being all things to all people - the realities of being self employed and an unpaid carer

This post was written at the start of carers week 2023 - and is based on conversations amongst freelancers and owners of small businesses at events hosted by Freelance Heroes and Atomicon23.

It is not intended to offer definitive, medical, or legal counsel or guidance - but reflect emergent themes and issues that may be of encouragement and support to others; and possibly also highlight future wider policy development needs. 

My name is Adrian, and I'm an unpaid carer for my adult step-child, as well as being a freelance business consultant.

In my head that makes me sound like I'm at an alcoholics anonymous meeting, but maybe it's not too dissimilar: people often struggle to feel comfortable in knowing how to best behave in the company of an alcoholic, and similarly with someone who's an unpaid carer (unless you're living it day to day, it can be hard to fully appreciate the realities of the identities and roles that you hold and manage as such).

But unlike my counterparts who are in salaried, direct employment, there are no legal recognitions for me as an unpaid carer in my (paid) work; and no data on how many other people like me there are - in preparing to host the roundtable discussions that this blog is based on, the Office of National Statistics, the Labour Force Survey, and ipse all revealed that there is no data about how many people who are self-employed/business owners are also unpaid carers. 

A rough-cut extrapolation of data I could find about unpaid carers in general, and different models of employment, might seem to suggest that roughly 10% of the self-employed are also unpaid carers (that's about half a million people!), and of those, less than 1 in 10 have access to any support for themselves in these roles - and as freelancers, we're more likely to be in poverty if we're an unpaid carer than if we were salaried.

Starting to initially explore these issues with groups of fellow freelancers, small business owners, and sole traders who are also unpaid carers like me, saw the following emerge and being shared:

 

Busting accepted wisdom about origin stories

It can be easy to assume that people who are unpaid carers chose to become self-employed to offer themselves more flexibility around their unpaid caring role - but what came out of the discussions, is that this wasn't always the case.

Often, people took on the mantle of an unpaid carer role after having been self-employed for many years, and as a result subsequently found they needed support with redeveloping how they worked in order to be able to maintain their earnings to continue to support themselves and their families (but this isn't offered/available to them).

Seeing it coming

In one of the roundtables, a person shared how they had joined the conversation to learn from others' experiences because they had recently recognised that in future years, they will need to be more actively involved in supporting the care of their parents. 

They were trying to be pro-active in managing the impact that becoming an unpaid carer would have on themselves, their family, and their business by better understanding the likely realities they will experience when they do. As a result, they hoped to be able to best plan to mitigate the impacts of this - and this roundtable had offered them the first opportunity to be able to do this in any meaningful way.

The need for a better handbook

Through sharing their experiences, people agreed that there was much about being an unpaid carer that they wish they had know sooner, but which no-one had told them (for example - the benefits of being able to be formally recognised and registered as a carer for a family member). 

While there is knowledge out there, it can be hard to navigate and identify ("you don't know what you need to know, so don't know what questions to ask").  People are frequently relying on friends and family for informal (emotional) support for themselves, but as encouraging as these people might be, they rarely know of practical and pre-existing systems and processes that unpaid carers can apply to, but often aren't told about.

The limiting of business growth and potential

A common recurring practicality about being an unpaid carer that was shared, was how it meant that the businesses we had created all had to be limited in terms of their potential to grow in order to honour our caring responsibilities - and with that, our ability to innovate and develop new services and offers in the marketplace.

Whilst this is obviously a personal decision that all unpaid carers find ways to eventually reconcile, this speaks to the impact of the need for unpaid care to our wider economy.

The cost to our personal futures

As well as the financial impact that being an unpaid carer creates through loss of earnings (which is not mitigated through carers allowance were it is able to be awarded), there was also concern about how little support there is for us to be able to access for ourselves in this role - one person shared how becoming an unpaid carer had led to them being diagnosed with mental ill health, and being subsequently needing to be prescribed anti-depressants.

The emotional stresses that unpaid care places on us therefore also affects the future we might have otherwise experienced for ourselves, through it is affecting our well-being today. 

The need for supportive clients

A tension was briefly explored around our relationships with our clients as small business owners - specifically, how far we're open with them about our identify and priorities as an unpaid carer, and how this tension can be managed in how we work with them. As freelancers, our clients come to us to solve problems quickly, responsively, and without adding to their own existing complexity, so revealing we may need to drop them at no notice because of a caring need, may understandably 'spook' them a little...

