The Missing Skills You Need For Surviving (And Thriving) As A Freelancer | With Sarah Townsend

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 211 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.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and this podcast, if this is your first time, I'll just go ahead and tell you now, this is a podcast where I try my best to motivate, inspire, educate, do whatever I gotta do to twist your little creative arm into being a better business owner. And if this is not your first time, if you've listened to this podcast before, then you already know this stuff, so I don't have to explain this to you. Our goal is to keep you in this business as long as possible to survive as a freelancer. And our guest today wrote the book on Survival Skills for Freelancers, so I'll get into that conversation here in a minute. But I have a couple of fun facts about me to start this day off. I don't ever talk about myself that much in these intros, but I feel like these are worth sharing. I have two interesting streaks that I keep track of right now. The first streak is how long it's been since I last vomited. It has been about 25 years. It's hard to calculate the exact day or year that I last vomited, but I haven't puked in like 25 years. It's probably been closer to 30 years. That streak is being challenged right now because my wife this week has been just throwing up every day with a very bad stomach virus that she got from someone else. And now like, I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for the moment that I start to feel it in my stomach. This is gonna be a really interesting week to test that streak to see if that ends up ending.

The second streak that I'm gonna talk about, or the second fun fact is a streak that I've been keeping track of for a while now, and this is a lot less gross and much more worth celebrating.

And that is my streak for how long I've been unemployed.

If you have a day job, that word sounds horrible. Like no one wants to be unemployed because we need money, right? But for me, that's a cause for celebration. As of the day this episode airs yesterday, I actually celebrated my 5,000th day without a day job. So technically unemployed. I guess it'd be self-employed, I don't know, but it's like, I don't have a day job, so I celebrate that. And I want our audience to have that same streak. So if you're in our Facebook community by going to 6figurecreative.com/community, I'd love for you to share what streak you've recently celebrated for how many days it's been since you last had a day job. But I just thought that was worth sharing. I love the little moments of celebration. We actually talk about it in the episode today.

And our guest is the author of a book called Survival Skills for Freelancers. She's been a freelance copywriter for like 23 years. So like, if I'm going to learn the survival skills for freelancing from somebody, I want it from somebody who's been doing this since like 1999 I think in 1999, I was in seventh or eighth grade. I was just on the verge of being a teenager. And so I hadn't even thought of freelancing at that point. So she's been in the game for a long time and she knows her stuff. So we talked about everything from getting clients, obviously, hard as an important part of surviving as a freelancer, but also turning down work and being willing to turn down work. And this is being an important and crucial survival skill for freelancers' longevity, because some jobs just aren't worth taking on no matter what you're getting paid.

We talk all about that. And we also talk about a lot about imposter syndrome, because most of survival as a freelancer, and not just survival, but thriving as a freelancer is getting past our own imposter syndrome. So we talk a lot about that. And I think this is one that many people are gonna need a lot of help with this.

And we even talk about how to stay motivated and productive when we're all kind of self-directed as people working at home by ourselves without a manager looking over our shoulder. Because like my last day job, I worked at GameStop, which is a video game store here in America.