Work from Home Success Program – becoming isolated

Work from Home Success Program Module 3, Part 1 – how home workers become isolated

I’m always banging on about the risk of becoming isolated when you work from home, and the dangers isolation involves. But you might be wondering how and why people get isolated when there’s plenty of work to be done, and a nice, peaceful environment to do it in.

The trouble is that there are a number of factors in any home working situation that can combine to push you towards becoming isolated if you’re not aware of them.

1. For a start, it’s unescapably a fact that left on our own for a while, we’re more likely to slip into self-doubt and negativity than ever-increasing confidence and high spirits.

2. Many of us start to work from home when we’re setting up a business. Often we’re on a tight budget so we get used to doing everything for ourselves, all the bits we don’t like as well as the parts we do. That can become a habit and we forget to ask for help or feel we can’t.

3. Family and friends might reinforce the feeling of being alone with ‘helpful’ suggestions, like ‘Why don’t you just get a job?’ As if that thought doesn’t occur to us repeatedly!

4. How many times have you booked to go to a meeting or event, and then decided you just didn’t have time? In my experience I’m better off taking the time out and coming back refreshed, than staying at my desk.

5. It’s bad enough from an emotional point of view feeling alone and demotivated, but these feelings can have serious knock-on effects on your business too.

6. Home business owners often have a bit of an inferiority complex (‘I’m just a mum who does some freelancing’), and this means you might unconsciously limit the kinds of jobs you go for, sticking with the known, which brings fewer rewards of all kinds.

7. It’s all too easy to compare yourself unfavourably to someone else who broadcasts their successes on social media, and feel you are falling short by comparison. You forget they will have had plenty of failures on the way, whereas you’re only too aware of your own.

8. And we judge ourselves, telling ourselves and other people that we procrastinate too much, that we’re not sufficiently motivated. I’ve never heard anyone who goes out to work run themselves down like that!

9. We set impossible standards of productivity, and beat ourselves up when we fail to reach them. And all this spoils the experience of working at home, which we thought would be such a joy.

Honestly, it’s amazing anyone sticks at working from home! But once you’re aware of the pitfalls, you can take steps to avoid them, and that’s what Part 2 is all about. See you soon.