Are you still aspiring to go out on your own in business? What about a freelance business? Blogger Maia Nolan spoke with Michelle Goodman about diving into a freelancer’s life.

Nearly two decades ago, Michelle Goodman dove headfirst into full-time freelance writing. Although there were bumps along the way, Goodman has managed to come out on top, and in her new book, My So-Called Freelance Life, she has assembled her hard-earned knowledge into a step-by-step guide for fledgling freelancers in all fields. Goodman (who is also the author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide) graciously carved some time out of her hectic schedule this week to share some of her insight with Entrepreneur Mom:

What keeps smart, talented women from taking the plunge into full-time freelancing? And how do we get over it?

Fear of not having enough work. Fear of having to sell yourself. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of having to buy your own health insurance, set up your own retirement fund, and deal with all the legal and tax aspects yourself.
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guest blog post by Gina Blitstein

Women wear many hats - some we love and some we loathe, yet we wear them nonetheless. It seems every day requires more of us as we pursue the many roles we play, be it partner, mother, businesswoman, daughter, sister, friend, good citizen…the list goes on and on. It often feels like it requires superhuman effort, endurance and speed to fit all we want to do into a mere 24 hours.

How do our lives get so crazed? If we step back and take an introspective look, we’d see that a lot of it is of our own doing. We tend to take on too much, never admitting that we have limits or boundaries that even we ourselves need to respect. So why do we think that we need to be “Superwoman” - and for that matter - that any woman is or needs to be?

Kathy Caprino, psychotherapist, women’s work-life expert, career and life coach, speaker, and author of the new book Breakdown, Breakthrough: The Professional Woman’s Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power and Purpose, describes the phenomenon she calls “overfunctioning” in women. Kathy defines overfunctioning as “doing more than is necessary, more than is appropriate, and more than is healthy.” Sound familiar? Kathy explains that “Women are addicted to overfunctioning out of fear of not being in control, or not living up to someone else’s standards, or being judged negatively by others.”
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by guest blogger Emily Bass.

Trying to find a financially viable arrangement for my future feels like trying to find the best method of treatment for some rare disease. There are so many options and so many opinions to assess out there. Since I am not a professional financial planner, it is daunting to try and understand my options.

I really appreciate finding Get a Financial Life - Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties by Beth Kobliner. The writing style respects my brain while still using very basic language and explanations when referring to my financial dis-ease.

A former writer for Money magazine and columnist for Glamour, Beth has appeared repeatedly on Oprah, Today, CNN, MSNBC, and ABC’s World News This Morning, as well as public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and Marketplace.

Beth said she wrote this book because financial advice tends to be targeted towards older and better-established people while people in their 20s and 30s lacked advice that spoke directly to them and their concerns such as: paying off student loans, getting their careers on track, and thinking about buying a house some day.
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Sylvia LaFair, Ph.D., author of Don’t Bring It to Work- Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success, is an expert on leadership, workplace behavior, and relationships. She is also President of Creative Energy Options (CEO), a consulting firm that runs teambuilding workshops and educational seminars that focus on results through relationships.

“I’ve been writing this book in my mind ever since I began to see the powerful impact leaders who are ‘pattern aware’ can have on their companies,” says LaFair. “As I offer executives and their teams the secrets of why we interact the way we do, I see less on-going conflict and more innovative solutions”

LaFair’s target audience are “leaders of the 21st century.” She feels these leaders can lead with more confidence when they learn about the complexities of relationship systems, especially how the learning in their original organization - their family - is replicated in their present work organization.

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It’s that time of year again!

Somehow, in between all the shopping and baking and wrapping and mailing and planning and driving to Christmas pageants and holiday concerts, you still have to find time to run your business—and decide how you’re going to mark the season in your professional life.

Here are a few tips to help you ring in the holidays the right way at work:

• Gifts. Who gets them? And what should they get? Etiquette maven Emily Post says giving gifts to employees is “a nice gesture and a great way to acknowledge those who work for you.” If you’re going to gift your employees, though, remember the old Valentine rule from elementary school: Bring one for everyone. Books, gift cards, tickets to arts or sporting events, and baskets of cookies or other treats are all appropriate for employees. Avoid gifts that are too expensive or intimate.


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If you’ve been tracking this blog, you know that I had some very self-confessional posts a while back about leaving one bank for another. The bank I was using for my company was trouble from the start, but I was afraid to move to a new bank, not just because of the hassle involved but because I simply felt trapped.

I finally took the plunge and moved my company’s business to Key Bank. During that process, I was fortunate to be able to speak with Maria Coyne, EVP, Key4Women. She provided me with the following tips about switching banks for this blog.

from Maria Coyne…

Switching banks can be a daunting prospect so making the move is often put on the bottom of the “to do list.” But understanding the correct steps in transferring banks can make the process less stressful. If you’ve been considering transferring to a bank that is more closely aligned with your financial goals and personal values, first take time to research the new bank to know if it’s the right fit for you and then understand the logistics that make the transfer legal.

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With all the talk lately about carbon footprints and eco-everything, you may already have taken steps to reduce your household’s impact on the environment. But what about your workplace?

Many offices are already recycling and making efforts to reduce waste (such as going “paperless” or providing reusable coffee mugs rather than Styrofoam cups). There are a lot of other easy things you can do to help shrink your office’s impact on the environment.

To get some ideas for “going green” in the workplace, we turned to mompreneur Diane MacEachern. Diane is the author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World and the founder of BigGreenPurse.com, a site that helps shoppers identify eco-friendly and fair trade products.

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I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.

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I finally got reading glasses so can get back to reading to stay up on my industry and to try to get through a book again.

Yes, sad but true: my eyesight is starting to fail. I wasn’t sure why I was struggling getting through a page of text because the changes are so slight but really affecting my ability to see words on a page clearly. But let’s move on…

Here are some books that I really have enjoyed and that have helped me in my business.

These are perfect last minute holiday gift for an entrepreneur you know…or for you! Some are newer books while others have been around for at least a decade and still ring true.

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