How the Internet changed my life in my 50s!

Teaching my first live class (I did those, too!) in 2016.

One of the things I most love about the Internet is how it’s opened up opportunities for everyone to create a life in non-traditional ways: millennial graduates skip the 9-5 office and start their own online business, seasoned professionals leave their corporate jobs, and become digital entrepreneurs, pensioners get another chance at fulfilling their lifelong dreams - like my mom who built a very successful bookstore on Amazon in her 60s and 70s!

Or in my case, non-academics get to teach what they are passionate about.

The internet is truly changing how we learn and teach, which is great news for people like me who are university dropouts and entirely self-taught instead. I have always been a very reluctant academic student, and I much prefer to learn by doing and at my own pace. Rather than spending years on theoretical study without real-life application, I do much better if I can jump right in and learn along the way. This, by the way, is not a derogatory reflection on the hard work and money people put into their degrees, nor the value of thorough training and intellectual pursuits. I am just saying that we are all different in how we process knowledge, and traditional schooling utterly fails to recognize or facilitate that fact.

However, while the conventional classroom model is still widely used, the internet has opened up so many more opportunities to those of us who either don’t respond well to the old-school system, who cannot afford it, or are otherwise excluded or discouraged from it. Well, guess what?

We can now go online and learn and teach in a way that aligns with our preferences, means, values, and desires.

I’m actually not a complete stranger to teaching; during my airline career, I loved presenting customer service and technical training, and I also created and facilitated a popular self-development workshop on how to get over a broken heart! But had you ever told me that one day I’d be teaching online courses, I probably would have laughed at you in disbelief. The internet and its opportunities just weren’t on my radar back then.

Yet here I am - in my early sixties - teaching my heart out online and loving it!

The road to teaching started with a leap of faith ten years ago when I decided to quit corporate life and become a web designer.

Web design has been my geeky passion since 1999, when I spent a lot of money dialing into the internet (remember those days?), taking HTML classes, and creating my first website. In 2005 I started blogging and used Wordpress for a few years until discovering Squarespace in 2008. I never looked back. A platform like Squarespace allows someone like me, who is not a coder or developer, to focus on what I enjoy the most – visual design – and use my nonetheless substantial CSS and HTML skills to make it my own.

Then, in 2016, I joined Susannah Conway’s class, The Inside Story, and it changed the trajectory of my business and life.

I was fascinated by how Susannah had created an online business around teaching her craft and sharing her heart. She is one of the eCourse pioneers and the perfect antidote to hustle culture, which tells us to identify a need in the market and then create a course and ‘secret’ formulas for success around this need so that we can eventually sit back and enjoy the passive income that will come rolling in. (By the way, there are no secrets, and there is nothing passive about being a successful online entrepreneur.)

That is so not what teaching is about, at least not for me.

I first heard the phrase ‘heart-centered business’ in Inside Story, and while it’s become one of those over-used and often misrepresented terms, I still like it because it best describes what running a business and teaching online courses is all about for me:

Creating a livelihood from a passion, utilizing modern technology with intention, and caring about providing a great service and delivering high-quality content and training.

I launched my first online course in 2016 and did 1:1 web design and teaching for three years. In 2019, I realized that I could no longer do it all and shifted my full-time focus to my courses. That was one of the best decisions I ever made! Sharing my knowledge with my students and seeing them learn and thrive in a way that is aligned with their own values and passions gives me so much pleasure and does feel a bit like a calling.

My course business has turned over six figures ever since but teaching is not just about the numbers for me, it’s about relationships, opportunity and substance. I go deep and wide, and as my client or student, you will always be seen and heard.

I believe that anyone can change their life and that of others by teaching online. In fact, we need more teachers who share authentically from the heart and help us build calm, strong, and sustainable businesses.