Freelance Lessons Learned–Make Your Own Music
Posted March 24, 2011 in Freelance Stories, Inspiration Add Comment »
Before I became a full-time freelancer, I’d imagine my future career and split it into two phases:
- Pre-freelance (when I lacked clarity and direction)
- Post-freelance (which would be full of purpose and perfection)
The reality was much different. Instead of leaving one life behind, I found that lessons from my previous career helped me in my new one. The most helpful lessons came from a surprising source–my job as a belly dancing teacher.
Before I was a writer (okay, I’ve always been a writer, but before I realized I could make a living off of it) I taught belly dance classes three days a week at my college. It wasn’t something I’d planned. I’d started out as a student and my teacher decided to mentor me to take over her role. For months I shadowed her classes, then worked up to teaching the warm up. The day I finally got my own class, I showed up with lesson plans, ready to take the class by storm…only to learn that I’d forgotten all my music.
In this post, I’ll explain how I handled this problem and explain what it has to do with freelancing.
What This Taught Me About Freelancing
First, I apologized profusely to the girls in my class. I called my sister (in front of them!) and begged her to bring me my case of CDs. I tried to pass the time by having everyone sit in a circle and introduce themselves, but it was no use. My students sensed my nervousness and this, in turn, made them doubt me.
Lesson Learned: Don’t apologize for what you think are shortcomings. Whether you’re just starting out as a freelancer or have been doing it long enough to still have insecurities, chances are that you’re your worst critic. In a way, prospective clients are like my dance students: they’re going to follow your lead. So if you show a prospective client you lack confidence, he’ll start to doubt you, too.
Once I finally got my music, I started the class…and didn’t play the music until 20 minutes later. I hadn’t realized that before my class was ready for music, they’d need to learn the moves.
Lesson Learned: Forget what you don’t have and focus on what you do. Sure, I was missing my entire music library, but I had something no one else in the class had—dance experience.
Because freelancers’ careers are always evolving, branching out into new niches and specialties, it can start to feel like you’re constantly starting over. Don’t let the things you’re missing obscure the experiences you already have. If you want to break into magazines but have no clips, play up your previous job as a hotel manager when pitching a story on the changes location-based networking has brought to the hospitality industry. If you’d like to start writing copy but have no agency experience, why not focus on the fact that you once worked in sales instead?
The next day, I told my teacher what happened, expecting her to be sympathetic. She just laughed and said “Big deal! That’s happened to me tons of times. I just made my own music.” Instead of throwing a fit about it like I’d done, she played her finger cymbals to keep the beat and acted like it was all part of her plan.
Lesson Learned: Sometimes you just need make your own music. No writing samples yet? Start a blog to showcase your expertise on the subject you’d like to specialize in. Need more logos for your graphic design portfolio, but no one’s hired you yet? Create your own, starting with an amazing one for your company (of course), then design complete logo packages for that coffee shop you’ve always dreamed of opening, or that iPhone app you wish someone would make already.
Remember that the purpose of a portfolio is first and foremost to showcase your skills, not how many times someone’s paid you for using them. You don’t need hundreds of jobs to start impressing clients with your talent, just like a dancer doesn’t need music to start busting a move.
Sometimes, You Simply Have to Improvise
It was naïve of me to think my first day as a dance teacher would go perfectly, and since then, I’ve learned to be prepared to improvise if I have to. One of the best (and most challenging) aspects of the freelance life is that you’re completely in charge—and completely to blame if things go wrong.
So plan for the unexpected. Give yourself a different deadline than the client does, so you have extra time in case your roof collapses or there’s a family emergency. Gather a group of freelancers you can count on should you have to subcontract work to them due to time constraints (or for an expertise you lack). If a client asks for three ideas for a new marketing campaign, have at least the beginnings of two more in case she hates them all.
And when all else fails, don’t let them see you panic. A calm and collected, “I’ll get back to you on that,” is always better than the alternative of having them wait and wonder, “What now?”
What About Your Pre-Freelance Life?
No matter how unrelated your pre-freelance life might seem, there are probably lessons that you learned from it that you are using today.
Why not share any lessons you’ve learned from past jobs that are helping you in your freelance life now?
Image by vmiramontes
About the author: Natalia Sylvester is the founder of InkyClean, a copywriting and editing consultancy that helps small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups find their voice and build their brand. She blogs about why business writing should never be boring at The Copywriter’s Soapbox and tweets about books, fiction, and copywriting at @NataliaSylv.
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