Your creativity doesn’t need to be confined to after-work hours or weekends. You can fully embrace and achieve the journey of designing your dream life and making it full-time.
I promise — it’s possible! You just need the right dose of magic to make it happen — which we have plenty of over here. ✨
When I first started venturing into blogging, I remember seeing all these Facebook ads about “quitting your day job!” And while this is eventually part of it, it’s not as easy (and, honestly, impractical) as that. The journey to design your dream life is more about strategically planning the next steps of your creative path.
🙈 Debunking the Myth: Not All 9-5s Are Bad! (You Just Need a Plan)
There’s this pervasive idea that all 9-5 jobs are creative kryptonite. But that’s not always true. In fact, a 9-5 job can be a fantastic way to have consistent income so you can focus your energies on your next creative step in your pursuit — because we all know how the stress of worrying about money can distract us from pretty much everything else in the world.
A steady paycheck can provide the financial stability you need to pursue your passions without the stress of wondering where your next meal is coming from.
The only problem with the 9-5 as an artist (assuming it’s remote, relatively low-stress, and working with kind-hearted humans) is when you don’t have a plan.
You’ll need some life planning strategies to make sure you have a plan for it, including artist goals and systems.
Where do you want to be in one year? Five years? Ten years? Do you have a vision board of exactly what your goals are, with no limitations? What are 5 things you’re doing every day to help you get closer to this?
👩💻 Starting a Cozy Girl Job
A Cozy Girl Job is a low-stress, remote job that a creative is naturally good at. I often use the examples of a social media manager, virtual assistant, blog writer, or content manager. These roles often offer flexibility in terms of hours and sometimes even remote work options.
As you design your dream life, finding a Cozy Girl Job is your first step in your path to artistic freedom. It gives you work flexibility, but also consistent income: win-win! The great part about your Cozy Girl Job is that many of these jobs are going to be relevant when you start working for yourself full-time. For instance, understanding social media marketing for your clients will help you translate understanding it for yourself!
There are two main types of Cozy Girl Jobs: a 9-5 job with a plan, and a full-time freelancing biz.
📝 Option #01: 9-5 Job with a Plan (Key: Strategy For an “Out”)
The ideal 9-5 Cozy Girl Job is 100% remote, low-stress, and low-meetings. It’s also one that will give you skills that you can translate into your business.
Having a remote job will give you the energy to work on your art during your lunch breaks and/or on nights and weekends. This is where artist systems really come in — you’ll need a strategic plan to make sure you can transition seamlessly from your 9-5 into being a full-time artist.
This option takes patience and humility. Working a 9-5 does not feel sexy as a creative — I know, because I’ve done it for many years. It’s especially tricky when you see other artists you know “succeeding” on social media as you feel stuck in your job. But remember that financial stability is helping build up your future. You have a plan and life goals, too. You’re leaning into these Silent Rebel skills (aka, leverage) right now because there’s a reason for it.
💻 Option #02: Build a Full-Time Freelancing Business (Key: Scalability)
The other option for your Cozy Girl Job is freelancing. It’s a different kind of hard compared to getting a 9-5 — you have to be the one to set your prices, create your boundaries, and set the standard of the clients you are working with.
The positives:
- You can control the work you do
- You can control the clients you work with
- You can set and change your rates whenever you want
The challenges:
- You need to learn boundaries. Fast.
- You need to be stringent with your pricing. This is your livelihood, not a suggestion.
- You’ll have some crappy client experiences. That sucks, but is totally normal.
Applying strategic lifestyle design principles will help you scale this business so you can work just a few hours a day but make a full-time income. I’m super lucky that I was able to make that work — but it took me 3+ years to make it happen. Probably because I’m not the best at setting rates (and boundaries) when it comes to work.
I always recommend people to get started on a job platform like Contra, Upwork or Fiverr. Before you tell me, “but wait, these platforms don’t pay well!,” I know. That’s not the point. The point is to get some awesome customer reviews so you can flaunt the heck outta them for your next project and raise those rates. 💸
💸 How to Work Through Your Cozy Girl Job to Get to Your Dream Creative Career
The great thing about the right Cozy Girl Job is that it can be more than a paycheck! If it’s relevant to what you’ll need as an artist (marketing, social media, content creation, etc.) it can be its own little launchpad for your dream creative career.
🙌 Create a Vision Board & Manifestation Lock Screen
A vision board (along with a solid strategy) is a great way to help you design your dream life. This is a physical or virtual board that gathers images, quotes and symbols that represent your dream life within the span of the next few years.
It’s important that you have this vision board in a space you see daily — I like making them my iPhone lock screen and my desktop background. Having a vision board is a great way to have goal visualization to manifest your dream life while you’re doing the humble work today.
The best thing about these is that there aren’t really complex vision boarding techniques, other than not having any rules or caps. You want a huge mansion? Put it on the board. Want a huge garden, to be in a hit TV show, or to release an album? Onto the board it goes.
🤝 Develop Artist Systems to “4-Hour Work Week” Your Cozy Girl Job
Artist systems are both how you achieve your manifestations and how you start to scale your Cozy Girl Job. I learned about the concept of scaling your business through the 4-Hour Workweek (a book I highly recommend).
This concept is about optimizing that Cozy Girl Job so you can free up more time for your creative pursuits. For example, as an SEO content writer, I spent some really intense time trying to figure out how I could scale my efforts and write 20+ blog articles a week in less than 3 hours a day — and it happened! This is helpful both as work-life balance tips and to help you transition your career from your Cozy Girl Job to your dream artist career.
Could you use tools like Asana to organize your projects? Zapier or Make to automate repetitive tasks? Is what you’re doing right now the most efficient way to handle your responsibilities? What work can you batch together so you’re duplicating your efforts?
👋 Body Double and Have Accountability
The concept of body-doubling has gotten huge, specifically in the neurodivergent world! It’s the basic concept that working with someone else helps give you more accountability and segment your work in a productive, focused way. This isn’t working with someone on the same task, but the both of you working on your own individual tasks, together.
This can also give you some mindset shifts for personal growth — for example, instead of worrying all day about when you’re going to tackle that to-do list that you’ve been dreading, thinking, “hey, I’ll just sign up for a co-working session and get it done then!”
We violets love Flow Club as a co-working platform — but there are many other ones that you can explore, too. They’re getting more and more popular, yay!
Create Holistic Daily Rituals
Think about the chores and tasks you need to do every day. As you design your dream life, what if you instead called them ✨rituals?✨
What are the daily things you need to do that you can romanticize? Can you light a candle and create ambiance before checking emails? Can you start switching out your old pots and pans for cute ones so cooking can be that much more pretty (and healthy)?
Bonus: if you know you want to practice sketching every day, but can’t find time to do it, use habit-stacking to help you pair two tasks together. For instance, do you always make coffee every day? Put your sketchbook and pencils right by your coffee station, and sketch for 10 minutes as it’s brewing.
This habit formation for success can be used both for your Cozy Girl Job and your creative pursuits.
Let’s Carve a Beautiful Creative Path Together: Head Over to YouTube
Design your dream life with me by heading over to my YouTube channel. 😺 As a female singer-songwriter, I’m sharing tips and mini musings that I’m learning through the journey so we can all bloom as artists together. You have everything you need to get started right now — I can’t wait to see the beautiful journey you create. 💫
