How to solve your top remote work challenges?

According to Drift’s David Cancel, remote workers who are also entrepreneurs face the challenge of managing the emotional rollercoaster of being on their own.

According to Buffer’s State of Remote Work 2018, the top two challenges remote workers face are loneliness and collaboration / communicating.

Below is an outline of how I solved these remote work challenges:

1) Emotional Rollercoaster: Remote work and entrepreneurship can be fun and not emotionally draining if managed properly. It all comes down to self-understanding and dealing with one’s reality effectively.

About 15 years ago, I conducted a self-assessment through StrengthsFinder2.0 to learn about my core traits and how to turn these into to strengths over time. Since then, I have developed my core traits into strengths by ensuring that the projects I chose to work on were a good fit for my values, behaviors, and strengths. Likewise, through the feedback of close friends, I have learned about my principal weaknesses: impatience and perfectionism. By becoming more self-aware and developing good habits, I have gained inner peace and become more patient and flexible.

A major paradigm-shift took place several years ago when I discovered the 8 Forms of Capital as a means for guiding my definition of success as opposed to simply thinking in financial terms. This acceptance provided me with balance. With time, I have come to realize that the challenges that I am going through on a daily basis are the most helpful for the evolvement of my consciousness and spiritual path or the foundational reason for my physical existence. I also follow the 4 Principles for Health by Lou Corona and have learned to spend ample time in nature and in activities that I enjoy such as hiking and camping. Most importantly, I have learned to live my life based on gratitude for everything — even the bad — as all of life is an opportunity to learn and grow.

2) Loneliness: Remote work doesn’t have to feel lonely. Loneliness is a perception of “needing” others to feel content and satisfied, but this is not 100% true. Although humans are tribal by nature and we tend towards socializing, it is entirely possible to leverage “lonely time” towards developing inner peace and growing personally and professionally. Much depends on whether you are an introvert or extrovert and your mental fortitude.

Several years ago, I started towards a path of uncovering my unconscious beliefs. This understanding has enabled me to better understand myself and how my beliefs either contribute to my objectives or distract from them. By undertaking this practice, I have been able to modify most of my beliefs so they are in alignment with my objectives.

Additionally, I now meditate daily to improve my inner peace, intuition and decision-making. I am focused on better understanding myself and my reality so to be at peace throughout the day. I learned from Vishen Lakhiani of Midvalley Academy to write-out three key guidelines for daily living: 1) want I want to experience; 2) how I want to grow; and 3) how I want to contribute to the well-being of those around me. I then joined a Mastermind Team for professional development based on Ray Dalio’s Principles for Business. My team’s focus is on quality decision-making based on Mental Models and Bayesian Theory.

3) Collaboration & Communicating: I have always enjoyed networking and assisting others. Unfortunately, I have also learned that not everyone is open to collaborating. This is due to the fact that people differs in their level of consciousness. Consciousness ranges from ego-driven or selfish (win/lose) to soul-driven or collaborative (win/win).

Through Dr. David Hawkins’ book, Power vs. Force, I learned about the various levels of consciousness among people. This insight has enabled me to manage potential relationships with greater awareness and wisdom. Through years’ of practice, I have become much better at identifying those that are soul-driven servant-leaders.

As to communicating properly, I have learned proper Socratic questioning.

I realize that much of the above may not make sense to you. That is ok. We all have different beliefs and perceptions about our life. My intention is to simply to make a positive difference!

For those of you seeking to network with remote workers: @Remotive and @NomadCity

For those of you seeking remote work, below is a listing of B2B SaaS companies that hire remote workers: @Slack, @Trello, @Buffer, @Zapier, @hotjar, @Amazon, @Automattic, @Shopify, @toggl, @Aha, @toptal, @wayfair, @bonfire, @invision, @GitLab, @HubSpot, @TINYPulse, @MURAL

Please add your comments below or send me an email at: juan@juanbarberis.com