Andrea's Story
"You’re just going to take easy steps, day by day, towards achieving your dreams."
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The following is a transcription of Andrea's Video story........
Hello my name is Andrea Lomas and I run a business called Big Love Amigos. I am a holistic therapist. Before I started my business I’d actually been out of work due to illness for about 4 years. I was only in my mid twenties when this happened so I hadn’t really developed a career history. During the time I was ill I was really quite despondent about what I was going to do and how I was going to start work again, but I knew over this time that really I wanted to work in alternative medicine because during the period I was ill I started to become really interested in lots of different kinds of therapies. I tried Chinese medicine, Yoga and Reiki and I started to study these things privately on distance learning courses.
I just gave myself treatments and gave treatments to friends and family on a really, really small scale as I started to get better. I just started to get more and more passionate about it because I could really see the benefits of all these kind of therapies and I myself just got better and better over a couple of years. I knew really that it just wasn’t something I wanted to do on the side while I had another conventional job I really wanted to do this with my life and the most sensible way to do something like that would be to seek self employment.
I practice a number of complementary therapies mainly I practice Reiki but I also practice Southern Chinese Massage, acupressure and I’m learning to be a Yoga teacher and a counsellor. I work in a variety of different places throughout my week. A couple of days a week I work in a day centre mainly for the elderly and people who are recovering from strokes, or who have multiple sclerosis or who have different kinds of conditions. I just give treatments all day two days a week in the local day centre. For another 2 days in the week I work in a primary school where I do some short treatments on the staff during their lunch hour and sometimes do a relaxation class after work. But mainly I work with children who have different needs, whether they have emotional problems or they’ve been through a specific traumatic event in their lives. They just come for an hour a week each and we do basically relaxation work and creative work. So we’ve adapted the skills inherent in the holistic therapy to use for different people.
I think probably the greatest disadvantage about being self employed is that you are responsible for your whole business. If you have to have a day off ill there is nobody to stand in for you and usually because you don’t have a contract with anybody you don’t get paid if you don’t go to work. So that’s a bit daunting and after being out of work due to illness for quite a long time, I think I found that a little scary. But if you just develop your own business at your own pace eventually you just become more and more confident and you learn the skills you need to do that.
The greatest advantage, obviously, is that you have the freedom, you do the work you want to do. As long as you have the energy and the time and the commitment to go out there and open up new opportunities when you need to or you want to it’s - you know – the world is your oyster really. And, obviously, you are doing the thing you want to do for your work which I personally think is one of the greatest things you can have in your life - to enjoy your job - because it takes up so much of your life.
I think the greatest advice I can give is really the old maxim that there is nothing ventured nothing gained. If you just go out there and talk to people and get information you don’t have to worry about, you know, leaping into the gulf and having to go for it straight away. You’re just going to take easy steps, day by day towards achieving your dreams. As soon as you go out there and start talking to people you are going to learn more and more about how to make it work and really I think you’ll find it’s much more possible than you probably thought it was and you’ll also meet other people in a similar position so you just start to feel that you have all the support around you that you need. As you go along you are going to be able to know where to go and who to talk to if you have any problems or things don’t work out quite how you want them to straight away how to adapt to that situation. So, yeah, I’d just go out there and find that support and ask the right questions and start to, you know, make it happen