you don’t at least try. You can always try it as a side-gig, without quitting your day job.

If you answered yes to the second paragraph, let me tell you that I know how you feel. I’ve been there a few years ago and it took me a lot of experimentation and getting to know my work habits to find out how to organize myself and prioritize the things that I needed to do to get my freelancer projects going.

If you get discouraged easily when you realize that being a freelancer is not as easy as you thought it will be, don’t despair. The structure I found, which took me several years to refine, will allow you to, at the very least:

    Prioritize processes from most to least important
    Sequence what needs to be done based on priorities
    Steadily grow your business and increase its value
    Become physically and mentally healthier and more energetic

Self-Help for Freelancers

Work as a freelancer without breaking the law. Take responsibility for your finances and don’t let others mismanage you.

Truth is, if you choose the independence that means to be a freelancer, nobody is going to do for you the things that you need to get your freelancing business going.

You need to create products and/or services and develop systems and processes to operate your outfit daily.

You also need even more essential foundational things, like for example the paperwork you need to have and constantly generate to be a legal business entity.

Even if one works in a relatively unregulated environment, like the internet, there are rules one must follow to stay away from legal trouble.

Additionally, there’s the fact that the government expects to be compensated for one’s use of their resources through taxes, even if you are a freelancer.

The good news is that if one gives the legal part of being a freelancer the attention and work it requires, it is not that complex, and the benefits one gets in exchange have value in the long run.

There is social proof, for one, to be able to tell the straight story to your clients when they ask about your gig’s legal status or having nothing to hide at the moment of filing your taxes or facing the taxman.

Instead of evading taxes due to indignation or resentment about being fleeced by the government of your hard-earned dollars, you must seek knowledge to do as best as you can to pay as less as possible thanks to the government’s provisions for tax returns and deductions built into the laws that regulate independent work.

Examples of the topics you will find in this section:

    Independent contractor agreement
    Independent contractor tax
    Personal finance software
    Freelancer tax law
    Registering as a freelancer
    Freelancer Self-management

Self-Help for Entrepreneurs

Do-it-yourself and self-serve information for startup founders. We don’t need to become a mess had by a business instead of owning, running, and staying at the top of our business. To be taken for a ride by one’s (or for that matter, someone else’s) business is a very dangerous situation.

To be an entrepreneur isn’t easy. You need a very extensive set of skills of which copywriting is, I would say, 15% to 25%-tops only. Contrary to what others would want one to believe it isn’t difficult to create a startup. The journey from the ideation phase of a startup and the first year is the subject of this area of the website.

Examples of the topics you will find in this section:

    Registering a startup
    Corporate tax law
    Business Administration
    Best Business Books
    Infographics

Self-Help Disclaimer

Everyone is different, especially at the physical level. Whatever health information you find in this section of the website is the product of my personal experience only. As such, it is here only to give you an idea of things that may work.

When you read an article in this section about how to become more healthy, or how I resolved a health or performance issue bear in mind that it is for informational purposes only.

This means that whatever information you read here doesn’t constitute professional advice. You shouldn’t follow any of the recommendations I give in this section’s articles without consulting with a professional who knows your clinical history first.

It is your responsibility to do your research, compare my version of the matter with other information you find, and finally discuss any health improvements in your lifestyle you want to make with your physician, nutritionist, and physical trainer.

Health and Fitness

Every health or fitness article you will find in this section of the website is based on my personal experiences, that I lived in my quests to find a combination that will make life livable for me.

I hope my experience will be of use to you, but remember, everyone is different and you shouldn’t follow any recommendations blindly without dully researching all alternatives, contraindications, and especially without discussing them with your physician, nutritionist, or trainer.

Nutritional Supplements and Nootropics

Off the top of my head I can think of several situations in which supplements and nootropics can save your career, your work or a number of different daily performances.

Sometimes having a balanced diet as the foundation of a healthy lifestyle is not enough. A point may come in which you change something in your lifestyle or working schedule when you need either a boost or a coping mechanism.

Also, you can find yourself in situations in which your ability to maintain your balanced diet suddenly becomes impossible for different reasons.

A transient situation, a nomadic lifestyle or a simple change of environs can force you to improvise and get whatever you were getting from your diet from other sources.

You may need to meet a higher daily requirement of different things, and your diet and fitness plan may not be doing the trick anymore. A few things that supplements can give you until you are able to settle down, get organized or normalize your situation are:

    Increased stamina
    Increased focus/concentration
    Expanded memory
    Increased intake of amino-acids
    More daily intake of protein
    Fighting insomnia
    Falling asleep faster
    More social acuity
    Adaptation to stress
    Burning fat
    Increased motivation

Until you can settle down, organize yourself and re-calibrate your diet, supplements can be a great help. They may not be a permanent solution, but most of them aren’t a simple band-aid fix either.