People shared how their clients were generally sympathetic and flexible in work agreed - but not every business that commissions us will be able to be such; which loops us back to the limiting on our business' potential that being an unpaid carer can entail.

Taking back control

Being self-employed often means we face a barrage of external stressors because of the ever-changing circumstances we all experience that are instigated by others (clients, government, etc) - and being an unpaid carer only exacerbates these through the additional unknowns of how the child, parent, or sibling we care for may respond on any given day to any given event, how reviews of their care or support plans may trigger new complications, and so on.

The roundtables therefore also tried to look at how we're approaching supporting ourselves, and in doing so, gain a little more control over our own lives:

- counselling support from the FSB was mentioned as one of their member benefits, that one person had made use of;

- one person shared how they had chosen to deliberately limit the earnings of their business to reduce the stress on having to work with multiple clients on different deadlines which would otherwise be constantly competing with the needs of their child, that they are the unpaid carer for;

- taking out a private health care plan to be able to arrange GP appointments, any procedures, etc at times that suited them, rather than playing the lottery of NHS scheduling and waiting lists, was shared by someone else;

- registering as a limited company, rather than remaining a sole trader, was shared as a way one person had approached reducing the stress they were feeling about the risks in their business alongside being an unpaid carer.

But these roundtables weren't all 'doom and gloom' as might start to be otherwise interpreted based on the above:

- there was also news about 'Cornerstone', a new emergent peer community for freelancers who are also unpaid carers being created;  

- gratitude was expressed for people having the opportunity to (briefly) share time with their peers, and be edified from hearing that what they were experiencing wasn't unique to them; 

- and people also valued how being an unpaid carer creates space for us to reflect on our own personal identities as human beings.

If you're an unpaid carer you may find the below sites of help (as well as links in the various parts of the blog above):

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/looking-after-people/carers-help-and-support/

https://www.gov.uk/browse/benefits/help-for-carers

https://www.carersuk.org/help-and-advice/

I'm also happy to offer to speak with any fellow small business owners, sole traders, and freelancers to swap stories that may be of mutual benefit - as well as with any sector or national bodies to further explore potential policy and initiatives that may address some of the themes and issues these roundtables identified:

- the impact to the economy of 500,000 businesses not being able to achieve their potential;

- the need for business disruption to be avoided when small business owners transition into unpaid care roles;

- how freelancers can be better supported to access support/avoid poverty when becoming unpaid carers.

UPDATE 3rd AUG 2023:

Published after these round tables, and blog was written up, JRF have undertaken some further research into this, and found that as unpaid carers who are also freelance/self-employed/small business owners, we pay a #CaringPenalty (suffer lost earnings) of nearly £10,000 every year!

- any wonder so many of us are finding ourselves being pushed into poverty?

https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/caring-penalty

I'm always trying to be a better conman

One of the recurring pieces of feedback I get from many of the people and organisations I've worked with, is how they've enjoyed how the ways in which I've enabled them to create the changes they've struggled to achieve, but always aspired to.

And got me thinking about what the 'secret sauce' is that I always try and use, and bring to every project and contract I'm involved with.

I've realised it's all about my being a con-man:

Con(findence) - modelling behaviours and actions myself, to inspire and encourage others in turn; so that they might be able to reach further than they thought they could, or felt brave enough to.

Con(nections) - we all rely on other people to varying degrees for everything that we want to achieve and enjoy in this life. I'm always happy to share contacts in my network with others to try and create some serendipity whenever and wherever possible. I also recognise that I'm mortal, so at some point, people will need to know who else they might be all to call on in the future... 

Con(viction) - life is hard and unfair. We need to keep finding ways to motivate ourselves, which is why I try and only get involved in work that I think is meaningful in some way, and creates benefit for others. Part of how I work is wanting to find ways to get excited about the things I find myself involved in.

So there it is - I'm a conman, and that's probably a good thing for the people who ask me to share some of their journeys and adventures with them.      

How people's forgetfulness is costing me a family home (or, maybe it's time I stopped trying to be so idealistic?)

A few years ago, I started to track how much time I'd 'lost' from people forgetting to turn up to meetings that they'd asked for with me, or from groups who'd booked me to run workshops for them, only to cancel them the day before.

My reason for this wasn't motivated by spite or indignation, but rather to try and quantify and understand the extent of the impact of such occurrences on my business; and what that meant in turn for how well I could earn money to support my family.

http://thirdsectorexpert.blogspot.com/2020/06/to-everyone-who-forgot-to-turn-up-to.html 

The first time I reported this figure was in 2020 - and it a showed a whopping £4,560 over the year; equivalent to treating my family to a meal out once a week every week of the year.

