Meet The 5 Freelancing Villains Secretly Sabotaging Your Results

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 376
Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Most freelancers don't fail because they lack talent, they fail because they get stuck in patterns that hold them back. And I've seen this after coaching hundreds and hundreds of freelance clients. So many people know what to do, but they can't get out of their own damn way. There's so much mental junk just preventing you from implementing what you already know will work. On top of that, getting success and maintaining success are two very different things. Everyone's so focused on mastery and getting better and better and better, but maintenance is the name of the game when it comes to business, especially in an infinite game like business. For those who are not familiar with the term infinite game, infinite game is a game with no real end. The goal of the game is just to keep playing for the rest of your life, just like fitness. If you think about fitness, for an example, getting abs is a finite game. You want to get abs, right? But keeping abs is the infinite game. Very different skill from gaining abs. It's really easy. I would not say easy. I've never really had a six pack in my life, to be fair. It is easier to get abs than it is to keep abs for your entire life, and that is business. Maintenance is not fun. It is routines, it is repetition. It is doing boring things really well, which is boring, which is why most people suck at it, myself included, in certain areas of my life. And so we ended up avoiding it all together. And so going back to the freelancer, client acquisition is something that you can do right. You can do all the things right, like get your ads up and running, bringing in leads, or you can do content marketing that's bringing in leads. You can do cold outreach, whatever the thing is that's actually bringing in leads. You can get a funnel belt and performing well. You can get your calls booked on your calendar. You can have a sales process in place. There's actually turning strangers into clients. You can get all those things right. But if you're ignoring these invisible self-sabotaging patterns that you have, you will not be able to maintain that success for very long if you can even achieve success in the first place. The longer you take to admit this to yourself and actually fix it, the harder everything becomes in your business as far as gaining success and then maintaining it for the long term. Because you and only you are responsible for building and maintaining your business. And if you're not in the driver's seat, you're not actually pushing things forward, everything goes downhill from there. All these little things that you've been neglecting, all these little things you've been putting off will turn into raging fires that will make more work for yourself and then everything becomes a thousand times harder than it needs to be. If you take a hard look at your business, just like an objective look and honestly look at your business, you're not stuck because you're not working hard enough, you're not stuck because you don't know what to do, it's not a strategy problem, it is merely a self-management problem. And as many times as I've seen these patterns play out in our clients, in friends of mine, in myself in certain circumstances, I can tell you from experience, it is not about working harder, it is not about learning new things, it's not about changing your strategy, probably again for the 50th time, and there's nothing wrong with any of those things, but they ignore the root cause. And that is the entire point of this episode. It's not about doing more, it's about understanding the survival patterns that you default to when things get hard. Because the truth is, you don't rise to the level of your strategy, you fall to the level of your patterns. And again, I've seen this play out with some of our clients, where they have a damn near flawless strategy that they're trying to execute, and yet they can't get out of their own damn way to execute it. So in this episode, we're gonna talk about the five patterns that secretly sabotage your success, so we can find out what it is that's actually keeping you stuck, so that you can break the pattern. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, or you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money with their skills without selling their soul. If that's you, you're in the right spot. I bring my experience from my background as an entrepreneur for over 15 years now, running multiple businesses, building multiple 6 Figure businesses, building multi 7 Figure businesses now, and now 6 Figure Creative as a whole, has a team of 11 people, 11 or more people at this point, with different experiences and different backgrounds. And one of those team members, we actually have here today on the show after this probably longer intro than normal, it is Josh Love. Hey, Josh.