Career Makeover Wednesdays: Daycare Duty to Writer Extraordinaire

By Guest Blogger Gina Blitstein

Here I am - living my new career. I am faced with lots of new challenges that I am tackling on a daily basis and others that I know are waiting to be tackled in the near future. It's proving to be quite the learning experience.

I am loving being a writer and arranging my time to suit my projects and inspiration level rather than around the schedule of others as was necessary in my "old" career as a daycare provider. Honestly, however, I have some days when I feel tremendously productive and others when I feel like I haven't accomplished nearly enough. Perhaps somedays I over-schedule myself or simply try to bite off too much. Ultimately I think it will prove to be a matter of trial and error.

I feel as if I am in the most creative and productive time of my life. I think the freedom has a lot to do with it. Yet within all this freedom, I know that I need to keep moving forward, keeping my "pipeline" full of new projects. After all, without projects, I would have no career at all. So the most pressing of my challenges is to find the time - and wherewithal - to do the necessary networking in order to drum up some future business. My current projects will soon be completed - and then what?

As the first step in my networking education, Ellen has tasked me with developing my "pitch." Of course it made perfect sense to have a way to easily express what I do for a living. How else am I going to gain new clients? But no matter how many times I tried, what I came up with sounded artificial and forced. Maybe clever, but never natural sounding. So I put my pitch on a back burner, hoping with time the right words would come to me. And they did - but in an unexpected way!

I made an appointment at a new eye doctor. It occurred to me that in the course of my visit, the subject of my employment may arise - and there it was! That was exactly the scenario I needed to imagine in order for my brain to put the words together without sounding like I was trying to sell my services. Now I get it - my pitch is simply the words I will use to tell people what I do - not sell them on my services! At last, the pressure was off and I could imagine myself, very naturally, telling the eye doctor that, "I Create written content for the web." That was it - from there I can expound and refine it but I have the foundation. I just love a good "a-ha moment!"

So here's my pitch, for the first time ever in print: "I Create written content for the web. I've discovered that even those people who are fantastic at what they do often have difficulty putting it into words. That's where I come in - to put words to your passion and express it on your website, newsletter and in social media."

So I can check "pitch" off my to-do list - whew!

Next up on my assignments from Ellen was to identify the strategies I was using to obtain the business I've won from the Internet. I would have to say that I've gotten that business from my website and from maintaining a reputable and consistent presence among small business owners in online communities and chats. I think it's very much the same as face-to-face networking in that I make myself known to those who may be in need of my services. In many cases, I believe that the Internet provides a more targeted audience for my message because the people can actually search for my particular skill set, rather than a more hit-and-miss approach at a luncheon, for example. Of course I'm not discounting the importance of face-to-face networking - only that I haven't found any that feel as natural to me as what I've been able to accomplish via the Internet. I will continue to look for those opportunities among local businesspeople.

So I'm continuing my career reinvention - one step at a time. I learn something new about myself on a regular basis. That's sure to keep things interesting!