Because the last several months have been some of the most difficult for me. I truly would describe it as surviving instead of thriving.
My main goal for 2021 isn’t to train for some brand new Ironman race or achieve some lofty professional or financial goal. While I have set some fitness and financial goals for myself, they are the top of the priority list.
To get it out there in the open my main goal and top priority next to being a husband and father: my mental health.
Right before the holidays I was officially diagnosed with depression with a side of anxiety and mounting, overwhelming life stressors.
Just how bad was it?
As we take time to reflect on this past year, with all its ups and downs, we want to thank you for continuing to support us and for showing up for your community. Because of you, we were able to fund our first ever scholarship program, and we awarded four Black Creative Students scholarships to students from all over the country. This year, we were also able to publish 26 new blog posts, had 10,400 page views, added and featured 4 new contributing editors, hired and on-boarded a super creative new social media, Greer Blount, and offered our first writing internship to Maggie Barbour who created and published 10 posts in less than 12 weeks.
It's been an eventful year for out team, and to close it all off, TNM founder Kevin O'Connell is sharing his thoughts on 2020, dealing with change and transitions as a new dad and entrepreneur, and finding new approaches for 2021. Keep reading for Kevin’s end-of-the-year message!
Working freelance may sound glamorous at first, but those who've been doing it for a while know it takes hard work. Getting your business off the ground isn't easy and sometimes it means juggling various projects all at once, but it also has it's benefits - I mean you are your own boss after all!
This week, writing intern Maggie Barbour asks The Niche Movement's Editor-in-Chief Jaylene Perez and founder Kevin O'Connell, both of whom have experience in freelancing, what it really takes to make it work.
Read on for Jaylene and Kevin's best practices when it comes to finding clients, marketing your services, settings rates, and more!
For all those in pursuit of professional development, this week we're taking a look at which skills you'll want to brush up on depending on your specific industry. Whether you're a freelancer, marketer, entrepreneur, or work in another creative role, you'll want to read up on what will make you and your work really shine.
Tap below for the full post!
Job searching is a tough task on its own, and job searching during a pandemic... well we know it's not easy. You'll have to be flexible, know how to network and market yourself, and really hone in on what it is your looking for as you search for the right fit.
To find out what can help you land your dream job, keep reading!
Put these four books on your 2019 reading list, and you’ll be making big moves in no time. Whether it’s finding meaning with Victor Frankl and vulnerability with Brené Brown or learning to work smarter with Morten T. Hansen and make stronger decisions with David DeSteno, all four of these books provide the tools necessary to make bigger, bolder, and truer career changes in 2019. These books will help you be confident in your direction and decisions.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve found that it’s easy to burn out when you’re involved in the work to make a difference, and you no longer see that difference. It’s easy to get distracted by the bottom line rather than focus on the big picture. It’s also just as frustrating to see your former colleagues and friends rise to a higher level in the for-profit world and wonder if it’s your sector that’s holding you back.
Are you undervalued? Are you underpaid? Did you make all the wrong choices in your career?
These are valid questions. But for me, it comes down to whether I am internally happy and satisfied with the work I am doing. If I am not satisfied with how I am spending 50+ hours of my week (this includes my DC commute), then my whole life is off kilter, and something needs to change. So, how do I change my circumstances? How do I prevent burnout? And how do I know when certain elements are outside of my control, and it’s time for a career move?
Here are seven keys to internal happiness that I’ve learned while working in the nonprofit sector.
In my youth I feared failure. I feared failing tests, losing games, or simply being denied something. I knew what I wanted and how I could get it, but my mind was constantly focused on the failures that could result. I rarely envisioned the possible successes but rather the embarrassment of a failure. When I studied for a test it was to avoid failure. In sports, I practiced to not lose in front of my friends and family. I was motivated by fear. My success was directly linked to a negative premise of failure. I used this mindset to propel me to excell at times but when I experienced a loss the negative mindset appeared. I was a sore loser but I was also a questionable winner. As I matured I began to see things differently. I saw that losing is opportunity to self evaluate and tweak some things to be better prepared for my next test. I learned that I had to be willing to take a risk to grow. Take a chance with change or simply to fall down, in order to truly learn how to stand properly.
One tip, piece of advice, or lesson learned for every month I have been on my own to launch my passion project The Niche Movement, build my personal brand and harness my digital storytelling skills to start FYN Creative.
