How To Turn Hobbies Into A Fulfilling Career
Many people spend their adult life splitting their time between work, family, and hobbies. Unfortunately, the first two tend to suck up most of our time, which means we don’t get to enjoy our hobbies as much as we want to. Our hobbies are what we’re most passionate about, and they deserve our attention.
One way to give them more attention and to bring our passion into more areas of our lives is to turn hobbies into fulfilling careers. The problem is that most people don’t know how. Keep reading to learn how you can go from a passionate practitioner to a fulfilled professional.
Assess The Situation
You have a hobby you’re passionate about, and you would love to do it full-time. However, your passion behind that hobby doesn’t automatically mean you can make it into a full-time gig. You need a plan. In order to adequately plan, you need to assess the situation, including yourself.
Things To Consider First
Why do you want to become an entrepreneur? Why now? What entrepreneur skills do you have outside of your hobby? What finances are available? What does the market look like? A career coach can walk you through these and other questions. That way, you get a clear understanding of where you are, what your motivation is, and how you can plan for this career change.
Make A Plan
Once you’ve properly assessed yourself and the situation at large, you can start making a solid plan for your career change. Make a realistic short-term plan that feeds into a realistic long-term plan. Each one should have smaller goals that work toward larger goals so that you can steadily improve and keep track of that improvement. You can plan from where you are now to where you want to go.
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Set Up Your Goals
If you want to try the latest 2023 quilting trends and make a career of quilting, you can plan from that career goal. You want to quilt professionally. How do you get there? Firstly, you need to set aside time every day to quilt. Once your time management is consistent, you’ll know how many quilting projects you can complete in a given amount of time.
With that knowledge, you can turn quilting into a side hustle. Build a customer base, work on marketing, and research the competition. Once you have consistent customers, solid marketing, and understand how your work sets you apart from the competition, you can go full-time.
Proceed Gently
When we lay out an example plan as we did above, it sounds easy. However, the reality of turning hobbies into a fulfilling career is often difficult. It takes time to build up a customer base, and you often face lots of competition.
Top Things To Consider
Proceed gently with your plan, allowing time and grace for mistakes and failures. Learn from those mistakes and failures so that you grow as a person and a professional. No one creates a fulfilling career overnight, and most people feel more fulfilled after overcoming adversity than they would if they snapped their fingers and achieved their dreams.
At Beyond Discovery Coaching, we want to help you achieve your dream of working in a happy and fulfilling career. If your version of that career is something you started as a hobby, we will champion you, no matter what ups and downs you experience. Coach Nadia is your partner in this journey and will help you thrive.
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Meet The Writer!
Hi! My name is Nadia Ibrahim-Taney and I help people design happy and fulfilling careers through authentic career coaching. My expertise includes career exploration guidance, resume writing, interview prep and LinkedIn profile optimization. My pronouns are She/ Her/ Hers and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I focus on how diverse identities impact and influence folks holistically and professionally. Please connect with me on LinkedIn or at Nadia@beyonddiscoverycoaching.com
