Freelance Freedom: Are You Really Free?

In this episode, I will explore the unexpected realities of freelancing. Many of us leave the 8-to-5 grind searching for freedom—our own schedules, creative control, and the dream of being our own boss. But what happens when freelancing turns into another exhausting hustle? In this episode, I share my journey of leaving corporate life only to find myself caught in a different kind of trap. We'll discuss how to break free from the relentless hustle and redefine what true freedom looks like—so that your work can be meaningful, joyful, and sustainable. Tune in and discover how to turn freelancing into a lifestyle that works for you, not the other way around.

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

****

I am the author of the forthcoming book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld, where I explore Dag's leadership style and his personal journey in greater depth. For updates, please visit: https://decodingtheunicorn.com/.

You can also follow my author journey on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saracauseyauthor.

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

freelance freedom, corporate job, self-employment, failure lessons, creative freedom, client hustle, inconsistent income, gilded cage, mindset shift, attracting clients, personal brand, work-life balance, introvert leadership, genuine freedom, new year goals

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com and now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to ponder the question, freelance freedom. Are you really free? I mean freelance, it says free right there in the title, but are you actually free? When I left my traditional eight to five corporate job, I absolutely craved freedom. Many of you that have been listening for a long time know my basic story already. I was unhappy working for staffing agencies, and so for a period of time, years ago, I went out on my own, and I tried to have a DIY staffing agency, which went splat right at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I got no traction. I made very little money. And it was terrible. Quite frankly, it was a terrible experience. And I went back into corporate America with my tail tucked firmly between my legs. But I was able to take some of the lessons that I learned in that quote, unquote failure, and I started to realize failure is not actually a permanent condition. I mean, it can be if you decide to lay down in the gutter and you feel sorry for yourself, but you can transform tragedy into triumph. You can take failure and transmogrify it into something else, which is what I did. I was about ready to tear my hair out being in that corporate job, even though I had arrived, I'm using massive air quotes here arrived. I had a management title. I was running an entire branch single handedly, and I had a big, grossly oversized corner office. It felt like a Pyrrhic victory. I got there and I was like, This is what I have supposedly been chasing. It's what I've been accustomed to want, and I have been able to get all the way to this point before I even turned 40 years old. This is what I as a young Gen Xer was groomed to want growing up, parents and grandparents told me that's the thing that you should be chasing. You should want to be the boss. You should want to have the corner office? Well, I got there and it was like, this is not freedom. This is not autonomy. This. This sucks, actually. So I had this excitement. You know, I tend to get introspective as we get into q4 because my birthday is in q4 we're starting to get close to the advent of a new year. It's just a time to really take stock what worked well in this year. What do I want differently for next year? And as I got to that point, in 2019 I got into q4 I thought, I don't want to be here anymore. I'm going to have to screw up the courage to try self employment again. I'm going to have to figure out a way to learn from my previous mistakes so that I don't duplicate them and get out of here. I felt like the proverbial coyote in a trap that gnaws its own arm off rather than being stuck. I don't know if you follow astrology. Maybe it's a Sagittarian thing. You know, our unofficial motto is, Don't fence me in. And I'm big time that way. When I feel trapped, Oh, it's over with whatever I have to do to get out, I'll get out. And that's how I felt in the corporate job I need to get out of here. So I started brainstorming ways to start another business. And I did a soft launch of this current business that I have now, did my a b testing, figured out some things that would work, some things that didn't, and I had this vision like it was. It was exciting to think about getting away from the constraints of corporate America. And I'm imagining freelancing, being my own boss, setting my own hours, and being like To hell with the eight to 540 hour work week. Ain't nobody trying to do that. I give a lot of credit as a young Xer, I give a lot of credit to the millennials and the Gen Z kids, because they figured out a hell of a lot faster than I think our generation did, the trap of corporate America that you can work hard and you can pay your dues. And all the stuff that you're supposed to do. I'm using a lot of big air quotes here. You pay your dues and do what you're supposed to do and still not get ahead. You can work hard and still be broke. I have heard Bob Proctor lecture on that numerous times. You can work very hard and mind your P's and Q's and still be broke. So true. And I think that some of the younger generations figured out, um, this sucks and we don't want to do it. I think they got there a lot faster than some of us. X ers did. Nevertheless, I might not have been the fastest draw. I might not have been the fastest person to come to the conclusion, but I came to the conclusion I want out of here. I want to get back to being able to call my own shots and make my own decisions. But I want the business to be successful. I don't want to sit at home and slowly go broke and be miserable and feel like I'm not actually helping anybody. I've got to figure out some other ways to manage this. So I had this wonderful dream, and I think so many of us do, there is this initial allure, I guess you could say of freelancing, flexible hours, creative freedom, being your own boss, working from home or from anywhere. If you're an expat and you want to travel all over the place, being able to put your your business into a backpack, basically of a laptop and a cell phone, and go over the hell you want to go, that's very alluring. It's very sexy. It's very tempting. And there's certainly a joy of working on your own terms, having that creative freedom and feeling empowered. But we also have to ask the question, especially as we get further into the actual mechanics of either running your own business or running your own full time freelancing desk, what does real, true freedom look like for you? I'm pausing here because I want you to think about this, the idea of freedom isn't always as clear cut as it seems, and it means different things to different people. I would also add in the word autonomy that means different things to different people. Some people really enjoy being intrapreneurs inside somebody else's structure. They want to have a higher level of reward than the run of the mill employee, but they don't want to take all the risks. They don't want to carry the liability insurance. They don't want to deal with customers who are pissed off. They want to be able to do their thing within somebody else's structure, and that's how they like it. And there's nothing wrong with that. For those of us who go into the freelance world, however, we're like, No, I don't want to be entrapped by anything, and yet we can be. How's that for a segue? So what I want to get to now is the reality behind freelancing, and this is uncomfortable, and some of you may get mad, and some of you may nod your heads in agreement, because you totally freaking get what I'm saying. Freelancing can turn into its very own form of hustle and grind, and you can be every bit as miserable, and you can be every bit as busy and frayed and harried as you ever were in an eight to five job. As a matter of fact, you can be even more so in those conditions than you ever were in an eight to five job, because it's all on you. You can find yourself juggling a never ending list of clients or hustling for prospects. You can be dealing with negotiations and people that want to haggle on price, you can have the pressures of inconsistent income and feast famine cycles, and you can find yourself scrounging, and that's really the way that I would would think of it. I'm picturing, you know, I live on a working farm and ranch, so I'm picturing animals like coyotes and buzzards that scavenge. They look for leftovers, they look for carcasses, and they have a job to do in nature. They exist for a reason, but you're a human being. Do you want to be scavenging for clients on freelancing platforms? I freaking don't. I got to the point where, when I was introspective during q4 of this year, I was like, No no no, because it's like looking for the proverbial diamond in the rough or trying to find a beautiful, fresh bouquet of vibrant red roses in the middle of a cesspool. I mean, you might find something beautiful in that cesspool here and there, but the default setting is you're typically going to find clients who don't want to pay what you're. Actually worth and who are demanding they want endless revisions they're never satisfied. So it's like, do you want to spend that time and energy and focus trying to hustle and audition for doo, doo poop clients, or do you want to aim higher and find something else? So our so called freedom can become another hustle. It's just in a different set of clothing. You have similar stressors. You're just doing it in a different setting. So you might not be dealing with some jerk, wide co worker in the next cubicle. You might be at home in your pajamas or your sweats, but you're still dealing with a jerk wad client. You have to think about those things. Sometimes we excuse bad behavior away, or we try to make ourselves comfortable with an uncomfortable situation by Well, at least I'm at home, at least I'm working for myself, at least I'm in sweats, at least I don't have a boss breathing down my neck every five minutes. And I have found myself doing that exact thing, trying to put polish on a bad situation, trying to look for that silver lining. And sometimes in life, the best thing to do instead of looking for the silver lining or trying to polish a turd, sometimes the best thing to do is to just leave to make a different choice, or to say, I will temporarily submit to this. But I do it knowing that it's a bridge job. I do it, knowing that this is not the final destination. This is not what I want out of life. I feel like freelancing can be a trap that we don't talk about. And one of the things that I have realized you may have seen, if you read my blog, then you may have seen me talking about this recently. Even a gilded cage is still a cage. I'm pausing because I want you to sit with that for a second. It's easy to gloss over something like this. Even a cage with beautiful golden bars and nice fluffy mattress and some pillows inside of it. It's still a cage. You're not completely free, because you're trapped in that cage, and sometimes it's self constructed. It can be expectations and requirements that we place on ourselves, always hustle, always grind, always be available. Never Stop pushing. You gotta go in one more time. You gotta do that. One more thing. You need to check the freelancing platforms one more time tonight. You need to get your application in first. You need to do the tap dance audition for this client who's probably doo-doo poop anyway. We can do these things to ourselves, and if you're not careful, Your Freelancing desk can be a situation where you've traded one boss at a job for multiple bosses, ie your clients, and you haven't changed the fundamental cycle of exhaustion that you're on. You know, I'm a big proponent. I have said it many times in my blog. I've said it many times on this podcast, your business has to