This update is a little bit different to normal, because it’s not really about business at all.
It’s about me taking a real, in-person, paid-by-the-hour nursing job.
WHY? Why would I do such a thing when I love online business so much?!
I talk about my history with nursing, my new nursing job, and how it fell into my lap at exactly the right time.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to Online Business from Scratch, where I usually talk about how to start a flexible online business that enables you to homeschool, travel, and live a pretty awesome life.
But today, I have a bit of an unexpected update, and it’s to tell you that I got a job. Like, a real job where I have to go somewhere regularly and get paid by the hour.
Although I’ve mentioned it in my emails, I’ve had quite a lot of questions about it, so I wanted to explain a little more because getting a job was not on my radar. I had committed to focusing on my business for this entire year. So, here’s what changed.
Our living situation right now is that we’re finished traveling for a while. We’re renting a house, and we will probably stay here for two years. That feels really, really scary to say because my husband and I have never, in our 23-plus years of being together, stayed in one place for over 18 months. But our two boys don’t want to travel, and being in one place is really the right thing for both of them right now. So we figure we can do it for them and turn it into a positive situation, which should be fairly easy, really, because we’re in a lovely place with lots of good stuff to do.
That led to the, “Well, we’re settled, should we work?” question. Now, the husband is pretty happy to work and earn some money independently because he doesn’t really do online work, apart from being my organizer and coach and generally helping to keep me on track—which is actually incredibly valuable and needed for me. Plus, he’s my unwilling slave when I need him to do tedious things. But overall, online work is not his thing, so he’s off working casually.
Then I thought, “Well, should I nurse? Because if I don’t, I’ll probably never be able to nurse again.”
As a little backstory, I qualified as a nurse at the end of 2019. The standard thing would be to do a graduate program in 2020, but I didn’t even apply to any. We had a lot of really stressful stuff going on in 2019, and I didn’t have the time or energy to apply. I also didn’t actually know where we were going to be in 2020, which made it a little hard to apply for work eight months in advance. Because I missed that initial grad year training and we travel a lot, and we have five homeschooled children, I’ve only done two stints in aged care since I qualified. To be honest, I haven’t really enjoyed either of them.
I definitely enjoyed parts of it, but I do find that sort of shift work and the relentless pace, low-level chaos, and unpredictability absolutely exhausting. I like routine and control and calm and quiet, and I also like regular sleep and not doing night shifts, although I probably hate night shifts much more than I should. And all of those are really bad signs for a nurse. I wish I’d had this self-insight before I started studying, to be honest, because I would have done something other than nursing. Although I absolutely love the health side of it—I’m a pathophysiology, public health, health behavior, and research nerd—that doesn’t necessarily translate into loving the typical hectic nursing experience of most hospital and aged care work.
I haven’t nursed for two years now, which is a long time for a job that requires being up to date. So when we decided to settle down for a while, I was considering just doing a day a week in aged care to at least maintain my registration because there is a minimum working requirement for nursing. That was just in case I wanted to get more into it in the future. On the other hand, I was seriously considering just giving it up—saying, “Yep, I did the degree, I love the academic side, but I didn’t really like most of my placements, I didn’t really like my aged care jobs, and any nursing I think I would like would require an actual career and further study. I’m not great at being in one place long term, so it’s not really doable.”
Plus, I have this online business—I love doing it, it has financially supported us for years and years, I don’t actually need to nurse financially.
So the only thing really holding me to it was the whole sunk cost fallacy in thinking that I put so much time, effort, stress, and money into getting this degree, and now I’ve barely used it. And I think, too, there’s also the high achiever hangover left over from school, where I think, “Wait a minute, I got the best marks in my entire nursing degree in the graduating year; I should do something with this.” So it really does feel like mostly a sunk cost fallacy, thinking that I should get back into nursing.
So I was tossing up either barely maintaining my nursing registration with a one-shift-a-week routine job in aged care or giving up on nursing completely. Then I took my 18-year-old son to the local disability agency to enroll him in their supported employment and day programs. While I was there, the guy showing us around was talking about all the new staff they’re employing. I asked if they ever employ nurses, and he got rather excited and said, “Well, yeah, we do! And our nurse just left, and we’re about to start advertising to replace her.”
I said, “Oh, okay, so should I keep an eye on your website if I’m interested?”
He said, “No, no, no, we’ll call you.”
