I’ve been writing online in varying capacities since 2007 and made this job my full-time career back in February 2012. Although I’d built the thought of leaving my day job up to be a tremendously scary thing in my mind, the one thing that nearly caused me to fail was something I hadn’t expected…
It wasn’t that I had trouble finding clients (in fact, I was
booked with a full-time work load from day one).
And it wasn’t that I ran out of money (really, I never even
had to tap into my meager “escape fund”).
It was the fact that
I was treating my freelancing business like an employee!
Here’s what I mean…
When you’re an employee, you rely on one company to provide
your entire income. As a result, it’s in
your best interests to do whatever it takes to keep that job – whether that means working weekends, sucking up to
an asshole boss or compromising your ideals to fit in to the corporate
environment.
Even if you hate your job, your mindset becomes, “I’ll do
whatever I need to do to keep my job and pay my bills.”
Over time, you become grateful to your boss for giving you a
job in the first place – especially when you hear over and over again about how
bad the economy is and how rough other people have it. Even though your pay has been cut, your hours
have been slashed and your workload has increased, you still feel a sense of
indebtedness to your boss for the fact that you have any paycheck at all.
(Okay, maybe it’s not that extreme in all cases, but I
guarantee that if you’ve worked 9-to-5 jobs for most of your life, you’ve
adopted this mindset on some level!)
This type of mindset really becomes a problem when you quit
your job to freelance full-time.
