Author: Muriel McClymont

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place"
George Bernard Shaw

WE OFTEN take language for granted and assume a level of communication and understanding that, in reality, is not being conveyed. I was recently working with a Danish colleague who appeared to keep swearing for no good reason. The relief in the group was palpable when we realised she was actually talking about a factsheet she had brought with her (you try saying factsheet with a Danish accent). What was even funnier was seeing her trying to work out why we were so shocked that she had produced and brought such a thing.

You can see how these random misunderstandings can cause real trouble especially when you add multiple cultures to the mix. Speaking the same language doesn’t even stop this, as Winston Churchill once remarked about the UK and USA: “Two nations divided by a common language.”

I’m sure we can all think of examples where we have been confused or have caused confusion with our American cousins. For example, American pants are UK trousers, gas is petrol and a faucet is a tap.

Such dual meanings that could lead to misunderstanding are much wider than just the words we speak. All of us live in our own bubble of experience, which no one else has access to. So if you just received bad news and then don’t laugh at someone’s joke, they may think you have no sense of humour. You may think them insensitive. It’s not possible to keep everyone updated with what is happening to us all of the time, so this is bound to happen occasionally.

Sometimes within our own bubble we think that we are experiencing ‘reality’, and not just one perspective on it. When that happens we expect other people to understand what we do and to know what we know and to behave as we would expect them to. When more than one person is working from this position you can expect some outrage and incredulity of what they have to deal with in others lack of understanding and stupidity.

There’s a good illustration of this here in a sketch from Fawlty Towers. It’s the layers of misunderstanding, which make it so funny, but also demonstrate so beautifully how easily we get our wires crossed.

In this sketch the Major thinks the moose head is some new fangled gadget that has been programmed to speak because he never saw Manuel crouched behind the desk. When he then asked Basil where the moose head had come from, what he said made perfect sense if you were aware of the experience he had just had, but as Basil was unaware of this, he dismissed the Major’s words as nonsense.

How many times a day do you think this happens between people? It’s a common gag in films but is a daily occurrence in all our lives. If you want a master class in miscommunication, get hold of the entire Fawlty Towers series, sit back and enjoy!

Other forms of miscommunication arise when there are too many differences in our life experiences or values. Our core values drive most of our behaviours so when we try to live or work closely with someone who’s values are too different from our own, it can be impossible to find enough common ground to build a sound relationship.

The title of this blog comes from a song by Jim Reeves singing about a relationship break up, which really captures this mis-alignment: “Both aiming for heaven(s), but ours weren’t the same”. It’s a sad song but a lovely illustration of this incompatibility. You can imagine that when they got together they used a common language that led them both to believe that each meant what the other thought it meant, but over time realised it wasn’t the same thing at all.

So how can we reduce some of these misunderstandings in our own lives? The first step is to let go of the illusion that you have a good grip on reality. There is no such thing. We are all having our own individually tailored experience of reality, no one is enjoying the definitive version.

The second step is when we notice someone looking puzzled, outraged or amused by something we said, be curious about what they might have understood by it, rather than dismiss them as idiots. Conversely when someone says something outrageous to you, explore with them what they really meant.

The third step is perhaps the most difficult, which is to embrace the fact that people interpret things differently and have different beliefs about how the world works. With some people, the best you can hope for is to exchange viewpoints - changing them is a much bigger job that you are unlikely to achieve in a passing conversation.

Understanding all this is extremely useful for us creative freelances who have to communicate with a wide range of people, often with disparate objectives to our own. For example, when it comes to negotiating contracts, or finding collaborators or obtaining funding. Not everyone is going to think like you. So the more flexibility, tolerance and curiosity you can develop when talking to people, the more you will be able to forge a common path of understanding between you that will put you and your business in a stronger position.

So good luck as you continue to navigate through the wonderful world of communication or miscommunication, and may all your misunderstandings be funny ones.

ONE OF the most common discussion I have at workshops with creative freelances is about how to not take rejection personally. This is a tricky question when you are effectively ‘the product’, so being turned down can feel very personal. However, learning not to take things personally is a key skill that will save a lot of heartbreak over the years.

When you pick a birthday card for a friend, if you are like me, you’ll be looking for something ‘appropriate’, whatever that may mean for you, e.g., something that reflects how you feel about them, or something that will make them laugh.

Imagine if all the designers of the cards you didn’t choose sat weeping in the background, feeling personally slighted by your selection. Doesn’t make sense does it?

In exactly the same way, it doesn’t make sense to feel personally offended when a decision is made that effectively rejects you or your work, no matter how much love, care and attention you have put into it. By all means feel disappointed, sad even - we are all only human after all, but offended? No, these decisions are rarely truly personal.

How to do it!

Let’s look at the two main ways we perceive and remember events:

• We either see or replay the event as if we are looking out of our own eyes, which I’ll call the ‘Player’ mode or:
• We see or replay them from the position of a bystander, actually seeing ourselves in the action as a fly on the wall. I’ll call this the ‘Watcher’ mode.

It’s not just how we perceive and remember events, it’s also how we imagine things happening in the future, in daydreams, or dreams. It’s a big part of how we make ourselves feel good or bad, motivated or demotivated. It’s a great one to be aware of and start using more consciously.

Try it out

Imagine a situation where you are having a strong pleasurable experience. For example, eating a cream cake, playing with a pet, or something much more personal (if it’s very personal, keep it to yourself please.)

Whatever you choose, imagine doing it now in ‘player’ mode - looking out from your own eyes: see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel. Take a bit of time to fully experience it.

Now stop that (if you can bear to) and imaging doing it again - only this time be the ‘watcher’, as if you are in an audience watching yourself doing it. It’s happening over there, while you are sat apart from all the action.

Feels quite different, doesn’t it? When you are the player, you can really engage in the experience and feel the pleasurable emotions. When you are the watcher, it feels detached and a lot less fun or a lot less intense.

Learning to step back from a bad experience, from player to watcher is one of the most effective and quickest steps to stop feeling bad in less pleasant situations, and is a very useful way to stop yourself taking things personally.

When something bad happens and you continuously replay it in your head in player mode, it’s hard not to sink into all the horrible feelings of the event, and even create some extra ones that didn’t come up at the time, but which emerge as we imagine all the other terrible consequences that could happen. To put it bluntly, we wallow. An important element of wallowing is being fully immersed as the player in the remembered experience(s). This is the perfect strategy to take things personally!

Being able to step back into watcher mode takes the emotional charge out of the situation and lets you be more rational about it. Both modes are important - learning to choose which you want to experience is the really useful life skill.

When you are having a romantic evening with someone you love, it’s going to be a much nicer experience if you are in player mode, often described as, ‘in the moment’. I’m sure you have all experienced situations where either you or the person you are with is not really present - perhaps so preoccupied with something that is not going on in the same room, or so busy worrying about saying the right thing, that they are mentally detached, i.e., in watcher mode. This rarely goes unnoticed by the other person, and generally impacts badly on the moment or conversation.

However, it’s sometimes very useful to be detached in watcher mode. For example, if you are dealing with an emergency, you will be much more focussed and constructive if you can step back and separate yourself from the emotions of the situation. Imagine working in a busy A&E department if you couldn’t do watcher mode? You would soon be overwhelmed by your own emotions, and the potential consequences for the future for the patients and their families of the more seriously ill or injured patients.

If you are one of those people who feels everyone else’s pain, emotional or physical, I’m talking about those of you who cry at adverts here, then being able to step into watcher mode sometimes would be a handy relief.

If you are habitually analytical, and let that stand back, assessing, watcher mode creep into your personal, relational, sociable moments, you might find more fun and joy in those situations when you learn to spend more time in player mode.

Some people are much better at just one, and would benefit from practicing the other mode. For a balanced, happy life, we need both, and practising allows you more choice and flexibility, especially if you want to learn how to not take rejection personally.

One of the biggest misapprehensions I come across when I run our ‘Tools for Goal Setting’ workshop is the belief that there are ‘goals’ people, and those who just bumble through.

