Nine To Five Club

Alan Dunnighan kept his day job in IT and turned an hour in the garden shed most evenings into Mitford Pottery, with classes, craft fairs and a YouTube channel. We talk about how The Great Pottery Throw Down got him started, buying his first wheel, and spotting a gap years before he acted on it.

Mitford Pottery: mitfordpottery.com

YouTube: youtube.com/mitfordpottery

Instagram: instagram.com/mitfordpottery

The people who mock your growth won't pay your bills.

David Oliveira of the Nine to Five Club explores why early mockery can hit so hard when you start learning, building, or changing your financial life. The core message is simple: other people’s discomfort is not a reliable measure of your potential, and you do not need their approval to keep going. This is a solo episode focused on mindset, boundaries, and practical ways to keep your momentum when the people around you don’t understand what you’re building.

The main idea:

People who mock your growth will not pay your bills, live with your regrets, or carry the consequences of your choices.

Why criticism hurts most at the beginning:

Mockery tends to land hardest when you are still unsure, and the results are not visible yet.

Mockery feeds on uncertainty:

A raised eyebrow, joke, or dismissive comment can amplify self-doubt you already had.

Most mockers are not speaking from experience:

David argues that many people laugh at growth because they never tried climbing themselves.

Long-term regret matters more than short-term approval:

He contrasts the person making the comment with the person living with the outcome years later.

You do not need to over-explain yourself:

If someone asks whether your project is “still a thing,” the recommendation is to say yes and move on.

Keep your plans private until there is something tangible:

Unfinished projects are easy targets for dismissive comments.

Separate the comment from the person:

David notes that some people who make discouraging remarks may still care about you in other parts of life.

Growth changes relationships:

Your progress can make other people uncomfortable because it forces them to confront their own choices.

The real issue is whose voice you let in your head:

This is less about toughness and more about protecting focus while building financial freedom.

This idea is one of the threads running through You’re More Than Your 9–5.

Grab a copy on Amazon and join me in the Nine To Five Club to continue your growth journey.

You know the feeling of working hard all week and not being able to say what you actually moved forward. The days went by. It was a busy week. And on Sunday night, you struggle to name what’s changed.

Most people answer that by trying harder. An earlier alarm, a longer to-do list, maybe a new app. It rarely works, because effort isn’t what’s missing.

What’s missing is a real picture of where you actually stand. Not where you think you stand, and definitely not where you’d like to stand.

So this is a thirty-minute exercise in four parts, and by the end you’ll have something specific to work with. The one thing genuinely holding you back right now.

An actual answer, and it’ll be one of four:

* Your time.

* Your energy.

* Your money.

* Or the people and the environment around you.

It’s Step 1 of the 9–5 Freedom STEPS Framework.

Everything after Step 1 depends on doing this exercise.

Paid members get the full guided version of this with worksheets and the rest of the STEPS.

This is just the first part of the framework.

S - Snapshot

T - Target

E -Essentials

P - Protect

S - Sustain

If you want the whole framework and want to be guided throughout, become a premium member.

UPGRADE NOW

This week I'm joined by Ria Farmer, founder of Rainbow Ri Holistic Health Coach in Northampton, a Reiki master and teacher, life and spiritual coach, and CBT counsellor, named Holistic Health Coach of the Year for Central England.

Ria's path into this work started with a cancer diagnosis at 36, found during surgery she thought was only for endometriosis. She talks about how Reiki got her through it, how she built the business alongside a full-time job as a single parent, and the moment she was made redundant and said thank you instead of panicking.

I also share my own story with alopecia, and we talk about why "one foot in, one foot out" beats quitting overnight.

Timestamps (approximate):

0:00 – Meet Ria Farmer.0:41 – What Reiki actually is, explained simply.3:13 – The surgery that found her cancer.6:01 – My own story with alopecia.8:21 – Building the business as a single, working parent.10:30 – Dropping a day, deciding to go all in.11:24 – Made redundant, and said thank you.17:08 – No regrets, only lessons.18:57 – Why generic networking groups didn't work for her.22:28 – Advice for anyone building something while still employed.27:53 – One foot in, one foot out.31:42 – Protecting the first hour of your day.33:46 – Where to find Ria.

Find Ria:

Website: rainbowriholistichealthcoach.comInstagram: @rainbow_ri_holistichealthcoachFacebook: Rainbow Ri Holistic Health Coach

Ria Farmer runs Rainbow Ri Holistic Health Coach in Northampton. She is a Reiki master and teacher, a life and spiritual coach, and a CBT counsellor. She was named Holistic Health Coach of the Year for Central England.

She had been trying to build this for years. It came together in three days once she had no choice but to move.

You don’t need to quit your job tomorrow. You need to use the hours you already have outside it. If you’re working a 9 to 5, you’re only using 8 of your 24 hours on it. What you do with the rest decides whether anything changes.

