You can feel it in the air, the nervousness of finances. Everyone can sense it, that creeping cost to exist; to eat, to be warm, to get around. After Brexit, Covid-19, war in Europe and political chaos, the everyday certainties of price and process we took for granted are eroding like a crumbling sea wall against the heavier waves. We all face the Great Pinch, apart from an opportune few who are making a killing from the calamity.
For most businesses and for micro-businesses, like freelancers especially, it can feel like yet another round in a series of live-or-die battles for economic survival. For myself, the battle is a quiet affair because remote working is a quiet affair, you have to self-motivate and self-organise and be very self-aware. The worst thing to do is do nothing, to wait, to expect. There is no solid wall to lean on, just a number of moving planks to jump from one to the other in succession like a complex, choreographed dance. In an almost nomadic circus life, as a freelancer, you need to be an acrobat of client work, a juggler with commissions, never losing footing to tumble into the air. It’s gritty, but it’s satisfying too because it’s at least work you love and a fight you love winning. However, it’s becoming apparent that burnouts are overdue for many of us in the freelance game and in all our workplaces – it’s all over the news, people are struggling. Looking around, it’s a tenser environment, with the feeling that there is more risk than people are happy with, shadowing like a storm cloud.
It transpires that 10 million people are looking for extra work in the UK to cope with remaining able to balance books, and we are all facing increasing stress. Those staple mentor terms like mindset and resilience remain woven into the threads of business terminology wherever you go. Anyone in business long enough will know that developing a can-do mindset is everything. Yet, mindset is a very personal thing that can’t be forced after a seminar or YouTube video. I had a friend who mentored, and he literally asked people to face their fears, so shortly after signing up for his course he had them jumping out of aeroplanes – which although extreme, turns out to be a valuable breakthrough for developing a healthy mindset that can’t be told in words.
When you are faced with real discomfort, you naturally want to fall back into your comfort zone, but hard changes require hard changes in response, they require inner strength to challenge your limits. Proactive moves, reaching out, doing more, being creative with solutions, doing it differently, proving you are the best at what you do and you are worth the money, these things are now mandatory requirements for sole traders to prevail in an era of financial pain.
Despite everything costing more, and businesses getting fearful out there, I’m finding that I am pushing myself and getting a lot of good work done in response, and as long as I can write I am happy. There is a comical bitter-sweet moment I always remember from David Brent in The Office where he quotes Dolly Parton: “You can’t have a rainbow without a little rain”. We double our strength when under pressure and whenever there’s another ‘financial doom’ overhanging the country and threatening us, I smile and think of that, particularly because one of my favourite pictures of my family is one with a rainbow behind them, they are all smiling in a storm. We need to decide we’ll be fine and we have to remember, it’s only the weather, it will change.
Writer for Hire 