Yet there are many successful people who don’t see themselves as ‘goals’ focused. However, anyone who is managing to run their lives reasonably well is setting and fulfilling goals. Whether they do this in a structured, conscious way or not is a matter of organisation not goal setting! Let’s face it, if you didn’t set any goals, you wouldn’t even make it out of bed in the morning.

Most of us have an internal depiction of where we are going. This can take the form of an idea, a picture, or deep sense of purpose which we often unconsciously refer to when making decisions. Very effective people who don’t ‘do’ goals, will often have such a compelling internal vision that is so motivating to them, they just keep ploughing through obstacles to get there. Many of us have this, but not clearly in our awareness, we just ‘instinctively’ know what we need to say yes and no to.

Whether we need structured goals and action plans or not, is a matter of personal preference, and both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, neither is wrong. What’s important is how effective the strategies are.

If what you are doing is working for you, great, keep doing it. If you struggle to get what you want, read on.

Setting your compass

The first and most important step is to work out what you want. I call it setting your compass because it’s not about intricately planning the next decade. You have no way of predicting what will happen over the next 10 years. You and your passions will evolve and the world is constantly changing.

When the first Harry Potter film came out, we smiled indulgently at the talking posters on the wall, and the newspapers with moving pictures in them. Now we walk around any major city in the world and see posters with movies advertising products, and people reading newspapers with embedded video on their hand held devices!

If you keep your long term plans vague and flexible, then as with any journey, when you have to go round the life equivalent of a mountain, or ocean, you’ll have the opportunity to explore new territory. You may even discover new passions that take you in an unexpected direction. It would be a shame to miss those because they weren’t on the plan you drew up years earlier! What does matter is that the direction you set is important to you.

Identify key steps

Once you’ve set your compass, what has to happen to get you there? Identify the smaller goals and key steps that need to happen for this to become your future reality. Put them in order and identify what has to happen first.

For some this will be enough to take action, others will need to spend a bit more time working out the detail, and scheduling in more specific activities. Before you start though, take these goals through the workout below.

The goal workout

As Steven Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People said, “It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

Do this goal workout and make sure your ladder is in exactly the right place! Ask yourself the following questions about each goal:

What do you want?

I mean what specifically do you want? If you want to earn more money, how much more exactly, when do you want to earn it by and what are you going to do with it? The more detail you can add, the more refined and compelling your goal will become.

Sometimes when you go into the detail, your goal can change. Take the goal of wanting to earn more money. Maybe when you’re more specific, you realise that what you actually want is more free time with your friends and family and you have been working on the assumption that the only way to get that is to earn more.

Once you realise that what you thought was the goal was actually the enabler, you can brain storm around your real goal and see if you can come up with an alternative range of solutions and options.

It’s important to state your goal positively. “I want to stop smoking,” or “I want to lose weight,” are examples of negatively set goals, they are stating what you want less of, not more. It’s a bit like jumping into a taxi and saying, “I want to be somewhere else!” You can imagine the response you would get.

Just as the taxi driver has no way of following that instruction, you can’t make a plan or actively ‘stop’ or ‘lose’ something, they are not activities, they are non-activities.

These alternative versions would give you something to aim for:

“I’m going to put the £5 a day I normally spend on cigarettes in a tin box, so in nine months I will have the money I need to book a holiday in Spain.”

“I’m going to follow these eating recommendations and walk four miles every day, and in six months I will have lost four inches off my waistline, and be feeling more energetic.”

The more specific you can be about your goals, the more they come to life in the present, and the more you will feel drawn to putting in the effort to make them happen. 

How will you know when you’ve got it?

How will you measure your success? What evidence will you use to check you’ve achieved your goal? What is enough? What is too much?

This sounds obvious, but you’ve probably met people who’ve strived to attain a position that they thought they wanted, but find that it takes them away from the activities that play to their strengths and that they really enjoy. For example, journalists who become editors sometimes realise that much of their time is taken up by managing people, budgets and schedules as opposed to chasing and writing stories - which is what they are best at and thrive on.

How will other people know you have achieved this goal? What evidence will they use to know you’ve got this goal?

When do you want it?