“There’s no fail in life, there’s no right or wrong in life. You’ve got to keep on making the steps, because if you don’t, that’s how depression starts, that’s how anxiety starts.”

Find Ria

She works from The Old Vicarage in Flore, Northampton, and offers distance Reiki healing across the UK.

Website: rainbowriholistichealthcoach.comInstagram: @rainbow_ri_holistichealthcoachFacebook: Rainbow Ri Holistic Health Coach

If you want to go deeper on Reiki itself, Reiki for Life by Penelope Quest is the one most beginners are pointed toward. She’s been teaching it since 1994 and has consulted on Reiki for the NHS.

Want more of this?

The Nine To Five Club premium has the STEPS framework for actually building something outside your job.

Upgrade here.

I think most people who want to change their lives are one small thing away from actually starting. Not a big thing. One small thing.

And it isn’t money. It isn’t time either.

It’s fear.

This week I’m reading The 5 AM Club, and I’m blown away by it. I haven’t finished it yet. I’m already thinking about how to apply it.

You take the first hour of your day, before work, and you split it into three:

Move. In the first twenty minutes, get your body going properly. Sweat. Not a gentle stretch, actual movement.

Mindfulness. Twenty minutes on your head rather than your body. Journaling, meditating, planning, praying, whatever version of that is real for you. Sitting still with your own thoughts.

Learn. Twenty minutes of growth. Reading, a course, something that leaves you slightly more capable than you were an hour earlier.

Exercise, mindfulness, learning.

All of it before the world claims your time and your attention.

What I’m Building Here

This is what the Nine to Five Club is for.

I’m going to keep sharing what I’m actually doing, the good and the bad, including the parts where I set five alarms and still don’t get up. And I’d like you to do the same.

If we can get a real group of people here who want to grow and build something outside their nine-to-five, and who are willing to be honest about how it’s actually going, we’ll do something worth doing.

So if you’ve got a dream sitting there that you’ve been putting off, maybe this is the week you stop putting it off.

Leave a comment and tell me what your one small thing is. The thing you already know you want. The thing that fear has been holding you back.

I’ll see you inside.

If you want to go deeper.

Paid members get the 9–5 Freedom STEPS Framework, which is the structured version of everything I write about here.

It’s the difference between reading about protecting your first hour and having an actual system for finding the time, choosing what to build, and keeping it going when motivation runs out.

If you’ve been reading these for a while and nodding along, that’s usually the sign you’re ready to stop reading and start building.

Upgrade to paid.

I bought my first property in 2013. I still work a day job now, in 2026.

If you're waiting for the story where I quit and never looked back, this isn't that story. This is the one nobody posts, because it doesn't fit in a caption. It's longer, slower, and honestly, more useful than the version everyone else is selling you.

THE MYTH

Here’s the version you’ve probably seen a hundred times.

Someone hated their job, took a leap, quit, and six months later they’re financially free, posting from a beach.

It’s a good story. It’s also survivorship bias wearing a nice filter.

For every version of that story that’s true, there are a lot more where someone quit too early, ran out of runway, and had to go crawling back to a worse job than the one they left, because they burned the safety net before they’d built anything solid enough to stand on.

I didn't want to find that out the hard way. So I didn't quit. I bought one property, while still fully employed, and I just kept working. Both things, at the same time, for years.

THE REAL ORDER OF EVENTS

Here’s the actual sequence, because the order matters more than people think.

In 2013, first property. Bought while I was still in full-time employment. That job didn’t stop. For years after that, I worked as a lettings manager, overseeing well over 250 properties for other landlords. Not my own portfolio at that point, someone else’s.

I was learning the entire mechanics of this industry on someone else’s payroll, seeing what actually goes wrong in property, not the theory, the reality:

* The boiler that breaks at the worst time.

* The tenant who goes quiet.

* The landlord who cuts corners and pays for it later.

That job wasn’t a detour from building my own thing. It was the best possible education for it, and I got paid to receive it.

By the time I was making decisions on my own portfolio, I’d already seen hundreds of other people’s mistakes up close. I didn’t have to make all of them myself first.

WHAT THAT ACTUALLY TAUGHT ME

The lesson isn’t “get a job in the industry you want to build in,” though that’s not bad advice.

The real lesson is bigger than that.

Building something on the side isn’t the compromise position. It’s not what you do until you’re ready to do the real thing. For a long stretch, it IS the real thing, just running quietly, underneath a day job that’s paying your bills while it grows.

The day job isn’t the enemy of the side project. It’s the reason the side project got to grow at a sane pace instead of a desperate one.

I never had to take a bad deal because rent was due. I never had to panic-sell something because I needed the cash that month. The job bought me patience, and patience is the one resource almost nobody building something new actually has enough of.

