Do you know the secret to working on terms?
It’s having the courage to be yourself.
It’s true! Imagine designing your own work based on your abilities, needs and values? It’s possible! I did it and now I want to teach you how to do it!
My name is Stephen Warley. I teach the Life Skills That Matter for business.
I’ve been self-employed for the last 18 years. I’m obsessed with researching and experimenting with alternative ways of working. Read my full story here.
In the next decade, I believe work will look more like self-employment and less like traditional employment. Check out these stats. Are you prepared for the future of work?
Our Mission
To help you create work that works for you.
It’s time we stop squeezing our lives in around work and doing work that isn’t the fullest expression of ourselves!
To achieve that lofty goal, I have designed an Accelerator, self-assessment challenges and a community of like-minded people dedicated to the belief that it’s possible to design your own work based on your abilities, needs and values.
I believe self-employment is the future of work. Outsourcing, automation and income stagnation is making employment less secure than ever before. It’s making more and more of us feel anxious and less valued.
What we now think of traditional employment will become more and more autonomous because of automation. Funny how that works, eh?
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.
Working for yourself isn’t just about starting a business – it’s about learning a new mindset. It’s learning an entirely new set of skills I call the Life Skills That Matter.
If we learned to think like employees, I believe we can learn to think like the self-employed.
There are a whole bunch of different reasons why people consider working for themselves. 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
It’s possible. I did it, and so can you.
What’s Holding You Back?
If you’ve been thinking about working for yourself, but haven’t done anything about it, I’d love to know why. How can I help make your transition toward self-employment a smoother one? You can submit your response here.
Stop Ignoring Your Inner Voice
You might be feeling anxious, overwhelmed or stressed out about your work. I want to help you relieve those feelings. It is 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.
I want to help you take the path you really “want to follow.” I want to build 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.
I want to empower you to 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.
Learn About Yourself
Your self-employment journey begins by studying the most important subject in life that you’ve never been taught: how to learn about yourself.
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 yourself.
Your life is the sum of your habits. You are what you do. Transforming your lifestyle begins and ends with 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. I’ll constantly be thinking of fun challenges to help you become more self-aware!
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.
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 be.
The Life Skills That Matter
Since I was laid off 17 years ago, I have interviewed 500+ people in professions as diverse as soldiers, financiers, doctors, marketers and entrepreneurs, read 200+ books about personal development, attended several conferences on entrepreneurship and conducted countless lifestyle design experiments.
I have become most fascinated by people who successfully transformed their lives to align 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. Lo and behold, 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!
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 for the rest of your life.
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!
I would be honored to be part of on your journey of transformation. I’ve been there and want to help make your transition smoother and hopefully shorter than mine. It took me 5 years to find my path and 17 years to find work that is in complete harmony with who I am.
You can do it too. It’s possible and it’s worth it.