The Secret to Less Stress and More Progress

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 331

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. Oh, hey, friend. Today, I want to talk to you about something that I learned from a three-year-old recently. It's one of those things that, like, of course, I know this stuff, but then I'm reminded of it, and we need to be reminded more than to be taught, right? It is this concept of something called Controlling the Controllables. No three-year-old said, Hey, Brian, you should control the controllables. But that's really what this boils down to, is that concept of controlling the controllables. And there are two main categories of things in our lives. There are the things that we have absolutely no control over, and that is generally the things that make the world feel like it's going to end soon. It's the things that are happening in the news, all the awful things that are out there that you have absolutely no control over. And there are things that do affect you, like your height, what happened to you in the past, the weather. These are things that do affect you, but again, you have absolutely no control over those things. And then there's the other category of things. The other bucket are things that we do control. So I control what time I wake up in the morning. I may suck at it sometimes. I may hate waking up early or I may want to sleep in, but I still control waking up at a certain time. I wake up at 530 every day. By the way, not to brag, I do it first alarm. For all you people out there with like 30 alarms and you have like 30 alarms going off before you wake up. Horrible habit, break that habit. just one alarm, you're done. I control if or when I scroll through social media, for how long I might scroll through it. I control what I eat for lunch today, within reason. But here's the lesson I heard from my three-year-old niece, my brother-in-law, her dad, when she's having an emotional breakdown or some sort about something that she does not control in any way, shape, or form. I always ask her, what can you control? And she will say in her little three-year-old voice, my attitude and my actions. She's 11 now, she's a really good kid, but she's been saying this, I control my attitude, my actions throughout all these years. And now I have two other nephews, one is like seven, one is now three and barely talks and will probably be soon, within the next year, be saying the exact same thing, I control my attitude and my actions. Great parenting. How does this relate to you though? That's ultimately what matters here. How does this actually relate to you? It's simple. Stop focusing on those things that you don't control, and let's control the controllables. These are the types of little things, control the controllables, my attitude, my actions. These are these little sound bites that we can keep replaying in our heads so that when something happens to you this week that you have no control over, you can just simply say to yourself, I can control my attitude and my actions. I can at least recite something that a three-year-old can say. I like to think that you can. So think through some of the scenarios that you've been through recently, where you just felt like you were out of control. You have no control over this. It's like when a client who owes you money is ghosting you, that's a common one sometimes, right? That sucks. When a great lead goes to a competitor, they were gonna hire you, but they went with someone else. That sucks. You had no control over that. That toxic friend in your life who keeps making you feel like shit. Ooh, that sucks. Makes you feel bad. When the market inevitably crashes again, or declines, or industry fails, or something like that, anything that makes you feel like the sky's falling.

Even your empty bank account. I would say that that's something that you don't directly control right now. That's something that happened to you in the past. It's a direct result of the things you've done in the past, which you don't control, at least not right now. But when you misdirect, you're focused to all of these things that you don't currently control. Nothing you can do about right this second. It makes you feel helpless. It gives you anxiety. It gives you this feeling of powerlessness. Feeling powerless or out of control is one of those things that great to me. It's one of the worst feelings in the world. This is a lot of times what can lead to depression, perpetual sadness, giving up on something because you feel like you have no way out of something. That's what we start talking about, control the controllables. So instead, we focus on what we can control. So let's talk to just some of those scenarios really quick. We'll talk through how we can flip this and take the three-year-old's advice of controlling your attitude and your actions. Simple stuff. Hopefully these examples resonate with you in some way, shape, or form. All right, client who owes you money. Some client owes you, let's just say, thousands of dollars. It's a lot of money. And then they've ghosted you, and you're not getting your money, and you feel powerless. You feel out of control. What do you control? My attitude, my actions. What is the attitude now? What do you shift your attitude towards? This sucks, but I just learned a $3,000 lesson, right? This sucks, I learned a $3,000 lesson. Makes you feel a little less s***y. That's the attitude. The action, change your payment policies. You control your attitude. Okay, I just learned a $3,000 lesson. I control my actions. Okay, I'm going to change my payment policies. And what's the new payment policy? It is what I've recommended in this podcast for years now, unless you're a recurring service. We'll talk about that in a second. But for one time project pay type things, it is a 30% to 50% deposit up front, preferably non-refundable. That's hard to do if you're not booked solid. But if you're booked solid, high demand, you can do a non-refundable 30% to 50% deposit. And then the remaining balance to do on the first day of the project or on the first checkpoint or deliverable of some sort. That could be you mock something up or you do a planning session of some sort. Once the planning session is done, then they pay the remaining balance. But you do not do work that you haven't been paid for. That's really the gist of this year. That's the policy change. And that's the action you can take from that $3,000 lesson. I had to learn this the hard way, much like many other freelancers. I lost out on payments that I should have gotten, and I had to change my payment policy to compensate for that. So that's just one example here. The next one, the great lead you really wanted to work with, goes to a competitor. You can't control that. They decided to go with someone else. Maybe you could have done things better, but that's in the past. You don't control it. So instead of feeling powerless, what can we control? Our attitude and our actions. Our attitude should be, instead of, woe is me. I'm a failure. I just suck at everything. Instead of that, which you do control these thoughts and these feelings, you can approach this with an attitude of, there's plenty of fish in the sea, just like in dating. When one doesn't work out, there's plenty more that are out there. And what are your actions? Double down on your lead generation efforts. If you are swimming in leads, if you have tons and tons of new inquiries coming in every week, you're not going to obsess over that one that got away. It can still suck, right? Of your dozens and dozens of leads in a month, there could be that one client you're really excited about, and it falls through for whatever reason. But when you have dozens and dozens of other leads to fall back on, that's a very good cushion. So it doesn't hurt as much, right? Double down on your lead generation efforts, or for many of you, just go from zero to one. Doubling zero is nothing. Many of you, you're just waiting for clients to magically find you. One finally finds you. You're like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever. I cannot wait. You're obsessed with this client. You smother them. They decide to go with someone who doesn't seem as desperate, and then you lose out on the one client you could have had, because you truly were desperate. So instead of waiting around, we double down on our lead generation efforts, or we start putting something in place to start generating leads that are out there. And we have a whole series on this. The lead generation series, we go back to episode 325 The Secret to Consistent Clients is the first episode in the lead generation series, 325 You can get there by 6figurecreative.com/325.