If your goal is to be really enthusiastic and motivated, do you want this all the time, in every area of your life? Or do you want to be able to switch off sometimes and relax? Being enthusiastic and motivated 24/7 would be exhausting, not to mention a bit challenging to live with, so think about where you want to be like this, and where in your life you don’t want it.

Is this goal right for you?

Perhaps you seek fame and fortune, but are terrified about the impact this might have on your friends and family. If you never address this, it will remain an unhelpful niggle in the background, stopping you from putting in the effort you need to. When you realise what is bothering you, you can address it, change your goal to accommodate it, or knowingly accept the risk.

Perhaps this goal isn’t yours, maybe a parent or teacher set this goal for you when they were trying to help or encourage you when you were younger, and you have been pursuing it trying to please them, ever since. It’s very hard to make a goal work if you don’t really care about it at a deep level.

To find out if your goal fits with who you are, ask the following questions.

• What will you gain if you get this?
• What will you lose if you get this?
• What will you gain if you don’t get this?
• What will you lose if you don’t get this?

The answers to these questions will start to weed out potential or imagined drawbacks to your goals that could be encouraging you to quietly self-sabotage.

Is it within your control?

There’s no point setting a goal that depends on someone else doing something. For example, if your goal was, “I’m going to be commissioned to write for television.” You have to ask yourself, how are you going to make that happen?

Instead, if you focus on what’s in your control, your goal could be, “I’m going to research where my style of writing is currently used in television, then I’m going to allocate one day a week to network, call, and find avenues where I can present my work to give myself the best chance of being commissioned to write for television.” That then becomes a goal you can action.

Ready for action

Once you’ve taken your goals through this workout, you will have highlighted, understood and dealt with any issues you have identified. If the issues you came across were deal breakers, you need to change your goal to accommodate them.

Once you have done this, you will probably find that it is hard not to work towards your goals because this process makes you focus on all the elements that make them more compelling for you. If you like structure, draw a chart, if not, then just by doing this process you will be clearer about your ultimate objectives and this will make your choices easier and your path clearer.

NEW YEAR is an interesting time - both embraced and dreaded. Embraced as a celebration of new starts, opportunities and progress, dreaded as it marks the passing of time, reminding us of lost opportunities, youth and loved ones. And both perspectives are true for us all. As I get older, finding the balance between the two has become harder, probably because we inevitable clock up more losses with age.

I generally embrace this time though as for me it symbolises a fresh start. It’s an opportunity to assess and review the previous year, allowing the laying to rest of old ghosts and regrets, and setting a new course for the year ahead.

If we can intercept and harness our end of year contemplations we can set ourselves up for a more enjoyable and constructive New Year.

Putting 2015 to rest

I love watching all those review programmes on TV at this time of year. I’m always amazed by how much has occurred that I have forgotten about. Did all that really happen this year? I have the same experience when I go through my diary. It’s a really great way to review your own personal highlights and ‘learning experiences’.

Set aside some time to go week by week through your diary for the year that’s ended. Make a list of all the great things you have done and what you learned. If you remember getting lovely feedback, search it out whether it was sent via e-mail or in a publication. Make sure you keep a copy.

I think we should all have an achievements file, where we keep a copy of every good thing anyone ever said about us including every great review and appreciative e-mail. Then, when one of the not so good days come along, we can pull it out and look through it to remind ourselves of what we can do.

For the less successful diary events, we can take a moment to think about what we learned from them, what we would do differently in future, identify any lessons or information that would be useful to hang onto from this experience - keeping the useful bits then discarding the rest, putting them behind us and making a decision to forget about them.

If you go through the whole year like this, you will be impressed with all you have learned and how far you have come. It is so easy to forget where you started from and this is a great way to remind yourself.

Setting yourself up for 2016

Once you have a sense of just how much can happen in one year, it’s good to turn your attention to what you’d like to happen in the year to come.

None of us has a crystal ball, so our plans for the year ahead have to be flexible, ideally a combination of vague directional long term important life goals, and some shorter term, more tangible goals for the next weeks, months and year ahead.

• What do you want more of?
• What do you want less of?
• What do you really care about?
• What did you really enjoy last year?
• Where did the money come from last year?
• What opportunities can you now explore?
• What calls do you need to make?
• Who do you need to get to know better?
• What experience do you need to gain?

