Penny, when you think about your self-employed job, what are the things that you suspect to be harmful? Is it the idea that you're constantly having to create business for yourself or is it just the presence of what you had been doing during the drinking career?
This general topic has been the latest chapter of my life, so I won't have any results to report on.
I am laughing at Bam's reaction, because I recently dropped a position that depended on selling ability through actual cold calls. I enjoyed myself while in the process of doing it, but it was torture leading up to it. I literally had to have a list in front of me that I could weed whack through and not let the phone out of my hand, so that I would keep going. (That's what some sales trainers recommend too.) After a while, I realized, if it was this unnatural, then I didn't like it naturally enough. I was too analytical for that. I would assess and over-assess my premise for approaching this place and that place, and that comes from my discipline in being on the receiving end of problems and fixing them (as opposed to looking for new territory). I also found myself gravitating toward others in the office when they would have something go wrong, and that comes from being in a supervisory position in the past. So as much as I had wanted to build on being a hunter and not a farmer, I had to let go. It wasn't the right place to make it work either. And all of that was after starting to be self-employed and after quitting drinking and after quitting my previous job in which I was earning nice barrels of money. So I am working on getting back into something similar to the past - even though that's what I did during the drinking career.
I asked a similar question around March of last year, if you feel like clicking on my profile (Statistics/Threads Started By) and sifting all the way back to it. There were reactions that were diametrically opposed to one another, yet there wasn't one single winning approach for me.
I think it has to be something that is going to facilitate your CHOICE to be what you are now (no longer using) but it has to sustain you too. One of the things we improve upon after quitting is how to have more than one important priority in life without the alcohol there. Or that's what we should do. So I'm going to be mindful of that once the "old career" is there again.
So my answer is not black/white. I wish I could hand it to you as factually as a pay statement, but it's part of the progress each person has to make on their own. Maybe dissect it some more? On the other hand, maybe you already have the answer and it's buried underneath feelings of uncertainty and newness and you just need to act on it.