Tame Your Freelance Fears

What’s the one thing that you’re afraid to do as a freelancer?

Are you afraid to send off a query to a new-to-you editor or publication? Are you afraid to get more assertive with a client about collecting late payment? Are you afraid to fire a deadbeat or slow-paying client? Are you afraid to delve into social media or learn a new skill? What is the one area where you feel stuck?

If you don’t have any active freelance fears (that you’re aware of anyway), congratulations. And please tell the rest of us how you managed to accomplish that. But if you’re like most of us, there are usually one or two areas where we’re letting fear make some decisions for us—whether we admit it or not.

The best way to overcome fear is to face it head on and just work your way through it. If you allow fear to take over, you’ll settle into inaction and the fear will grow over time. That’s been my experience anyway. So the best antidote to fear is action. But in order to take that action, you have to understand how fears tend to manifest themselves into your freelance life. Because as highly evolved as we’d all like to think of ourselves, there’s still a certain amount of denial that’s attached to fear. Sometimes people aren’t even aware they’re operating in fear mode.

So how to spot if you’ve got it? Here are some common ways fear can show up in your life based on my experience and the experience of others I know:

1) Procrastination. What “important” task in your professional life keeps getting shoved down to the bottom of your to-do list or carried over into the next day, and the next, and the next one after that? Take a look at that task and ask yourself if there’s any fear attached to it—especially if you tell yourself that you have to do that task within the hour or by the end of the day today. The remedy is to schedule the task, and decide that you’re going to do that thing—no matter how difficult it is—before the end of the day today. Get it over with and move on. When you procrastinate and hang onto fear, you’re just wasting energy and time—and I’m guessing you don’t have any to waste.

2) Automatic resistance. People resist change in different ways. Many times, people simply dig in their heels and get vocal about how opposed they are to [fill in the blank]. But from my corporate experience (as someone who had to help teams change their processes and adopt new software), I eventually realized something very interesting about the most vocal change resisters and naysayers. They were usually the most fearful of the bunch. The change was forcing them out of their comfort zone into a new, unfamiliar territory. And in many cases on a deeper level, they didn’t trust themselves or their performance in the new paradigm. So even though you’re self-employed and probably not working on a team, you can still suss out certain attitudes and behaviors that you’re walking around with when you think about having to change what you’re doing or how you’re running your business. So if you determine that you’re resisting change of any type (and you find yourself trying to convince yourself and others that it’s a bad idea), take a closer look. Are you afraid to delve into social media? Do something about it today. Get on Facebook. Send that query. Dive into Twitter and see what happens. The important thing is to get at the root of your resistance and then take action. Fear tends to create inaction as a defense mechanism because it allows you to acknowledge the change, but gives you an excuse not to do anything about it.

3) Foot-dragging. Is something taking you an inordinate amount of time? Are you afraid of making a mistake? Then your first step is to get honest with yourself and acknowledge what you’re doing and that you’re creating your own bottleneck. Or you can continue dragging your feet on XYZ task until you’re more comfortable and willing to move faster. But the bottom line is, you are only hurting yourself and your business by holding onto old ways and old things for too long. And as quickly as changes are happening today—particularly in the media and publishing industries—a certain amount of speed or willingness to move faster is required.

These are just a handful of ways that fear can manifest itself in your freelance life. Perhaps others will occur to you as well. The important thing is to acknowledge the fear and then take action. If you do nothing or you don’t acknowledge that it’s there, the fear will grow over time. And it’s probably just a bogeyman in your closet anyway—the cause of your fear in most cases will be unfounded.

What’s the worst thing that can happen if you do that thing you’re afraid of? You might fail, or you might succeed. And for some, both can stir up some fear.

I know that when I was freelancing part-time before with the intention of going full-time, I had a lot of fear attached to that. There were just a lot of things that I didn’t know. So I made a list of all the things that I needed to find out and do and told myself that I’d work at tackling one of those things every evening after work for a set period of time. A lot of it just involved simple research. But it was still intimidating to me. I wasn’t questioning my ability to do the work, but what I was really fearful about was taking that big leap of faith, leaving the regular paycheck behind, and going off on my own. I won’t lie. It was scary at first. But the fear subsided the longer I did it and the more experience I got under my belt.

So in addition to your regular work tasks today, I’d like you to consider doing a few things:

1) Identify your biggest fear.

2) Think about the cause of it.

3) Make a quick list of tasks or things you need to do with regard to that fear.

3) Pick one of the action items on your list and do it today.

And, of course, the last item on the list is to let me know what happens! Drop me a line and tell me all about it!

Photo credit: Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha (Flickr)