I know I haven’t written much about making the escape since I left my corporate job nine months ago to become a full-time freelancing circus freak. It was my  focus for a long, long time and now that I’m on the other side I think about it less and therefore it shows up on my blog less. But, I know there are still lots of you out there working hard on your side hustle and dreaming of the day you’ll be able to quit and I want to make sure I’m still providing information and inspiration to help you do that.

So! I’m going to do a little Q & A session answering your questions on how to get started, how to figure out what your side hustle should be, how to stay organized, how to ignore family and friends who think it’s not such a good idea, how to know when it’s really time to leap, etc.

Leave your questions in the comments, send them via Twitter, Facebook it or email me and then next Wednesday I’ll be back with answers – I might even do a video!

OK – ask away!

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One of the most important things to do when working toward a goal is surround yourself with inspiration. Tack up photos of people with killer abs, subscribe to blogs of dedicated knitters, make plans with friends nurturing their own small businesses. No matter what you’re working on, having a daily reminder of where you’re headed can be hugely motivating.

I’ve been on a workout kick lately and have started following a bunch of women on Instagram who post exercises, recipes and yes, their killer abs. A few of my favorites are @sillysilje @karenakatrina @sitarabird @lululemon @fitqueenirene

Here are some other ideas for incorporating inspiration into your daily life:

+ Follow Pinterest boards dedicated to what you love

+ Subscribe to mailing lists for a daily dose of motivation delivered straight to your inbox

+ Magazine subscriptions

+ A weekly class or meet-up

+ A YouTube channel

+ Instagram hashtags – I love checking out #aerialist and #circuslife

Let’s hear what you’re working on and your three favorite sources of inspiration.

Who knows, maybe some of you are working toward the same goal.

Have you ever had a big meeting, date, or interview and immediately started thinking of everything that will go wrong? All the questions you won’t have answers to? The flaws the other person might see? I have, and I’ve developed a little trick to combat the worry and the negative voices so I can be confident and get what I want.

Here’s what I do…

I’m lucky enough to have received incredibly complimentary emails from some of my lovely readers and lots of positive reviews from my clients. So, I put those into a folder in my Gmail along sweet messages from friends. Then when I need a reminder of all my badass qualities, I just read through a few and my confidence gets an instant boost.

Now I know a few of you are thinking, “Buuuut no one ever sends me nice emails!” So here’s my solution – if you don’t have any emails or cards to cheer you on, ask someone to write one for you. I’m sure your mom, brother, best friend or even your child would be happy to write you a little note extolling your virtues and best qualities.

Or better yet,write a mood-boosting note to someone else and you might just get one in return! Plus, the act of doing something nice for someone else will make you feel happy either way.

The positivity folder is also helpful after being scolded at work, having a fight with a friend or just an all around crummy day.

How do you get yourself pumped up for important events when you’re not feeling all that confident?

ALSO! Hello to all of you coming by from Yes & Yes (you might like my posts on accomplishing goals & working as a freelancer) and from Cathy Trails via Sometimes Sweet (you might like my Nerd Party posts – I’m happy to answer your questions too) Lovely to meet you & I hope you come back soon :)

I hope you all had a sparkling celebration last night. I caught myself a cold, so Piglet and I stayed in and watch a bajillion episodes of Parenthood (have you watched this show??) I’m still under the weather today, so I’ll just leave you with this thought for the start of 2013 :)

Since last year was all about conquering THE big goal, in 2013 I want to focus on balancing my two careers with the rest of my life. While I love what I do and am thankful and excited for ever opportunity, juggling two jobs when I’m the boss can be very stressful. In addition to being the designer and performer, I’m the accountant, tech support, the organizer, email responder, shop updater and a million other things. I want to figure out how to minimize the amount of stress and also work on dealing with it when it comes crashing into my life.

+ Stop worrying about what others are thinking or doing: I’m always reminding myself to focus on what makes ME happy and to stay in my bubble and love what I’m doing. A little Facebook cleanup was helpful in fixing this problem.

+ Finish all the decor details I’ve been thinking about: I spend a lot of time at home and there are a few things on my to-do list that are constant distractions, like the mismatched couch pillows that I want to recover and the bathroom, which is the only room I haven’t painted yet.

+ Get back to blogging five days a week (post suggestions welcome!): Since I left my corporate job and am no longer bored and chained to a cubicle all day, creating new content has falling to the wayside. I want to get back to posting regularly and create more in-depth content.

+ Find a hobby: I turned both my hobbies into jobs, which is a good and bad thing…I’ll be writing about this one next week.

+ Be deliriously happy with my life: My jobs are kind of awesome, I stumble upon brilliant opportunities all the time, I should be thrilled much more than I usually am. It’s time to work on that.

What are your goals / resolutions for the new year?

It’s raining and icky outside. I ate a giant brunch and would prefer to nap than work. I’ve  looked at my to-do list at least five times already and instead of tackling anything I made a wallpaper for my iPhone and ordered a new bag online. (It was red with fringe – I couldn’t help myself.) Even with all my goal-making prowess and motivation, sometimes work just isn’t happening, so here’s what I do.

1. Write down the top five things I need to do

2. Put items in order of importance (Google to-do list is quite helpful for this little switcheroo)

3. Work on one thing at a time, starting with the most important, ignoring the rest

Also helpful for monumental to-do lists and raging deadlines.

Photo via LIFE

This is how my white board last looked for the past two months. Completely blank. You may recall it was the site for my escape plan and every goal I’ve checked off for the past year. But now that I’m done working toward such a massive project, my new goals are focused inward. It feels a little strange to wake up to that empty board every morning, but it seems sort of strange to write down and check off more personal less quantifiable things.

All of these goals are part of my continuing effort to de-clutter and de-stress my life. There are far too many unnecessary, unpleasant things that I’ve just allow to be there. Like a pile of laundry sitting on my bedroom floor – I think about it every time I walk into the room – but never feel like making the effort to put it away. Now that my white board is empty, I have space in my life to work on a few small, but important things.

+ Have patience with Piglet, my friends and clients. Think of answering questions and small mistakes as part of an education instead of an annoyance. Take a breath and think for a moment about the other person’s point of view before responding with negativity.

+ Cook with recipes instead of throwing things together. I eat nachos for dinner far more than I’d like to admit and I would like to become a more skilled cook. I made this last night with locally grown tomatoes – it was easy and like eating a plate full of magic. (This also come from all the French books I’ve been reading)

+ Get out of the house more. If friends didn’t text me to go out, I would probably stay parked on the couch working all week. I’m trying to be more spontaneous and go out when there is something fun to do and stay home and work when there isn’t.

+ Go to bed earlier and get up earlier. I have really taken advantage of the fact that I can get up and work whenever I like. I generally wander off to bed around 3am and wake up around noon though I would prefer to go to bed around 1am and get up around 9. (Especially since it was pointed out to me that come winter, waking up at noon only leaves me with a few hours of daylight.)

+ Take pleasure or inject pleasure into every minute of my life. Work outside instead of on the couch, walk piglet while the sun is shining, buy produce at the farmers market, do mostly things that make me happy.

+ And lastly, writing more thoughtful, true-to-me blog posts. Danielle touched on something I’ve been thinking about – how we sometimes share a watered down version of ourselves online – not too happy and not too sad – in order to avoid looking braggy or overly negative. I do have a level of professionalism I like to keep as this blog helps to build my business, but I also have lots of days where I’m deliriously happy or completely ready to give up and stay in bed for a week. So I’m going to try and open up a bit more.

Have you been working on any personal goals lately?

Click here for more posts on achieving goals

Walk to the grocery store: I have a confession…there is a really great little grocery store five blocks from my house, my house that I have lived in for three and a half years…and I’ve never once walked there. Now that I’m working from home, I don’t need to drive anywhere on a daily basis, so there’s no reason I should be jumping in my car to go a few blocks. From now on, I’m walking!

Read Small Business for Dummies: It’s been sitting on my shelf for six months. I own two small businesses. Yeah…I should probably read it.

Nifty Nines every day: We do this fantastically horribly painfully awesome ab workout in aerial class. It’s nine exercises, you do 10 or 20 of each, get really sweaty and end up with rock hard abs.

Do you have any little goals you’ve made this summer?

What’s your switch? That little thing that can pull you out of a motivation rut just as fast as flipping a light switch? That thing you need on days when all you want to do is park it on the couch, put your feet up on the coffee table, and watch Gossip Girl reruns for hours?

For me, it’s cleaning. If I start doing the dishes and then maybe Swiffer the floor, before I know it the bathroom is cleaned, couch vacuumed, plants watered, dog walked, bills paid, spreadsheets balanced, email answered, sites built. I usually come to my senses around 11pm and realize I’ve forgotten to eat, really have to pee and have kicked my to-do list right in the butt.

Accomplishing something little gets me moving and motivated to take care of even more. So, what’s your switch?

To take advice from one of my favorite bloggers who recently wrote a piece called “Let’s not pretend it’s always easy,” I wanted to talk a little (err…a lot) about how I was able to leave my corporate day job.