THE PART THAT’S STILL TRUE NOW

I still run a day job today alongside the property portfolio and everything else I’ve built since then. Not because none of it worked. Because I’ve never needed to bet the whole thing on one horse, and I still don’t.

Every business I run started as something running quietly in the background of a full week, not as a leap I made after clearing my calendar.

If you’re building something right now, evenings, weekends, in the gaps around a job that pays your actual bills, you are not behind.

You are not doing a lesser version of the real thing. You’re doing it the way that actually survives contact with reality, which is slower and considerably less glamorous, and works.

If today was a day when the job felt like it was in the way of the thing you actually want to build, I'd just gently push back on that.

It might be the thing that's letting you build it properly.

You should never feel guilty for wanting more.

At least not for wanting to be successful or for wanting a better life for you and your family.

It’s easy to feel guilty about it. Most people around you will tell you to just be grateful for what you have, that money isn’t happiness.

None of that is technically wrong, but it’s not true either.

Wanting more isn’t about greed.

Wanting more means being able to actually do the things you enjoy, take care of your family, take care of the people you love.

There’s nothing to feel guilty about there.

Having money will allow you to 10x whoever you are.

How do you get past that limiting belief?

If you feel guilty for wanting more, then you’re probably spending too much time with people who make you feel that way.

If everyone around you works a 9-5 and has accepted that’s just how life is, you’ll keep believing you’re supposed to feel the same way.

Go out, network, meet people who are actually building something, and you’ll realise something important:

It’s okay to want more.

You’ll see how much more they’re able to do for their families, for their health, for the people they love. It’s not about buying designer bags or status. It’s about what you actually do with it.

If you want to make a change, start by looking through your contacts.

Who do you actually know that’s living the life you want for yourself and your family?

If the answer is nobody, that’s a sign that it's time to make a change.

Go to a networking event. Look into what you’re genuinely passionate about but maybe never told anyone. You can be in that circle of people, but you need to find them.

The people who surround you right now are often the same people keeping you exactly where you are.

Are the people around you helping you grow, or keeping you the same?

Leave a comment or send me a message.

I did a Substack Live with Claudia M. Zedda, who writes The Brave Leap.

It was different from what I normally post here.

We didn’t talk about multiple income streams, the 9-5 job or present a framework for success.

Instead, we had a deep, yet challenging conversation about the part of building something outside a 9–5 that people seem to forget.

THE INNER WORK / PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

Join the Nine To Five Club to take your personal transformation journey to the next level.

Claudia M. Zedda opened with her definition of inner growth:

“Inner growth starts with being able to look at yourself and be honest about what you’re doing, who you are, what you like about yourself, and what you don’t.

If honesty is the starting point, the question becomes:

Honest about what, exactly?

For me, it comes down to your mindset, your health, your values, and your finances. Neglect one and the others get harder to develop.

Admit what you actually want before you try to change anything.

That’s the whole starting point of my book, You’re More Than Your 9–5.

It’s not about quitting your job tomorrow.

It’s about using it as a tool while you build the small, brave choices that get you somewhere else, one at a time.

Grab a copy here.

We live in a world where everyone looks successful, but almost no one feels successful.

And the reason is simple:

We’ve confused self‑improvement with success. This is ruining people’s lives.

Here’s the difference:

Self‑improvement is inward.Success is outward.

One changes who you are.The other changes how you’re seen.

And when society cares more about the outward, the inward gets lost and confused, so let’s fix that.

Self‑improvement and success often appear side‑by‑side, but they’re not the same. I first came across this idea in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F\ck*, and it stuck with me because it exposes something most people simply ignore.

Self‑improvement happens behind closed doors, through the people around you, the books you read, mentors, failures, and the lessons that reshape your values and mindset.

Success, on the other hand, even though you can feel it, is measured externally, by metrics, milestones, and the scoreboard society hands you.

Mick and I went live.

This conversation was about:

* My story (Portugal to the UK).

* Why I’ve always cared about independence.

* What I learned from getting scammed young.

* Why multiple income streams matter.

* Cashflow is king.

* Property as an asset and why mentorship matters.

Join the Nine To Five Club if you work a 9-5 but know you’re meant for more.

👇🏽

If you’re working a 9–5 and you know there’s more in you, don’t wait for the perfect time. Start building with what you’ve got.

My book, You’re More Than Your 9–5, is the full framework behind this mindset. It’s for people who want to use their job as a tool, build in the background, and stop letting “fine” become their future.

GET YOUR BOOK HERE

You don’t need to “quit your job” tomorrow.

You need a strategy.

Use the 9–5 as a tool in this period of your life.

Build assets.

Build skills.

Build income streams.

Protect your cashflow.

Get around people who know what they’re doing.

David Oliveira