Answering some of these questions will help you start to see what kind of goals you need to set for the year ahead.

Finding your balance

Dealing with past regrets and making plans for the future are a great way to allow you to focus more on what you are actually doing right now, and hopefully enjoy it more.

It’s worth mentioning here that the strategies most of us use to make ourselves miserable is to fret about things that have happened in the past, or which may happen in the future. When we are ‘in the moment’ we are experiencing what is happening around us and reacting to it, whether those experiences are good or bad, we don’t usually feel miserable at the time, we are too busy focusing on what to do.

Obviously, learning from the past and planning for the future are very important and unless you are planning a career change to Tibetan monk it’s not practical to imagine a life where you spend all of your time in the moment.

It is important however, to learn to step back from all the planning and worrying and to make sure that you do have an enjoyable present, finding a balance that works for you between all three time zones is your best chance of having a happy and prosperous New Year.

Happy New Year!

AT THE END of a recent workshop on negotiation someone asked the question: “It’s all very good talking about negotiating new work but what about trying to increase your rate to an existing client?” The room fell silent as everyone thought, good question and this got me mulling over how we think about ourselves when it comes to earning more money.

If you were selling apples, you would work out what it cost to grow them, pick them, package and transport them, add something for profit, compare that with what other people are charging, adjust if necessary, then just get on with it. When it comes to selling our own services, for many of us there is almost an embarrassment that we charge for what we do!

I blame Oliver Twist. Generations of us have sat in front of that film and empathised and absorbed that famous scene, so that as grown professionals, we still approach our clients, mentally with bowl in hand, and whisper, “Please sir, I’d like some more”, fully expecting our clients to turn into Harry Secombe screaming, “MORE?”

It’s not rational is it? If they didn’t want or need what we do, we, or others like us, wouldn’t be being paid to do any of this in the first place, would we? If you accept that, it’s really just a matter of degree regarding how much they pay.

Earning enough is one of the biggest worries for most freelances, and, if this includes you, then we have some suggestions that may help.

More of the same

The obvious place to start looking for more income is to find ways to increase what you are already doing. It may even be possible to get additional work from your existing clients. You don’t know unless you ask. Or they may know other people and be prepared to recommend you, again, don’t assume, ask them.

The advantage of doing more of the same is that you have a track record, contacts, and a body of work. It’s very easy to get lulled into thinking that you are doing all you can in any one area. So take a look at what you do with fresh eyes, imagine you are a candidate on The Apprentice with Sir Alan Sugar breathing down your neck, having set you the challenge to find 10 additional opportunities in your area of work. What would you come up with? Once you have your ideas, go speak to people and see if you can make them happen.

Other work for the same clients

Another area where we can become blinkered is to limit what we offer to existing clients to what they have always used us for. If you are hired regularly as a musician by someone, but are technically very skilled, you might be able to offer your services there as well. Or perhaps you teach for an organisation, where you could also perform. Or perform where you could also write.

It’s important to keep looking for opportunities that lie right in front of your nose. In marketing speak this is called ‘low hanging fruit’. Clients are likely to remain blissfully unaware of your many talents if you don’t enlighten them.

Diversify – what else?

What else do you do that you are the ‘go to’ person for your friends and family, but which you don’t actually charge anyone for? Most of us have hidden talents tucked away, some of them have the potential to be good earners. Look at those people who have such a passion for organisation and order, who have managed to create a lucrative business out of sorting out other people’s cupboards and lives. I’ll bet no school careers officer would have suggested that one.

The problem with these special skills that we all have is that they come so easily to us, we often don’t rate them and we harbour the belief that, if we can do them, anyone can, when the truth is quite the opposite. So start off by asking your friends and family what they think you are good at, and see if there is a money maker in there somewhere.

Stop giving it away

This is sticky point for many. While there are times when a foot in the door for no pay or expenses is a genuine opportunity, more often than not you should be charging for what you do. Agreeing to do work for nothing not only devalues your work, it undermines every other professional in your field who is trying to charge appropriately for what they do. Also on a practical level, signing up for unpaid work makes you unavailable to even look for paid work.

