I would love to hear your impressions of this call!

Of course, this advice is longstanding among great thinkers (think Socrates’ “know thyself”). And when I read it again recently, I was struck by how true it is for some women to make the decision to be a work at home mom.

I mean, deciding to make the transition from being in the corporate world to having a home-based business takes a knowledge of one’s self, one’s strengths and one’s priorities that may only come with purposeful reflection. Perhaps that transition is mental only, as with a woman who decides not to begin the traditional career path, in anticipation of motherhood. Mental and/or actual, I suspect there is some transition involved in most cases. While being a work at home mom is growing in popularity, it still isn’t the norm. And so, a woman must know herself to embrace this alternative option as the good fit for her and her family that it may very well be. Do you know thyself?!

That last statement really caught my attention. The chair going to the local hospital was not at all comfortable for me. What if I was an “executive” there? I would be very unhappy sitting and working in that chair. OK, maybe it’s not a big deal, but lots of those little deals add up. Chalk another one up for the home-based business as a work at home mom!

Sure, I could probably bring a chair I liked into my theoretical hospital office, but chances are I would have paid for it myself. If that’s going to happen, I might as well get a tax deduction for it . Maybe I should craft a bumper sticker: Entrepreneurs choose their own chairs!

I have been surprised, though, to learn that I needed a 1-800 number, as they’re called, much less than I expected in my work at home mom field. I think the primary reasons are twofold: (1) with the increasing role of the internet, I have found myself communicating with my customers (and them with me) by e-mail more and more; and (2) as cell phones have become more widely used, with “unlimited minutes” packages common, people seem to be using “land lines” more infrequently. There is no charge to them to call my regular phone number (or my cell number), so the need for a free way to call me disappears. Now, I don’t have any statistics to back that up; I’m just commenting on what I have observed.

Technological advances have made it easier and easier to be a work at home mom, methinks. Here’s another example – you may not have to concern yourself with getting a toll free number. But if you do, they’re easy to obtain (check with your long distance carrier) and relatively inexpensive.

But I was sort of taken aback that the thrust of the article was about the controversy among some very successful mommy bloggers. Blogger A not liking what Blogger B had to say about motherhood. Blogger B responding in kind. And so on. Yikes! That is so not my style.

If what a mommy blogger has to say doesn’t resonate with me, I probably won’t return to that blog, but I would feel no compulsion to shout out my perspective. I don’t agree with every work at home mom blog out there, but so what?! I have much better things to do with my time than to be sure that disagreement is known far and wide.

That type of competitive culture does not appeal to me and that’s one of the reasons I am SO happy with the company with whom I work at home. Technically, all of us who represent the company could be considered competitors, but the culture of the company just doesn’t cultivate that. We are on a common mission, we support one another, and we believe that, at a certain level, when one succeeds, we all succeed.

I recently read The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers at copyblogger.com, and while some were particular to the craft of writing, many of those habits apply to all of us who work at home. Persistency. Consistency. Planning. Being a self-starter. Yep, those are all critical to work at home success, wouldn’t you agree? You can get more inspiration on all those fronts at the original post.

Wow – when I try to look at it from the outside, it almost sounds too good to be true. Can one woman with nonmom skills and a mother’s heart really have all that? Well, regardless of how it sounds, I’m living proof that it IS true. And if it can be true for me, it can be true for you!

It was more the foray into network marketing…an often misunderstood and often under-appreciated business model. It wasn’t even considered a valid business model by some. I was affected by these perceptions of other people, and I know of other work at home moms and would-be WAHMs in the same boat. For myself personally, I find it tinged with sad humor in retrospect. The advance of home-based business is now touted as a driving market force, and it has been a wonderful fit for me.

But I think there are still some professional women out there who are stymied by this old stigma. To them, I would say: do your due diligence. Educate yourself on the current state of business affairs among the forward-thinking. Be careful who you allow to be your “who saids” (who you listen to in forming your self-picture). And then remember these wise words from a man who is the Director of International Business Development for a highly successful network marketing company: “Any major change is ridiculed, opposed and then becomes self-evident it would happen anyway.”