work for you. It's not only about developing value and providing value for your clients. Obviously, that's important, obviously that's meaningful. At the same time. Are you doing it at your own expense? Is it a situation where you offer endless revisions to demanding, haughty, uptight clients, and you're draining the life blood out of yourself. You're miserable. You're not even doing what you set out to do in the first place. Because that's a very real reality for freelancers, and I would say in particular, creatives that decide to freelance, some will set the expectation for this price point. I will offer two revisions for this price point. I will offer three for this price point, I will offer four. They will have tiers that you can choose from, depending upon how picky you want to be. Other people will just say, I will do this work for $10 and offer endless revisions because I'm just desperate for your business. And unfortunately, when we do that as freelancers, we invite abuse, because the people who tend to take you up on that offer are people who are going to bleed you dry. They're not easily satisfied. Hell, some of them are not ever satisfied with anything. They like to gripe and they like to. Make life miserable for other people. So you want to be careful that you're not perpetuating a cycle that you've tried to leave. Maybe at the cube farm, you had one boss who was a nincompoop that you didn't want to be around, but now you have 10 different clients that make you want to tear your hair out. I mean, think about that. What? What have you really accomplished in that situation? Maybe you're at home, maybe you're in sweats instead of a business suit. But are you better off? One of the things that we have to do, in my opinion, is shift the mindset. You know, I have all something else, I've also said many times before is, I believe what Dan Locke says about mindset, that maybe 20 to 30% of the issues that you face in business are actually tactical, practical, strategic problems. Everything else is mindset related. So the majority of problems that you're going to have are in your mindset. And one of the things that we have to do in any kind of freelancing or any kind of creative endeavor is move away from that chasing, hustling, grinding mindset into more of an attracting, curating, cultivating mindset. If we think about it like a garden, that's when the metaphor becomes even richer, and we can understand the folly of chasing all the time. When you go out in a garden and you till the soil, maybe you have some amendments, some compost, some fertilizer that you're grinding into the soil, you get all of that done. You create your rows or your furrows, you stretch out a piece of tape or a string to try to keep your rows somewhat straight. My rose never seemed to be completely Martha straight. I'm just gonna tell you, I always wound up with some of them being off key. But anyway, stretch out your string or your tape. You plant your seeds, you space everything out appropriately so that your plants are not all too close together and crowding each other out and competing for the same nutrients. After you've done that, you don't go out to the garden the next morning and start screaming at the seeds and the rose. You better hurry up. What the hell are you doing, you lazy *sshole. I try to keep it G to PG on here. I'm not gonna bleep that. I'm doing it to make a point, if you go out and start screaming at your rose and cussing at your seeds, what's the point? It's so stupid. That's so stupid. Nobody would do that. No sane person would go out the very next morning and be mad that they didn't already have plants. It doesn't work that way. The seeds take a little bit of time to germinate and then to push up through the dirt. I've had situations where I waited and waited and I thought, is this seed ever going to do anything? Or did I get some dud seed? Because occasionally that happens too. I remember one time. I don't even remember what kind of plant it was, a bean plant, maybe, but I had gone out there and I was like, Oh, I think something's wrong. I think this is a dud seed. I better dig it up and plant a new one. Once I moved some dirt, there were green shoots coming up. They just weren't visible yet, because they hadn't all the way pushed up through the mound of dirt. So we would never go out to a garden and scream and cuss and act like a crazy person. Yet we do that to ourselves all the time. That's what happens with the chasing and the hustle and the grind. It's got to be now. It's going to be right now. I don't see an instant result. It didn't work overnight. That's also, I can say it. You know the old saying, If you spot it, you got it as a recovering type A personality. That's also something that we find a lot in the type a mentality. Hurry up. Do it now. I'm impatient. It's got to happen right now, right now, right now, right now. I don't want to wait. I don't want to wait. We got to do it now. Everything's urgent. That is a very unpleasant way to live, been there, done that, and one of the reasons why I call myself recovering type A is because I realized this sucks. This is not a good way to live. All you're going to do is burn yourself out. And in fact, cardiologists have and other doctors have found that people with Type A personality are more prone to heart disorders. Well, I already have heart issues post I don't need to compound that by being type A. There's nothing to be gained by that. Even if we start out on freelancing platforms, we're trying to get some testimonials. We're trying to get some money in the bank, or maybe you're, you're doing your A and B testing there to figure out what offerings work or what services you're capable of delivering. That's no big deal. I think where it becomes a big deal is if you plan on staying there forever. Don't get me wrong. There are some people who do, and there are plenty of of articles that you will find online. I suspect some of them may be sponsored by the platforms themselves, but that's neither here nor there. You'll find plenty of articles of supposed freelancers out there somewhere. Oh, I