Increase your rate

We don’t live in a world where prices are static for us. Pretty much all of our expenses constantly creep upwards, e.g., food, travel, accommodation and power, so without an increase in our rates, we are actually taking a pay cut. When you think about it like that, it seems crazy not to keep this under regular review and periodically adjust your rate.

You’ll need to make a case that explains to your client why you are increasing your rates. Without sounding apologetic, present the facts - I have maintained the same rate for you for X years now, in the meantime, my costs have increased by X %, therefore, I have to increase my rate to £X. I would also suggest giving them some notice of one or two months, rather than saying, “Oh, I forgot to tell you my rates went up this month.”

Most people will recognise the necessity of this, and if they don’t, you have to be prepared to negotiate. You could suggest doing less time for the same money, or maybe there are other benefits you could barter. If they are really not interested in paying you more or making any concessions, you may want to consider walking away. Obviously this is an option you need to think through fully before you open the conversation. Decide what your minimum acceptable outcome is, and what your best alternative options are, then you can make some choices and plan your strategy.

So, forget all about Oliver Twist and get out there to see how you can use the many skills you have to earn more for what you do.

More info

• Effective negotiation e-course
• Diversify your portfolio e-course
• Pitching for work - quick tips

MINDFULNESS IS one of the latest buzzwords but what is it and why has it become so popular?

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is at the core of many Buddhist practices and includes many forms of meditation. It is also about learning to put your focus onto the task at hand at any given time, spending more of your life consciously, in the moment, fully experiencing what you are doing, without simultaneously worrying about what you need to do next, or what might have gone wrong in the past.

Why do we want to be more mindful?

Hands up all of you out there with a smart phone that has e-mail, internet, social media, text, oh and by the way, it also makes phone calls! I’ll bet there are quite a few. It’s almost become an essential tool for a freelance. But what has this gadget done to our lives?

When I started my career in the mid 80’s, if you left the office, you were not contactable, mobile phones existed, but were in their infancy, so few people had them. If you needed to contact someone, and they were out of the office, you wrote them a letter. This letter took a day to arrive, and even if answered immediately, took another day to come back to you. E-mail was barely on the horizon. In offices where information had to be obtained urgently, they used Telex!

Even as I write this, I find it hard to believe we worked like this, so I can understand how someone born into the current plethora of technology may struggle to imagine life without it.

However, there was an upside. You could plan your day, and set time aside for specific tasks with far less chance of being interrupted than you can now. When you were out, you could give clients and colleagues your full attention, because you weren’t trying to simultaneously answer ‘urgent’ queries from the office in your absence.

Anyway enough of the history lesson, or was that just old person nostalgia? Either way, the point is that technology has made it much easier for us to be in constant, indiscriminate contact with everyone, to work non-stop, to relentlessly network and interact. Added to the myriad of demands of every day life, it means that we can sometimes struggle to maintain perspective, focus and even our identity.

So what’s to be done about this? The answer for some is to practise mindfulness. There are two main aspects to this:

1. To habitually take time out of your day to deliberately do nothing, by which I mean, meditate. There are lots websites and apps that can help you with this. The Independent suggest their best 10 apps here. There is a growing body of scientific evidence about the benefits of meditation. It lowers our blood pressure, improves our immune system makes us calmer, helps us gain perspective, and allows us to hear our own inner voice, which often carries some of the answers to problems, that have been alluding us.
2. To do things mindfully, by which I mean recognising that carrying out a task is going to take a certain amount of time, so devote that time just to that task, focus fully on it, and nothing else. Don’t multi task, leave all thoughts, plans and worries about anything else you need to do aside while you do this, and just see how the quality of the experience changes for you. You will be amazed.

Doing this can transform your life. People rediscover joy in tasks that had become time-pressured chores. It can transform relationships. Consider a situation when a family member is trying to talk to you about a sensitive subject. As they talk to you, you carry on preparing a meal, while mentally trying to solve a work problem you have been mulling over. Ever done that? I know I have. Imagine instead taking a seat and really listening to what that person is saying. Imagine the difference it would make to them. As Richard Moss, an internationally respected spiritual teacher said, “The greatest gift we can give is the purity of our attention.”

