Pick your freelance goals wisely: personal goals
There’s a lot of yakkety-yak about masterminding yourself to this or TO DO listing yourself to that. But the truth of the matter is we get the most satisfaction out of what we do when we focus on the process. We take the joy from the task. We enter the flow.
The flow is that area where you have enough work to keep you challenged, but not so much work that you feel overwhelmed. You can read more about flow here.
For this series of exercises, I’m going to take you away from some processes that you thought may have worked that don’t. And I am going to give you some that do.
It’s up to you to make your decisions on what to do.
Vision Boards
It’s very common for people to start off their working year with vision boards. Vision boards are a load of baloney. The reason they are a load of baloney is that while they remind you of the far off dream of a holiday or Ferrari, they provide no practical roadmap to how you are meant to get there. They are pretty, but they aren’t grounded in reality.
In fact, staring day after day at that expensive car or coconut palm trees is probably going to make you feel less and less satisfied with what you do.
So take your vision board and burn it. Ok, that’s brutal. But maybe treat it like an art project as opposed to something to aspire to.
Instead of a vision board, set yourself moments to work on smaller tasks that lead to bigger things. It’s about eating the elephant one bite at a time. If you want to be a rock star filling up a stadium, you first need to learn your instrument.
The same applies with your business career.
Exercise:
What lessons do you need to learn to progress?
What kind of time do you need to carve out for activities?
Break down the bigger plans into bite sized chunks and set time aside to take on parts of your wider project
Focus on their completion
And have a ‘done list’ so you can see the progress you are making.
Yourself as a product
It’s super popular right now for people to try and be a celebrity in freelancing, entrepreneurship and business. There are a lot of women especially who are looking to make their smiling visage on their sassy new parallax site the biggest drawcard in town.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a household name. As long as you offer something that is worthwhile enough for you to gain that level of accolade for. Famous for being famous is boring and it never lasts. Well, unless you’re a Kardashian.
But even then, there is a strong focus on (narcissistic) marketing techniques – which the average freelancer has little time for (and will probably also find fairly emotionally exhausting).
Anyway...
Your product must always come first. I’ve ranted about that with this article called ‘branding fails when you are the only product’- take a look and see if you agree with me.
The bottom line with this one though is to focus on the problem you solve for people. Not how wonderful you are as a superhero.
We’re freelancers. Not Batman.
Exercise:
You’ve identified why your product exists. You’ve identified your audience.
How do you keep that conversation going?
Where do you need to be for them to hear what you have to say?
Write a list of places and MoSCoW the important places to action.
Extreme TO DO lists
Extreme TO DO Lists are the kind that come from you spending time at a conference, workshop or becoming a devotee of B-School. It’s all about world domination, lots of amazing ideas and marketing projects. The problem is the majority of self employed people don’t have time to take on giant marketing campaigns or reshuffle their entire diary in order to make massive changes.
The eating of elephants has been forgotten. And instead of bite sized chunks, you’ll get a brain that is choked and overwhelmed.
So the rub between all these wonderful things you’ve identified you should be doing and the progress you’re actually making becomes bigger and wider, and the dissatisfaction sets in. This is another way to make you feel like you are not doing enough for your business. You don’t need that kind of pressure.
The simplest way to get through this is to MoSCoW the heck out of what you want to do. That way, you can see what you truly need to do for your business to survive without the guilt of leaving ideas behind.
You can dig deep into MoSCoW in this guest article I wrote for Click Winning Content entitled how to get stuff done when you can’t do everything.
Exercise:
Once you’ve read the article, I’d like you to:
Write down a list of things you’d like to do
And then use the MoSCoW priority to sort out what is and isn’t necessary. We’ll discuss this as part of your lesson 10 call.
You can have it all
This phrase is ridiculous. It places pressure on people. What is ‘all’ anyway? My ‘all’ is different to your ‘all’. It’s not univers-all.
You don’t need to have it all to be content. You can choose the things you enjoy and focus on making them work for you. It’s about defining what those things are.
I discuss this at length on Hacking Happiness – whatever happened to being content? Take a read and see if you agree with me.
Exercise:
Make a list of the things that truly matter to you. It might be family, your health, your business, study, spending time with friends, carving out time for creative projects, establishing an audience, making money, whatever.
Look at those items and now pick 3 to focus on. It may feel like a Sophie’s Choice of sorts, but the human mind can only make 3 choices at any given time before we enter analysis paralysis.
Pick the 3 that need the most attention, give you the most joy and have the best potential.
Go through your diary and make sure you give them sufficient time each week to gain attention and momentum.
And stick to it.
What- no aim for the stars stuff?!
I’ve read books that talk about when you should and shouldn’t read emails, be on social media, take holidays and plan your life. I’ve seen celebrities rock the room with all kinds of claims about how their way of doing something is better than the rest.
The truth is the joy lies in the process. It is found in keeping things as simple as possible. And it’s about being able to repeat it until it becomes second nature.
It takes 66 days to form a good habit. So if you want to be fitter, give yourself 2 to 3 months of exercise. If you want to be a better parent, allow 66 special dates with your kids or say no 66 times to overtime instead to hang with them.
And if you want to be a better freelancer, identify the 66th pitch or blog post or project booking and aim to have it tied towards showing your best work.
Never plan yourself out of the game. Always take a step back. Put ideas away in a box where they can’t ignore you- keep it simple. Only do the exercises you need to keep your own personal freelance fitness levels high.
Until next time!