So long story short, after a couple of interviews and a big pile of paperwork-type stuff, they offered me the job of being a clinical educator and coordinator for their disability service, and I accepted. If I believed in the universe, I would say that this job was meant for me. I’ll mostly be training support workers in clinical tasks, putting together training materials for them, and making sure they stay up to date with their training and practice. So it is mostly teaching and training, which I absolutely love doing. It’s only day work—there’s no shift work or on-call, and it’s three set days per week. So I can have a regular routine and not be sleep-deprived.
It was actually a full-time job. I said, “I can’t do that. I’ve got homeschool kids at home; I can only do three shifts.” And they were fine with that. So this really is the sort of nursing job that I actually wanted to try but didn’t think I could get without years more of exhausting on-the-floor shift work experience. And the job pretty much got dropped in my lap.
But I did still dither. I mentioned the strain to my husband in the last episode because it feels like my business is really starting to grow now. And I’m in a house, so I have more time and headspace to create courses and more products, and the business has been really enjoyable lately. So I feel sad thinking that I’ll have to scale it back to do this job, but I also think that I could really like this job. It’s a pretty unique opportunity, and it’s probably the last long stint we’ll ever have in a house. So I figure I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes.
So my plan for the moment is to put the business aside for the first month while I settle into the job and get used to it. I’ve already removed the option to get a business idea review because that’s one-on-one work, but people can still sign up for the free Business Idea Blitz and the paid Beyond Productivity course. I do have a few summits and other events coming up that I had already committed to, so I’ll still be doing those. And my automated emails will still go out, plus my podcast and blog posts are still out there for anyone to find and read and listen to.
So hopefully after that first month or so, I will be back. I will be making less progress, but I will still be growing my business slowly because I really love doing this. I love writing and doing workshops and creating courses and working with all of you on your ideas and businesses and seeing what you achieve, so I don’t just want to stop. And I also know that I will be traveling and hiking and adventuring around the world again in the future, so I’d better make sure I’ve got a way of funding that.
And I have a funny job-related story for you. The thing I was most stressed about with this job wasn’t, you know, technically being underqualified or the fact that I’ll be creating all these new learning materials or working pretty much independently to teach and train over 200 support workers. All that stuff’s fine; it doesn’t bother me at all. The thing I was most stressed about was dressing appropriately.
So do you also freak out about what to wear? Like, I love uniforms, even ugly uniforms, and nursing usually has uniforms. But this is an office job, and it’s not a shirt-and-tailored-pants office job. It’s more of a smart casual dress code with what seems like a huge range of possible options. But that also means a huge pile of unwritten rules that I would probably unknowingly breach with my ignorance of fashion, which is the sort of thing that makes my autistic brain just want to melt down and say, “Come on, just give me a uniform! Give me strict rules! Please just tell me exactly what to wear!”
Plus, I generally feel like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts cartoons. I think that you can put me in something stylish, and within an hour, it will be crumpled, and I’ll have dropped food on it, even if I hadn’t eaten. And even when I try my absolute best to look put together, something always goes wrong, and I still always look like I’ve been dragged backward through a hedge. It’s just me. I’ve accepted it; I’m always going to be a derro.
So I went to a few stores in my small town. I hated everything. I thought it all looked wrong and stupid and just had no idea what I was meant to wear, so I was kind of freaking out about it a bit. But luckily, my eldest daughter Gabrielle swooped in to save me. She came to visit, and she knew I was stressing about this, so she found me a big range of funky tops from Dangerfield. We went through them and I ordered three. She also approved of some pants that I used to wear for nursing, and she brought back a nice Italian wool jacket that I bought in a Greek op shop that I left with her. She’s reviewed all of it and told me that it should be very appropriate.
So there you go—welcome to my life, where I can single-handedly take on the training of over 200 support workers in some pretty complex clinical stuff, but freak out about what top is appropriate to wear while doing it. We all have our special things, right? And I’m just very grateful I have lovely children and other people who help me with the stuff that I find particularly hard.
So there you go. I wasn’t really expecting this job opportunity, but I am very used to plot twists in my life, so I’m going to take it and run with it, give it my best shot, and see whether I can actually find a nursing role that I like doing. And once I’ve got that under control, I’ll be back here helping you with your business while I build mine, and we can carry on where we left off.
I’ll do one more podcast update on how I tidy up and get ready to put my business aside for a month while I’m pretending to be a normal, respectable adult. And of course, while I’m gone, you can always email with your questions, replies, whatever you have. I’ll still actually be here; I’ll just be trying really hard not to work on my business until I get the job under control.
So wish me luck! I’m scared, but I’m doing this thing, which is all we can do, right?
All right, I’m off. I’ll be back soon with my pre-working tidy-up episode, and I’ll chat with you then.
Thank you for listening, and I will be back next time with the latest update. I will see you then!
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