So really, there’s much to be gained, and nothing to be lost by giving this mindfulness thing a go. If I’ve whetted your appetite, a good place to start is Headspace, where you can sign up for 10 days of short mediations for free. And of course you can just slow down, and start to think about what you’re doing as you are doing it, and start to notice more and more about where you are putting your attention.

More info

We’ll be holding mindfulness workshops around the country from the autumn so look out for updates.

AFTER OUR Get Fit for Freelancing workshop recently (targeted at young members and new entrants), I found myself wondering, of all the tips and advice offered, what was the single most useful recommendation I could make? How could I distil a two and a half hour workshop down into one great tip?

I thought about the session and all the issues we discussed. It was hard to focus on one being more important than another, especially as every topic had a quite different impact on each member of the group.

Get organised

For example, we covered being organised. There were some who rolled their eyes in horror at the thought of keeping tidy records, and using their diary to make all their tasks happen, as if I’d just asked them to eat a cockroach. On the other hand, others couldn’t imagine running their lives any other way.

Develop resilience

We discussed the whole issue of rejection, an occupational hazard for creative freelances, and had a long discussion about how not to take it personally. Then one of the group casually shrugged, and said, “Lots of people are going to say no to you, but some will say yes. It’s not personal, it’s a numbers game.” A completely different take, that took the sting out of ‘no’ for them.

Set boundaries

We spoke about setting boundaries between home and work, and the group had lots of suggestions how this could be achieved. We laid out what good goals were, and how it’s necessary to monitor your progress while staying flexible. We talked about assertiveness, resilience and motivation, all really important topics.

So what’s my number one tip?

But where could I find this top tip, this overriding piece of advice that could really make the difference for someone starting out? Then it hit me. On pretty much every topic we covered, there was someone in the room for whom this wasn’t so much of a problem.

This added so much to the session. It’s all very well me as the tutor saying, “you need to be organised,” or, “don’t take things personally,” but when someone else in the group leans forward with a genuine, works for them solution, it reinforces the point beautifully, and makes that advice much more accessible and possible for the rest of the group.

It’s to get out there and meet other people in the same or similar businesses. I’m trying not to use the word networking, because so many people have attached negative connotations to this word, but really, that’s what I’m talking about. However, in my definition of networking it’s just about putting a face to a name anyway. In my experience, these sorts of connections can often lead to work, but the emphasis for me is meeting interesting people, and maybe staying in touch with them.

Mixing regularly with other creative freelances helps you to understand that many of the pressures and stresses that may be getting you down, are often just a normal part of this world you have entered. The great thing is, that different people will not all find the same problems difficult that you do, so you all have the opportunity to support and learn from each other.

If someone does something easily that you find hard, ask them how they do it? Quiz them about how they think about this, and what steps they take to make themselves get on with it? You will be amazed at some of the answers you will get. Maybe not all of their strategies will suit you, but give the ones that do a go, and see what happens.

Where can I meet like-minded people?

There are lots of places to meet peers. The FEU Training events are special because there you can meet and work with actors, musicians and writers. Cross discipline collaborations have been born at our workshops, when people have met, shared ideas, and identified ways to combine their skills and interests.

Your union meetings and events are a great way to connect with people who share your passion, and who will have a wealth of knowledge and experience. There really aren’t many new problems out there, whatever you are worried about, other people will have solved. Find out how they did it, till you find a method you are happy to apply.

Use your creativity to find ways to link with other like-minded individuals. Create groups on Facebook, or whatever platform you prefer to work with. Keep up with people you trained with, or that you’ve met along the way. Make sure that this is a two way process. As well as looking for support, know that what you have learned, and what you do easily, will also be useful to others in the group.

So what’s my one piece of advice from this workshop? It’s to get connected, and stay connected, and learn from all the people you meet.

More info

• You find a range of straightforward e-courses at our digital learning centre from an overview of the business skills you’ll need to support your creative career to financial management. All you have to do is register on the website if you haven’t done so already.
• You’ll also find a range of quick tips including networking and confidence building.