Sadly, that figure has continued to rise year on year, and since 2020 it's jumped by over 80% to the latest reported value of £8,325!

That's about £160 a week that I otherwise could have earned - nearly £700 a month: almost the average cost of renting a family home in the UK! 

Over the last 18 years since I've become self employed, I've always tried to practice the value of grace in different ways - which to date, includes not penalising people who are causing me to incur these lost earnings (which, frankly, would be very welcome in my bank account in light of current inflationary and cost of living pressures). I could have been charging them a percentage of what I would have otherwise realised from working with them in those periods of time: a common practice in the terms and conditions amongst my fellow consultants and training providers.

But in light of people and groups seeming to be becoming more dismissive of recognising the impact (hurt) that their not trying to make effort to have the courtesy of letting me know when they know that they they're not going to be able to spend the time with me that they'd agreed to, and with sufficient notice for it not to cause me further financial distress, maybe I need to start introducing some 'nudges' in my own T&C's?

And that sucks - because, as I wrote before, I'm aware of how messy and unpredictable the world can be at times, and we can't always know when we're going to be knocked sideways. But surely, if we all know how much we're all struggling, we should at least be trying to make an effort to recognise when a change in our own circumstances may affect others, by having the courtesy to give each other a quick heads-up?

Perhaps by starting to include some penalties in how I agree to work with people, that might help to start to nudge behaviours so that we can all become a little more sympathetic, understanding, and supportive of each other?

But doing so would mean I'm starting to compromise on what I try and hold as one of my core values - perhaps after 18 years it's time I accepted that I can't carry on being so idealistic?

erased from history (by facebook)

You won't be able to find me on Facebook any more.

And more than that - you won't be able to find any trace that I was ever there since I first registered my account on the platform about 20 years ago... no sign of any photos I posted, comments I made on your posts, nor membership of any groups.

And it's not because I've decided I hate you all and don't want to hang out with you anymore - but because I found myself being targeted by hackers who, it seems, when they couldn't get through my passwords and 2-factor authentication do-hickey, managed to find a back door way to link my personal Facebook profile to what must have been a very illegal Instagram account.

And I know this because when I recently tried to log into Facebook , it told me that my account has been disabled - and reading around this topic, it seems that whatever the hackers were doing on the Instagram account was bad enough for it to qualify as an immediate and automatic disabling (deleting) of both that account, and under the rules of the Metaverse, any accounts linked to it (which included mine, thanks to the hackers), with no right to be able to submit a request to review the decision.

Now - I know what most of you reading this will be thinking at this point:

"how awful for you (I'm glad it wasn't me that happened to!)"

"that's really unfair that you can't appeal this - surely there must be something you can do?"

Well - like I said, I read around this level of disabling and them's the rules that we signed up to when we created our accounts, and agreed to keep them going when Facebook went Meta.

Life isn't always fair - and no-one owes me anything (a personal mantra that helps me with navigating and pressing on in this world).

I'm fortunate to have grown up in a pre-Facebook world, so as upsetting as this might seem, I feel I'm able to bear it better than those that have come after me into this internet age would. Somehow I navigated this life before Facebook was born, so there's a chance I'll (hopefully) be able to again.

Whilst I do have the option to 'regenerate' myself on Facebook by recreating a new profile and account from scratch, I'm not immediately rushing to do so.

I'm using this unexpected plot twist to allow myself some time away from that playground - to have space to reflect and experience what it's like not to be on Facebook, so that if/when I return, I'll be clearer about how I manage my relationship with it (and hopefully it will have strenthgthed it's security and rights of appeal by then, too...)  

why volunteer as a small business owner?

Being self-employed or a small business is hard.

We're the ones responsible for making sure everything's being taken care of, to resolve all the issues as they arise, and to also make sure the coffee doesn't run out...

We spend more hours working than our salaried counterparts - so from a starting point of being more pressured and having less free time, how could we even consider adding volunteering to our calendars?

Well, various researches show that there are lots of reasons that motivate people to volunteer:

https://www.ncvo.org.uk/news-and-insights/news-index/time-well-spent-employer-supported-volunteering/what-are-the-main-motivations-for-getting-involved-in-esv/#/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319067855_What_drives_employees_to_participate_in_corporate_volunteering_programs/link/59fff5b4a6fdcca1f29ef9e6/download

For me, volunteering is something I do through my pro bono work. It's part of my CPD: the opportunity to get involved in projects and activities that I might otherwise not, and in doing so, push my skills and gain new knowledge.

