We’re On A Mission To Create Work That Works For You
Do you believe work is broken?
We do too!
We want to disrupt everything you’ve ever been taught about work, so you can learn how to create work that works for you using the most important life skills never taught to you!
Do you want your work to be part of your life, but not your entire life?
Do you want to get paid for just being yourself?
Do you believe money isn’t the only measure of success?
Do you want to stop playing by someone else’s rules and write your own?
It’s possible when you create work in alignment with your values, needs and abilities!
Work as you know was designed for the needs of corporations. We’re on a mission to help you create work that works for YOU!
To achieve that lofty goal, we’ve created Communities of Practice to hold you accountable, as well as a blog and self-assessment challenges to learn about your work needs.
We also created a Lifestyle Calculator, so you know exactly how much you need to work to financially sustain your ideal lifestyle.
We teach you how to gain your work freedom as a remote worker, freelancer, coach, consultant or solopreneur!
My name is Stephen Warley. I started Life Skills That Matter in 2016 to show you how work is changing as you know it and how you can change work to your advantage!
I’ve been working for myself since I was laid off on Election Day in 2000. I’m obsessed with researching and experimenting with alternative ways of working. Read my full story here.
Today I’m happily unemployable! No amount of money could get me to become conventionally employed ever again!
Why? Because I have gained complete freedom over how I work. I choose what I work on. I decide who I work with. I determine when, where and how I work.
I make enough money to live the life I want without losing my mind from overworking! (I have a theory that most people are cool with making around $75,000/year doing something they enjoy without working more than 30 hours a week instead of hustling to become a millionaire!)
There are a whole bunch of different reasons why you might want to work for yourself. Maybe you want to:
Get out of debt.
Be less anxious.
Live a wholly integrated life.
Work from anywhere.
Spend more time with your family.
Explore your passions.
Become financially independent.
Travel the world.
Solve a big social problem.
Have more meaning in your work.
Just get paid for being you.
After getting laid off, it took me another 5 years to discover conventional work made me miserable because I was trying to fit into someone else’s system! I gained my freedom when I designed my own system of work by first learning how to assess myself.
YOU are the starting point for designing work that makes you feel energized, productive, secure and satisfied.
Want to become happily unemployable? It’s possible!
The Life Skills That Matter
I have interviewed 500+ people who have made the transition from employment to working on their terms and all the different ways they’ve done it.
You can listen to archived episodes of our podcast on iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast app to get inspired by some of their stories!
I have become most fascinated by people who successfully transformed their lives in alignment with their unique purpose, needs, motivations, abilities and values. These people work on their terms. They are paid for being exactly who they are. Pretty cool, right?
Then I began to wonder, how did they do it?
I started looking for common patterns in how these individuals transformed their lives. A core set of life skills kept popping up over and over again.
I call these skills the Life Skills That Matter. These are the skills that awakened me!
Isn’t it time you stopped squeezing your life in around work and started doing work that is the fullest expression of yourself?!
Do you know the secret to creating work that works for you?
It’s having the courage to be yourself.
You need to stop asking for permission for how you work. It’s time for you to start defining success on your terms and no one else’s!
For the most part, we’re taught how to conform to work for the best of the system, but not about how we perform best as individuals within the system.
Why can’t the system work for us all by learning about our own personal productivity?
If you want to make your work, work for you, start by learning about your habits.
Your life is the sum of your habits.
You are what you do.
Transforming your lifestyle and work begins by transforming your habits.
To begin changing your habits, you need self-knowledge. You gain self-knowledge by identifying patterns in your thoughts, behaviors and habits through a process of self-experimentation.
We believe you already have everything you need to create work that works for you!
The process of creating your own work begins by practicing the 3 most important life skills of self-awareness, curiosity and connection to learn more about yourself and your potential than ever before!
The biggest mistake first-time entrepreneurs make is not taking the time to fully assess their first and most important business resource: themselves.
To become self-employed, mastering yourself is equally as important as mastering business tactics. Maybe even more important.
We believe most businesses fail because of a lack of self-awareness. You are the first resource of your business and its biggest obstacle!
The more you learn about yourself, the better decisions you will make in designing your business and ideal lifestyle. The more you align the way you work with who you want to become, the happier and less anxious you’ll feel.
It’s possible. I did it, and so can you.
Work is changing as you know it.
Are you ready?
Outsourcing, automation and income stagnation are making conventional employment less secure than ever before. It’s making more and more of us feel anxious and less valued.
As more and more work becomes automated, the remaining work will make us more autonomous. Funny how that works, eh? We’re going to get paid for our creativity, not by how well we follow the directions.
We’ve all been taught how to think like employees, but we’ve never learned how to work for ourselves. It’s making us woefully unprepared for the emerging realities of our changing economy.
If we are taught to think like employees, we believe we can learn to think like solopreneurs and the Life Skills That Matter can help us do it!
What’s holding you back?
You might be feeling anxious, overwhelmed or stressed out about your work. I want to help you relieve those feelings. It’s possible. I was chronically anxious about work for 20 years. I finally cured myself.
It’s not that we want to get out of working (although that might seem tempting at times), but rather, we feel a loss of control over how we work. We’re frustrated by our lack of purpose.
And even when we have achieved success (however you define it), many of us still feel unfulfilled.
Some people have even told me that “success” has taken them away from their original goals in life. We work hard and do everything that has been asked of us by our parents, teachers, employers and society, but we still feel unhappy. Why?
I have come to realize there are two paths in life:
1) The one you really want to follow (the one your inner voice is begging you to take).
2) The one you think you are supposed to follow (the one your family, peers or society expect).
Unfortunately, most of us take the path we think we are “supposed to.” Why?
Because we’ve been taught that employment is the only socially acceptable option. The evolutionary fear of losing the acceptance of others is often more powerful than the desire to strike out on our own.
Let’s get you started on a path you really “want to follow” by building a community of people who will support how you want to work. It might be tougher than traditional employment in the short term, but trust me, you’ll be much happier in the long term.
Stop aspiring to live up to the ideals of others and start living up to your own ideals.
Once your work is in alignment with your needs, motivations, abilities and values, your chronic stress will melt away because you will finally work in harmony with yourself.
You have a big decision to make.
No pressure. 😉 But you do have a pretty clear choice to make in my humble opinion:
1) Continue to do work you think you are “supposed to do,” the work that is making you miserable and may do so for the rest of your life.
2) Put in the hard work of learning about yourself and discover work that works for you over the next couple of years, so you can experience sustained joy in your work from this point forward.
Most of us think we have a third choice: “I’ll figure it out someday.” But why put it off?
Stop ignoring those feelings and start exploring them today!
You can create work that works for you.
It’s possible and it’s worth it!
Get started by subscribing to our Weekly Reflection Reminder to hold you accountable for making more time to figure out how to design work that works for you!
