Freelancer: Just how happy are you? Really?
I didn’t set out to ask, nor answer that question this month. Yet after nearly three weeks of being away from the computer and driving across the country, it’s exactly the question I found myself wrestling with. And wrestle I did for about 1,967 miles.
Yet somewhere mid-Kansas (everything seems to happen in Kansas), I made what I was thinking were some hard decisions. In the end, they were pretty easy. Apparently, it takes a few state lines and a lot of counting silos to bring clarity to your thoughts.
Turns out the clarity was there all along. The action? Not so much.
You have that same clarity in you right now. But maybe for the same reasons I didn’t act — fear, concern over reputation, the inability to turn down paying work — you may not be acting, either.
[bctt tweet=”Finding your #freelance bliss is already in you. Here’s how to unleash it.” username=”LoriWidmer”]
1. Take control of your time.
That’s a big one for me. I have been guilty of letting clients sneak in those conference calls while I’m on vacation. Why? Nothing is that critical that I need to forego my time off. The same goes for you. For that client who will insist on talking with you when you have a houseful of out-of-town guests, for the client who thinks one project while you’re waiting at the departure gate, for the client who cannot understand that your taking two vacations within a month is your business, say no. That’s all. No. No, I can’t take a call that day. No, I can’t work on that while I’m away. No, I’m not revising on a Sunday morning.
That time is yours to dictate. You’re a business. Businesses have hours. They’re even closed at times. Treat your time as the most important boundary you have. Protect it.
2. Remove all compromises.
You know the ones — the client who expects you to resubmit your invoice in three different forms, or the one who wants you to work with an onboarding vendor and waste hours for a 500-word job, or the client who says you need to be available within a ten-hour window. Those are compromises they’re telling you to make. Not asking — telling. That word in bold above — No. That’s going to be your best friend.
Over the years, I’ve been asked to share my cell phone number with someone who was already showing boundary issues (I didn’t). I have had clients expect me to write articles and then get paid for what they accept or a rounded-down fee. I’ve turned down offers of royalty-only payments, unpaid “team” calls, revisions allotting me just two hours of compensation for a complete rewrite (that was their gaffe, not mine), and articles paying a whopping 1 cent per word. Nowhere in any of these compromises that these would-be clients expected was there any indication of what exactly their compromises were.
Work under your terms and only those that are satisfying to you.
3. Drop the stress.
That might mean dropping the client. So be it. You should not have any of the following reactions to seeing a client’s email in your in box:
- Groaning
- Upset stomach
- Tensing of your neck muscles, rubbing of the temples, growling at the screen
- Any verbal “Oh, gawd” or “Now what?” reaction
- Anything other than a pleasant feeling
These are not clients worth keeping no matter how much you are charging them. Stress shortens your life and contributes to health issues. Better to have less money and more enjoyment. Believe me. I’ve been on each side of that equation — less money is definitely a happier place than overworked or over-stressed.
The beauty of it all:
Every single bit of this is already under your control.
You just have to act on it.
So what are you waiting for?
Writers, if you could act on any of these things today, what’s the first thing you’d do?