home-aloneBlogging can be a lonely business, and sometimes it’s tough to deal with the personal implications of stepping out of a busy office and in to the dark recesses of your home office.

Your entire life can be thrown off balance, and everything you knew before disappears, leaving you with just the blank cold stare of your monitor for comfort.

It’s all very well celebrating the power of the online community, but sometimes Skyping and e-mail simply can’t fill the void left behind from when you worked in an office. Office life can be fun sometimes, for all we try and escape it as soon as possible, and we make friends quickly in an environment where we are thrown together for seven or more hours a day.

Celebrating the social side of office life

Most of us who have worked in a corporate environment still have great friendships with the people we worked with.

Pulling together over a project, or bemoaning the negative side of the company we work for can be a great way of bonding and forging new relationships. Add to this the draw of the communal coffee area, car-shares, and after-work socializing, and it’s not hard to see why people seem to get close to one another more quickly in this environment than any other.

You only have to look at the number of relationships that are going on in any office to see how important our work colleagues are. Regardless of the kind of industry you are in, the office environment throws people together with an intensity which we don’t get in any other area of our lives. Sharing stress together, bitching about the boss or pulling together to reach a tough deadline all bring out the best – and worst – in people, and sometimes our work colleagues know more about us and our lives than our family!

No matter how alluring running your own business is, there’s still something missing from our lives when we make the jump in to working for ourselves. Unless we rent office space somewhere with other business owners, we’re faced with the prospect of not seeing anyone sometimes from the minute we wake up and switch our machines on, to the moment we log off at the end of a busy day.

Gaining support from online networking

Since I started my blogging business, I’ve made some amazing contacts that I keep in touch with every day.

Sometimes, every hour. Some of these people live on the other side of the world, and I’m unlikely to ever meet them, but they are as much a part of my business as my old colleagues from my corporate world. Through Skype I am able to speak with people and have meetings online, and video and audio technology have made it possible to run your business without ever getting up from your chair.

I’m not saying this is the answer for self-employed loneliness, but it does go a long, long way to remove feelings of isolation when we start to build up our network of relationships and contacts. I’m glad of the people I have met virtually, and it’s good to know that there are thousands of us out there, all looking for someone to talk to!

How do you overcome the loneliness of blogging?

Please share your views in the comments below.

_____________________________________________________________________________