It can seem, on the internets, that lots of bloggers create a side business and then just up and quit their jobs. And maybe some of them do. Maybe some of them have a trust fund or immediate success or a husband paying all the bills, but my guess is that most of them put in a lot of hours before they left the cube for a creative job.

I don’t have a trust fund, immediate success or a husband, I only had a job I didn’t love in the least and a whole lot of motivation to leave.

I started planning to leave about a year ago. In September I put up a giant white board and wrote out eight months of goals for my design business, my shop, blog stats, aerial classes and shows under the heading ESCAPE PLAN. I picked May for my escape because in figuring out how much money I would need to make in order to leave, the increase in revenue month-to-month was a little crazy, but not insane.

I worked toward my goal every day. Whether it was going through song choices for a show, building a new templates, responding to potential clients, creating spreadsheets for class. I was 100 percent focused on where I was headed. I visualized putting in my two weeks and driving out of that parking lot for the last time (yelling with joy) over and over and over.

And a lot of times it was really, really difficult. I was taking on an enormous amount of work and I was afraid that if I stopped moving for a second my dream would be compromised. I spent quite a few nights in a ball on the couch crying my eyes out, completely overwhelmed, while Slayer climbed all over me trying to lick my face. And I had multiple conversations about how I was “falling apart, taking on too much, and everything is a mess” with a good friend who basically told me “shut up, your life is amazing, keep working.” As much as I didn’t want to hear it, it was good advice.

In March I had my yearly review with my boss and unfortunately/fortunately he was well aware of my lack of passion at work. His solution for this was, beginning in June, to have me write news stories for the site (what I did when I first started my job) and work weekends (after putting in 7 years there). This turned out to be the push I needed to leave.

In April and May we (The Weird Sisters Circus) booked nine shows, which meant more rehearsals and routines to build – I literally did not have time to be stuck in an office 40 hours a week anymore.

I tied up all the loose ends, bought a new computer, went to the dentist, worked out a budget. Then last week I told my boss I was leaving my job to run away with the circus. It was exciting and terrifying (hello mortgage!) and a leap I knew I had to take because I didn’t want to wake up in 10 years at the same job knowing I’d been so close to reaching my goal.

All of the long hours were so worth it when on Monday morning I woke up sans alarm and spent the morning eating breakfast on the deck while going through email. Then I was able to run all my errands to pick up stuff for an upcoming show and go to a fitting without having to cram everything in at the very end of my day. My new freedom hasn’t completely hit me yet, but the relief is slowing starting to seep in and so far it feels really good.

Now let’s all cross our fingers that I don’t have to write a post in a year titled “Dragging my ass back to the cube: How I completely and utterly failed at the freelance life.”

My advice to those of you currently reading this from your soul-sucking job and dreaming of a creative life…

SAVE YOUR MONEY All of it. Especially if you’re like me and are SINGLE with a MORTGAGE. Stop buying shoes, stop eating out. Do you want a new dress or do you want to leave your lame job? That’s the question I’ve asked myself on a weekly basis and, frankly, sometimes I bought the damn dress, but most of the time that little reminder was enough for me to hold onto the cash.

MAKE A BUDGET Know where your cash is flowing. Cut down all the bills you can. I canceled my cable to save $15 and changed my phone plan to save $20.

MAKE A PLAN The second I realized my job would be changing and I wasn’t going to stick around I went back to my desk, opened up a file called Escape Plan and wrote: new laptop, health insurance, Photoshop, clean office, dentist appt. What do you need to do in order to leave your job? Don’t leave it until the last minute.

If possible, CREATE MULTIPLE INCOME STREAMS I make money from freelance design, my template shop, teaching aerial and performing. If one of those comes up short one month I have three other places where I can try to make up for it. This not only helps my bank account, but saves me a bit of stress too.

If the WORST CASE SCENARIO is holding you back – mine is losing my house – then imagine it happening, what will you do? Make a plan. I would: get another job, get another roommate, build a million templates for my shop, start selling possessions. It won’t be the end of you world and you will not die from the worst case scenario. If you managed to escape the 9 to 5, then you surely have enough balls and strength to get through a lot of bad shit.

START NOW Like, immediately. There is no reason to spend another day dreaming about what you want to do and not lifting a finger to move yourself in that direction. Stop making excuses and complaining about things you CAN change and start believing in yourself and just take one step forward every day. Seriously…do it.

ALSO…I cannot say thank you enough to those of you who read my blog, bought one of my templates, hired me to design your site or just cheered me on. Each one of you has given me a little leg up on my journey and I’m truly, truly appreciative of your support. I would not have been able to do this without you <3 <3 <3

If you have any questions feel free to comment or email :)