Written by Kevin O'Connell
After many years of traveling, living abroad, and continually challenging myself to try new things, something I've realized is that, it’s not traveling that I truly enjoy; its personal growth that comes with getting outside of your comfort zone. Why? Because when we travel time becomes distorted. One day in a foreign country can forever change the way that you think about life. One week trekking through the amazon, or taking a road trip will often be more impressionable on you than a year in university. A few months working abroad can forever shape what you want out of your career and your life.
I believe that anytime someone puts themselves outside of their comfort zone, it leads to an accelerated hyper growth; what I now refer to as “growing in dog years”. In the same way that a dog theoretically ages 7 years in a year, I believe that when we travel, try new challenging things, and get outside of our comfort zones, we grow at a more rapid pace; we grow in “Dog Years”.
You see, when we get outside of our comfort zones and try new things, we realize that time is not created equally. When time is maximized, and we pack as many overwhelming experiences into a short period of time, we grow at an accelerated rate because, quite simply, we experience more. The more that you experience, the more that you grow.
This is why when we return home from our travels it is so hard to relate to our friends. So much has taken place for us in the last year, but for them their lives have remained essentially the same. They might have a new job, or a new girlfriend/boyfriend, but in reality their lives haven’t changed much throughout the course of that last year. They haven’t experienced the same intensity and acceleration of growth because quite simply, they haven’t experienced as much.
In my opinion, it is simply because you have grown more than they have in that same year. You have had more experiences. You have learned more things. You have widened your perspective in a way that they haven’t. So you are literally no longer at the same points in your life, you have accelerated your own growth and are now years ahead of where they are. In the same year that they grew only one year, you have grown probably 3-4x what they have.
Have you ever been in a position where you look back at the last 6 months and say to yourself, “I feel like the last six months have passed by in the snap of a finger, but at the same time so much has happened and it feels like an eternity ago!” This happens because you packed new experiences into your life, which made time pass by seemingly fast, but these experiences also accumulated at an insanely fast pace, making it seem like an eternity has passed. It’s quite the contradictory feeling.
I look at it like “hacking time”. If you want to get the most that you can out of your life, your goal should be to pack in as many new experiences as you possibly can into every year. If you look back on the last year of your life, how many new things did you try? How many impressionable events can you name? How many times did you take a new trip somewhere? How hard did you push yourself at work? How many new skills did you pick up? The more things you can list out, the more that you have grown.
Take something like Vipassana meditation for example. Although it might be a mere ten days long, in those ten days you will experience years of personal growth because it is such a novel and challenging experience. When you come out, you have grown more in the last ten days than your friends who didn’t do it with you.
Unfortunately, I also think that it’s necessary to touch on hardship, because hardship has a way of manipulating time, but in a bad way. Hardships and struggle have the potential to cause adverse growth. They have the ability to debilitate people and slow life down.
Hardships have a tendency to debilitate people. Something bad happens, and we sit in our rooms and sulk. We stop working. We stop moving forward. We stop growing. Months can pass in this way. Have you ever had a friend go through a failure and take months to get over it? Or a friend who broke up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and they take a year to get over it? Or, in the worst case scenario, the death of a family member? Situations like these have the ability to slow or entirely halt your growth, and it is important to be cognizant of this.
Hardships and struggle have the potential to either debilitate or motivate, and it is up to us with how we handle these hardships. We can either use them as an opportunity to grow, or a time to recess. Am I saying that if something bad happens ignore it and keep moving? Absolutely not. I am instead saying that with every struggle comes an opportunity for growth, and in the end it’s up to you how long you let that struggle knock you on your ass, or get back up and keep fighting.
Where positive experiences speed life up and cause one to say “time flies when you’re having fun”, negative experiences have the ability to slow life down and make it seem like it passes forever. Have you ever noticed that when you are in a bad mood the day seems to pass by incredibly slowly? Or remember back to those days of sitting in a classroom and staring at a clock waiting for time to pass, and then you go outside for recess and it feels like you didn’t get enough time to play? Funny how time becomes distorted depending on our mindset and how we are perceiving our experience of said time.
This is why it is so important to schedule things into your year that will have the maximum impact on your growth. This is why it is so important to choose a challenging career path, travel and work abroad when the opportunity arises, and jump at novel experiences every time you get the chance. It’s like the phrase “getting the best bang for your buck”, but instead I look at it as, “get the most shine for your time” ;) (ok ok I’m working on it!)
Time is not created equally. It’s up to you how you spend your time on this planet, and how fast or slow you want to grow. You have the ability to grow like everyone else, or grow in dog years. Personally, I choose to get the most out of every day that I am here on this planet and grow in dog years, and I encourage everyone else to do the same :)