use such and so platform, and I make $300,000 a year. Oh, I use this other platform, and I make half a million. And I'm sitting there going, how much dirt Have you had to eat? How many hours a week are you working 90 hours a week and not sleeping? Are you dealing with clients that are I'm trying to be polite here because I've already cussed. But are you dealing with poop head clients all the time? Like, how much dirt Are you having to eat to get there? Maybe they're not. Maybe they're so dialed in on manifesting that they're manifesting the absolute best clients in the world through those freelancing platforms. I'm skeptical of it, but I mean, maybe I think the day comes where you're going to want to graduate off those platforms, and you're going to want to get out of that hustle, grind, hurry up. Do it now. Push, push, push mentality. One way is by building a personal brand that attracts the right clients to you. Another way is by establishing systems that will create some degree of stability and reduce or completely eliminate those hand to mouth, rob Peter to pay, Paul, feast, famine cycles. And last but not least, you want to create some boundaries that allow space for your own creativity and rest. Rest is not a dirty word. Sometimes, those of us that start our own businesses have our own freelancing desk, we just think, I've got to always be on, I've got to always be grinding. I've got to always be doing. No, you don't. You don't. I think you also need to look at what real freedom looks like to you? Is it about reclaiming your time? Is it about setting appropriate boundaries with clients? Maybe it could be something as simple as I am available Monday through Friday from eight to five outside of those hours, I do not check email, I do not respond to phone calls. Could also be having a dedicated line for work so that you can at 5pm shut it off and you have a different line for friends and family. That way, if grandma calls at 8pm and you want to take her call, you're not being bothered by clients at the same time. It could be that true freedom is being able to take vacations not feeling like you're always on. It might be that you do graphic design for your job, but you also do graphic design for pleasure. It may be that you paint because you want certain things to be featured in galleries, but then you also paint privately to work out your own ideas or get things out of your own subconscious mind. I do that. Sometimes I'll just see something in my brain abstracts or shapes or some particular something, and I'd be like, I think I ought to paint that. It doesn't matter if the painting isn't any good, I just do it. To do it. It's a great way to unwind and to focus your brain on something else. It's one of those things to me, like taking a shower, mowing the lawn, folding the laundry. Sometimes I've had incredible bursts of creativity and amazing business ideas that occurred to me when my mind was fixated on something else. You could just be standing there folding towels and be like, Oh, I just had the coolest idea. I should go try that, or shampooing my hair in the shower. It's like, oh, well, wait a minute. I think I just solved that problem that's been bugging me for the past two weeks. It can really help but the thing of it is, you need to have the time and the space to do that for yourself. So how do we move forward? Many freelancers are freaking exhausted, and it's not their fault. The traditional freelance model, and certainly the freelancing platforms we're all encouraged to use, are flawed. There's hope that there is a better way, and part of that change starts by rethinking, getting in your mindset, and rethinking the way that you approach work and success. Now, on that note, I have been rubs my hands together gleefully. I have been in my own laboratory, if you will, not creating Frankenstein's monster, I don't think, but working on a program specifically for introverts and creatives, as I've been writing and working on Dag Hammarskjöld's biography, and seeing what an amazing introvert leader he was, the the manner in which he led, the strategies, the gratitude, the. Appreciation. Nothing was loud. Nothing was shouting and intimidating and bloviating and blustering the way that we so often see in extrovert, heavy leadership situations. He wasn't like that, and he was so incredibly effective. In fact, it was not that many years ago that Kofi Annan said that Dag Hammarskjöld was the lodestone any other Secretary General, any other international diplomat, can always be judged by the standards that Dag set. But Dag wasn't an extrovert. He wasn't loud and jazz hands and boisterous and crazy. He was quiet and gentle and a wonderful human being, truly, and that inspired me to create this upcoming program, quiet, brave, bold, because those things are not antonyms. You can be quiet and be brave. You can be quiet and be bold. And I want that for introverts and creatives, it's certainly been a metamorphosis for me, my God, I feel like I went into a cocoon and came out as a butterfly, and I want that for other people. So if you're looking to take those steps towards genuine freedom in your work and in your life, please stay tuned. I will have a webinar and a workbook coming out soon. It's kind of the preliminary entree into that program, and then I'll be developing the program further. I've still been in the lab working on some additional things for the Digital Library, getting the modules put together. And so it's a really exciting time. So here's the thing, especially as we go into this time, people are thinking, New year, new me. They're looking to make changes. They're looking they're hungry for transformation. You can redefine work. You can get into your true self. You don't have to be stuck in these cycles that promise freedom but don't actually deliver it. So stay tuned. More exciting news on that front. In the meantime, stay safe. Did I get tongue tied there? I think I might have. I won't edit it out. In the meantime, stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

 Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time you