And it's also part of my values: for example, as a member of the Federation of Small Businesses, I try and show solidarity and support and encourage fellow small businesses, through volunteering as a host of one of their networking forums. 

I have an idea that it we're not clear as to why we're doing something before we embark on it, then at best we won't get the most benefit from the experience, and at work - it will be a waste of time.

So if you're thinking about what you might be able to 'give back' through volunteering as a small business/business owner/freelancer/sole trader - it's ok to think about what you might want to get out of the experience, and then to seek out ways that best help you to achieve that.

How long can I keep it up for?

In January 2005 I officially became self-employed. I never meant to be (and still don't), but in seeking to try and make the most of it from every angle, I've committed to a range of ongoing practices - one of which is my annual impact report.

It began in 2006 with 2 throwaway lines on my then CV, and didn't even feature in my blog here until I'd done the 4th one of them!

But over the years, the framework I've created has expanded and evolved so that it's now looked to as a leading example of 'integrated impact reporting'; picked over by people in different countries around the world; and is now starting to increasingly raise questions about/highlight how the context for how I work is changing (and not just because of when I started this, the UN's Global Goals, and letters 'ESG' didn't exist!).

And this years' has already elicited feedback that likens its approach and structure to the professional revalidation that medical practitioners have to undergo every year to prove that they remain safe to care for patients (which I'm taking as a pretty hefty endorsement of it being an excellent way to evidence my CPD*).

However, one of the other early comments that's also come back has particularly struck me - "17 years of impact reporting - that's dedication!"  I've been sharing this 'warts and all' view of how I work, and what happens as a result of it, every year for 17 years.  

I'm not sure I know of any other organisation who's published so many such reports about themselves in this way, so I'm hoping there's someone out there who can 'prove me wrong' and help reassure me that I'm not the 'oldest tool in the bag' when it comes to publishing impact reports on their work?

* In this instance, the letters mean what most people usually associate with them, rather than what I do... 

  

imposters in the RSA

I was recently asked to give a talk about some of the ideas in my book about imposter syndrome by the RSA North, as part of their ongoing Coffeehouse programme which seeks to spread thinking and insights to help create more/better change throughout our communities.

Having been approached to become a Fellow in 2007 by direct invitation from the Society (to my knowledge, the only such instance - everyone else I meet who's connected to the RSA became a Fellow through either direct personal application, or being nominated by an existing Fellow!), I've always been encouraged by the profile and ideas of other people that they've helped to share, so to now be part of that recognised body of changemakers who they offer a platform to, is an exciting validation of my own!

But unlike previous invitations I've received to date from sector bodies to lead conversations based on the ideas in the book, this time the format was much more about my conveying a summation of my research and arguments, followed by a short Q&A.

Rather than re-hash what I shared in my presentation (that's all available through either reading the book, or dipping in and out of the 2-min videos on my YouTube channel's playlist), I wanted to try and capture some of what people shared in response to what I brought, and the initial conversations that started to flow from it:

• Many people in the session felt that they don't have easy access to opportunities to talk about any feelings of self-doubt in constructive ways. As a result, people can live with feelings of imposterism for prolonged periods of time, unsure of how to resolve them, and this can create ongoing damage and distress for them.  
• Imposter Syndrome can sometimes be 'weaponised' by others against us: if we start to exhibit skill and potential that a colleague feels threatened by, it can be easier for them to seek to undermine our confidence to maintain their position, rather than 'rise to the challenge' and 'level up their own game'.
• If a person feels that they've never experienced feelings of self-doubt/imposterism, then this may be a sign that they could have psychopathic traits. However, this does not automatically mean that such people are automatically dangerous or destructive...
• A lack of role models for a person in new or emerging roles (which can be a frequent 'root cause' of feelings of imposterism developing within someone), can sometimes be mitigated through a carefully designed mentoring or coaching relationship.

But as always with opportunities like this to reflect on the books ideas with others - to gain feedback, critique, and seek to further build on them, the time goes all too quickly. And the above capture offers tantalising hints at future conversations we might like to explore more fully and deeply - so, if you were in that lunchtime talk, and want to carry on the discussion, or you'd like to reflect on some of your own experiences and thinking about any of the above, I'd be very happy to find a time to chat over a cuppa (virtual or otherwise!).