Diet Tweaking

I think that there’s no better dietary supplement than natural vegetables and fruits in their natural state. Still, there are many reasons why a person would want to supplement a diet with nutritional supplements

    Vegetarianism
    Athletics
    Sports
    Bodybuilding
    Travelling
    Transient Situations
    Lack of Time and/or Organization

Today is very common to generate well-being by creating a personalized stack of supplements. Nothing wrong with that, but natural alternatives, based on creating a balanced diet deserve attention also.

There are many ways of tweaking one’s diet to achieve greater health, body growth, and well-being through food.

In this section of the site, I will share what I already know and what I will continue learning because this is an area of knowledge that I doubt I’ll ever stop researching.

DIY Fitness

For the last two years, I have discovered do-it-yourself fitness and I will share the things I discovered in this section of the website.

Let me tell you a short story about personal fitness.

I do yoga and chi-kung since my late teenage years, but when I started to get older I began to train with weights.

I went to several gyms, to work out with weights, for around twelve years, without interruption.

During those twelve years, I was monitored by at least three different gym monitors that I consulted when my workout schedule seemed not to be working.

Seemingly, it is cheap to get advice from gym monitors (most of the time it’s included in your gym membership fee), but at the same time, in my case, the advice from gym monitors was a textbook case of “you get what you paid for”.

I mean, there has to be a world of difference between a mere gym monitor and a personal trainer, but I expected that their advice would at least make a tiny difference. The truth is that in my case, it never made any.

At the same time, I was doing all I could do with the web, trying to learn from bodybuilders advising on fitness websites and YouTube. I even read some books on how to make my weight training give fruits.

I followed the well-known day-to-day schedule and practices that everyone who trains with weights must follow.

    A sequence of training-feeding-resting
    Alternating different muscle groups for different days
    Balancing my diet based on my body mass index
    Accelerating my metabolism by eating plenty of food each two hours
    Taking nutritional supplements
    Getting a good night's sleep and daily hydration

Nothing worked. I mean, I felt great all the time, and my health was also great, but I never developed physically like I should have developed after more than a decade of going at least three times per week to the gym.

In my best moments, the best I achieved was a verifiable increase in strength, and an athletic toned look of my physique, but nothing beyond the strength and looks department. No visible muscular growth.

There was a season of around two years, during which I ate like there was no tomorrow, and did a lot of napping even on days that I didn’t go to the gym.

During that season my back, chest, legs, and arms did grow a lot but also did my belly and my face.

I wasn’t what you would call fat, but still, I thought that to have meaty, full arms didn’t justify having a bloated face and a protruding belly.

I don’t know exactly why things were that way. Let me make this clear, I never stood all the time doing the same things when I realized that they were not working.

The only technique I kept using through the years was steadily increasing the weight I used for each exercise. I tried different types of workouts, different exercises, and different menus. Still no results.

During my last months going to the gym, I had started putting into practice a technique that I thought would help me.

After more than a decade there wasn’t much left for me to try, so I tried this. It was about doing lighter workouts, not with less weight, though. It was about doing 30 minutes workouts instead of 45-50 minutes ones, and going every day from Monday to Friday instead of three or four times per week, with rest days in-between.

It was kind of amazing, because somehow I had this idea without reading it anywhere or being told about it by anyone, and it worked.

The sad part is that after two and a half or three months when finally my body seemed to be responding like it never did before, the pandemic struck.

Yet, when I couldn’t go anymore to the gym is when the real breakthrough came. I stopped going to the gym when the lockdown started. Less than one week after the last day I went to the gym I started following the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension course.

I don’t know what happened. It may be that twelve years of going to the gym prepared my body for dynamic tension exercises to be most effective on my body. It may also be that at the same time my diet took a 180 degrees turn. Maybe a combination of both.

The point is that my body started to grow as it had never grown before.

The fact remains that I grew in six months more than I did in twelve years going to gyms.

I still can’t believe it, especially taking into account that for the last two years I have been following the dynamic tension program in a half-bore capacity.

Yet, my body continues getting bigger, leaner, and more athletic.

Atlas recommends doing the exercises every day (pretty much like I had discovered by myself just before starting with his program) for thirty minutes, two times a day.

I have been working out half that amount (only once per day, in the morning), and like I said, it made my muscles grow like never before. Especially in some parts that I could never develop in the gym, like the inner side of the upper arms.

I can’t imagine how much more effective it would be if one follows it the way it’s meant to be followed. But I also practice the other two fitness types, which I don’t want to stop practicing, so I don’t have time to do it full-bore, as recommended by Atlas.

The reason why I told you this story is to leave you thinking that sometimes simpler and cheaper fitness can have a greater impact on your body and life than what is accepted as mainstream, contemporary or common fitness methods.

Fitness Disclaimer

The Site cannot and does not contain health or fitness advice. The health and fitness information is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. Accordingly, before taking any actions based upon such information, we encourage you to consult with the appropriate professionals. We do not provide any kind of fitness advice. THE USE OR RELIANCE OF ANY INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THIS SITE IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Image Credits

Muhammad Zikria

© Martin Wensley, 2020-2022 — Self-Help