The Fundamentals of Coming Back Stronger

In my previous post, I talked about how things came to a head with my freelancing business, Five Muses Creative. TL:DR: It was ugly and I quit.

It took me being away from the business for about three months to realize that I didn’t want to give up completely. What I needed was to work out what went wrong and use those lessons to come back better and stronger.

While it would have been easy to say that AI arriving in the market was what went wrong, it’s not the truth. While AI had and will continue to have a massive impact on the creative market, there is space for us yet. (I’ll probably go into this in detail at some point, but today isn’t the day.)

The true reason why I wanted to stop freelancing came down to one thing: I lost my way. Basically from the moment I started freelancing, my approach to the work would harm me in the long run. Something had to give, and it did.

How does one recover from realizing how badly one messed up? In my case, it’s a matter of taking a hard look at the lessons I’ve learned and overhauling my life to make freelancing (and just being creative in general) more sustainable. Honestly, there aren’t any new lessons here, at least not for me. Instead, I realized most of the changes I wanted to make came from a few fundamental principles. Since I’m all about sharing good practices and lessons, I thought I’d share those fundamentals in the hope that you don’t hit the same landmine I did.

Five Fundamentals

1) Intention, Intention, Intention.

I’m starting off with this point because it’s the one that actually encapsulates most of the other principles. If you work in any capacity as a creative and you come to your work lightly, it will flatten you.

Nothing about the work of being creative is easy, so if you disregard the amount of energy it takes, it will leave you burned out like nothing you’ve ever seen.

In the past, I’ve often fallen afoul of this issue because of my passion for creating things. I get onto an adrenaline high as I go, so I don’t feel the fatigue setting in. At least not until I’ve stopped or my body hits the brakes for me.

The best way to counter-act this is to enter into your creative space (mental or physical) with a deeper awareness and an intentionality about what it is that we’re doing. On the freelance front, this also helps with the sense of overwhelm when everyone wants something done yesterday.

2) Open Mind, Widen Horizons.

From the beginning of starting to freelance, I allowed myself to fall into a rut by taking a short-term perspective on Five Muses Creative. I knew I wanted the business to run indefinitely, but I only focused on doing the best work I could for my clients right now, with the plan being that I would keep doing that forever. (Great plan, I know.) I took such a narrow view that I put aside everything about my own business and even my life that wasn’t about finishing a given job.

This strategy paid off in the sense that it brought rapid revenue growth as my clients trusted me with larger projects. However, it created a problem. My revenue grew, but my client base didn’t because I wasn’t putting in the work to attract more clients. In the meantime, the cost in my energy to do the work grew exponentially the more my work took over my life.

Over time, I realized the need to focus more on health and work-life balance, but I incorporated wellness and other activities around client work, while self-destructively taking on a workload that would take over my life anyway. This led to me becoming increasingly dependent on those few clients, which created a whole slew of problems that I discussed previously.

Instead, it’s better to take a holistic view, with client work forming a part of a larger whole, and my entire company forming part of a larger whole still. Work cannot be allowed to become a creative person’s life. If it does, it burns us out. Clients will not feel the impact in the short term, but we as the creatives carry the massive opportunity costs of doing work to the exclusion of all else. Keeping in mind the damage to our health, relationships, and all manner of other aspects to our lives, the money we make from this behaviour isn’t worth it. Moreover, the problem only gets worse the longer we persist.

For this reason, I believe the best way is to focus large to small. Life. Business. Work. Take care of your energy. Never stop expanding and learning. Apply those lessons to everything you do. Keep the business running, then focus on specific projects and tasks for clients.

While some clients might flatter themselves to think they want your undivided attention on only their work, they’re wrong. Unless they want to mine you for your creative output until you’ve expended your value. Then expecting that sort of sacrifice from you is par the course. But who wants clients like that anyway?

3) Start well, but be disciplined about ending your day.

This is a biggie for me, especially the part about bringing my day to a close. I have a nasty tendency to sacrifice my free time by working just that little bit longer, just doing one more thing. Okay and maybe another thing. And another.

The problem is that how we end our day impacts how we start the next one–and this effect is cumulative.

Every time we push past the limits, we’re just that little bit slower out of the starting blocks tomorrow. Our minds become just a little less elastic. Our creative wells recharge just that little bit slower. So doing the things we expect ourselves to do takes just that much longer. Which means we’re more likely to finish just a little bit later than yesterday. It’s a dangerous slide to go down because it’s not something that becomes immediately apparent. Instead, especially when everything feels urgent, our brains reward us for doing the unhealthy thing and delaying our daily switch-off.

With time, we’re stuck wondering why we’re struggling to do things that used to come as second nature. We’re fatigued. That’s the reason. We allowed fatigue to set in.

4) Lead with your values.

From the start of my freelancing journey, I was taking work for the sake of working. I wanted for Five Muses Creative to grow and flourish, and I was simply thrilled when the work just kept coming. It all looked so rosy. I was fine to work with clients who didn’t quite align with me because the fact that I was working was the most important thing.

The problem became astoundingly apparent this year. The work I do for 5MC is deeply collaborative, which means that a client who doesn’t see things the same way I do sets me up for failure, if not burn-out. Things really came to a head for me when certain clients behaved so badly that it actively sabotaged my ability to do the work they hired me for.

I’m a perfectionist and I was already in a frame of mind where I would do absolutely everything in my power to deliver the best work no matter what. The result? Dealing with these clients nearly destroyed me.

Lesson learned. Going forward, I am going to be very clear and outspoken about the values around which Five Muses Creative (and I) operate. Doing this will allow me to “speak” to the right people and attract them to the brand. It will also create a space for having tough conversations when clients aren’t bringing their part of the deal. (Again, this is a collaboration. If you don’t show up, I don’t show up. Period.)

In the long term, leading from values should allow me to expand the 5MC client base, not only by attracting more people, but by attracting clients who prioritize the same things I do. This should make my work for Five Muses a much more sustainable experience.

5) Remember your why and say no.

To wrap up, I think we come to what should be the crux of both why I left freelancing and why I’m coming back stronger and smarter. By forgetting my intentions and forgetting why I chose freelancing in the first place, I lost myself in the work itself.

Coming back required that I ask myself one key question: Why did I start freelancing instead of just changing employers? There were several reasons. First, I love helping people to achieve their goals. This is the heart of my passion for Five Muses Creative. But second and equally as important? I love my own stories. I wanted to create the space I needed to devote love and attention to my personal projects so I could get them out in the world.

I lost sight of both these reasons when I fixated on client work to the exclusion of all else. As a result, I almost went too far when things went wrong for me this year. I very nearly stopped freelancing because of a few bad clients I had attracted while being careless of myself, my values, and my needs. I also almost stopped freelancing because I was starting to resent my business for keeping me away from my own projects (and my life).

Neither of these things could be blamed on my company. I forgot why I was doing the work, which made me make the wrong decisions. It made me say yes to things that I should have said no to–including some borderline abusive behavior from clients.

If there is one point I want people to take from this post, this is the one: If something doesn’t serve your motivations, don’t do it. Don’t allow it in your life.

Say no. If necessary, say “HELL NO GO AWAY.”

These were all lessons I learned while going through some of the worst times since I started freelancing. I was forced to find my perspective so I could come back with intention and awareness. None of these lessons are new, but they remain true, the fundamentals for a happy (creative) life. What fundamentals do you live by? Do you have principles that guide your life as a creator?

I plan to share further thoughts from my experience as a creative on the Five Muses Creative Musings substack. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe so you can get future posts in your inbox.