who should we believe about how great (or not) being self-employed is?

I'm now into my 12th year of being a self-employed enterprise consultant-type. It was never part of a grand plan I have for my life, but rather necessity: I found myself needing to earn money to support my family, and at the time no-one was hiring, but some were offering work on contracts rather than payroll. And I've been hustling ever since.

Some readers of my bog will know how I've managed to use this status to clever effect in influencing national legislation and policy, and others may also recall the other impacts it's had on me (such as struggling to get to all the christmas parties clients invite me to...).

But there were 3 pieces of research published earlier this month that made me pause and reflect on how appropriate it is that we're all being increasingly encouraged to explore and pursue freelance careers, and also the apparent indifference of the government to us in the bulk of business support being directed to companies with lots of employees and such like:

1) being self-employed makes you happier and earns you more money (according to research by Intuit Quickbooks), but...

2) average earnings for the self-employed continue to fall far below that of their employed counterparts (according to data from the government)

3) being self-employed means your relationships with your family will suffer more (according to the Centre for the Modern Family)

so who should we believe if we're considering a freelance career? What sort of life could we reasonably expect in light of the above contradictory research, and what impact might it have on those close to us?

As for me - I didn't feel I had the luxury of a choice, and over the last 12 years I've tried to manage my role as best I can to try and create as much benefit as possible for those I've been supporting, and also the wider world ('cos of how my mum brought me up). It's been tough, but there have been various moments that I can't imagine I could have otherwise created, (many of which I've tried to chronicle here on my blog).

But the challenge with all this research (as I highlighted under 'Q' in my alternative entrepreneur's A-Z), is that it's all generalisations based on the group of people (who aren't you) that the researchers asked. And I have an idea that we're all so diverse and unqiue in our circumstances that any surveys like these can only point to general trends that may or may not be relevant to us - as with everything, we should look behind the headlines, consider if there are findings which speak into our circumstance, work out what we can do about them, and then just get on with it, and continue making our own path.