Why Meet Ups Are So Important When You Are A Freelancer

Its super easy to think that working from home is an ideal scenario, and it is if you are someone that works away from home. 

Unfortunately the theory and the reality of working from home differ immensely. 

For me I found working from home harder than I ever thought possible. People think your at home so often just appear to visit with you. Which is wonderful but then you have lost a chunk of the working day. 

Then there is the obligatory home tasks, boiler services, unloading washing, ‘popping’ to collect prescriptions and such, because its easier when you work from home. Suddenly the day is speeding past at a rapid rate of knots and yet no work has been completed. 

However even with practicalities of working from home sometimes being a struggle that is nothing compared to the joy sapping boredom that from time to time hits. Personally working online on your own sucks all the creativity from my very being and finding time to have a face to face conversation with my peers never happens unless I take the time to head to an event or conference. 

Earlier this year I signed myself up to the newest conference/workshop. The Retreat run by the team behind TOTS100, Flea Enterprises and the wonderful Sally who blogs at Who’s The Mummy, and I was super excited.

For me the weekend began with getting into the loaned car from Vauxhall that I had the pleasure of test driving for the nearly 4 hours drive to the venue. The Grandland X became and ideal ride to Somerset which I will be sharing my thoughts on soon.

Firstly I collected my blogging friends Becky from A Beautiful Space and Penny from Parent Shaped ready to have a catch up in person and to enjoy the ride down to the event and I am so glad we travelled this way together. Life has taken on some amazing journeys for us all but having tried and failed many times over he last 6 months to arrange a meet up we had so very much to catch up on.

To be honest the whole weekend followed the same principle, there were so many people that I respect and admire at the 40+ people event that I actually got to catch up properly with so many of them and had chance to chat to some that I admired from afar, Cass from Frugal Family, I am looking at you!

The event itself was by far the best event I have ever attended. Now I know its easy to carried away with the emotion of these things but for starters it was all in one location making it literally a retreat to focus on purely learning and connecting. Secondly it was deep dive stuff. 

I have been blogging for 6 years this year and although I am the first to admit I love a good blogging event or conference I had in fact stopped ‘learning’ much at them. With short sessions and contradicting information in some I had started attending to use them a mostly catch up places with some of my blogging besties.

The Retreat was beyond that. The sessions were in-depth and the workshops were run by people that specialise in their fields of film making, photography and the like. 
Now what I loved about the event on the whole is that this was aimed beyond the newbie blogger level. Now don’t get me wrong I was once a newbie and loved learning about site SEO, DA, Layouts, blog admin and the like but I needed to take my journey on to a higher and deeper level and the sessions at the Retreat were just that. 
I attended lots of amazing sessions like before the shoot, confidence on camera, travel videos, making recipe videos along with so many photography sessions! I honestly never thought about this next level of my creativity because I thought it was out of my league but with thanks to the amazing companies below I am eager to get going and start putting my newly learnt knowledge into practice.
With some new found confidence in my own abilities and so much love and support offered throughout the 3 days I know I can do this, so watch this space.

With Thanks: