As I look back I know that writing my first book after the death of my father was as much a cathartic experience as it was an urge to write a book. This article may have a similar purpose. It has been birthed by a particularly difficult week. I won’t go into detail, suffice to say, a variety of issues, both internal and external business factors left me feeling isolated. In this article, I want to discuss the often unspoken truth about freelancing or running your own business, that we are often left to cope alone with the challenges.

Freedom

The attraction of self employment for many is the concept of freedom. There’s no boss, corporation, or peers to tell us what to do. COVID for some was a dream come true, make a living without having to leave the house, or meet other people. I can go for days or weeks sometimes without seeing anyone. Yes, I’ll have plenty of PMs, emails, and Zoom calls, but seeing real people, that’s another thing. Sometimes we go for days when we don’t have to put real clothes on. If I didn’t have to walk my dog or do the school run, I could live in old sweat pants and slippers almost all the time.

If working from home then, for many of us, travel to work is across a hallway, down or up some stairs, depending on if your workspace is in the cellar or the loft, or down the garden. I often think that a tough commute for me is thirty seconds. I roll my eyes when it’s raining and I have to make it from the kitchen to the studio, it’s a tough life!

Then of course, there’s the money side of things. We think that our boss made the mega-bucks and we got a small percentage of that in pay. Now when we do a job, the money is all ours, more on that theory later.

In summary, the allure of working for one’s self is tempting, what’s not to like about personal and financial freedom?

Reality Bites

Much of what I’ve outlined above is true, however what is often missed out in the ‘timeshare’ sell of the self employment dream is the stuff that employment brings.

For starters, as someone once joked, when you run your own business, you do still work for someone, and that’s the bank. Or in many cases, it’s the client, or your customers. The idea that self-employment brings absolute autonomy is a myth. You still have to answer to someone, you still have people to make happy, answer to, work to standards, deadlines and budgets. The only difference now, for most of us, is that when there’s friction, or challenges, there’s no peer to talk to over the water cooler. Or if you have a creative challenge, there’s no one to ask if the idea is good or bad, or anyone to check your work. Sometimes the first person to check your work, however meticulous you’ve been in trying to spot any errors, is your client.

When you work in a team a lot of this pressure is shared, as are the different parts of a job. For example, when I worked in post houses in Soho, there were certain people who were better at some things than others. It made sense in those situations to walk into another edit suite to ask them if they had a moment to check the loudness, or explain how a certain function worked. For the freelancer, in most cases you’re on your own. You may have peers in the industry, but they have their own challenges, and they aren’t working for you, so the natural interaction found in a team environment is gone. You’re instead often left with a YouTube search, or asking on social media or in a forum, and we all know how that often works out. There’s a certain amount of natural peer learning that goes on when you’re working alongside people on a daily basis that gets lost when working alone.

Mindfulness

I don’t read anywhere near as much as I used to, one of the main reasons is that I don’t commute anymore. I watched a comedian recently joking about mindfulness. He said that when he grew up no one talked about mindfulness. He then went on to say, jokingly, that the reason was, we didn’t have smart phones to distract us. We’d sit on the bus and watch the rain run down the glass, we would sit on the toilet and do nothing… unless of course you were one of those who would read the ingredients on the toilet cleaner bottle. I’ve included the video, WARNING, if swearing offends then don’t watch.

Walking to the bus stop, or the train station, then travelling gave me time to daydream, to think. Even walking to and from the car, once parked, gave moments of ‘mindfulness.’

Now I have none of those things, it’s a walk from one room to another, I’ve come to miss riding a bus or train. In fact one of the things I love most about going to London on business now, is the chance to get back those moments of doing nothing.

Money

Financial freedom is perhaps the number one draw for those considering running their own business. However, it’s often the primary reason for stress too.

My wife is a smart woman, she’s got more qualifications than I care to mention, is calm under pressure and does a job that changes millions of lives. In my world, she’s a rock star. However, mention self employment to her and she would prefer to eat glass or be set on fire. The idea of self employment blows her mind, especially around the money stuff.

The conversation goes something like; “So let me get this straight, every day you have to work out how you’re going to make money today? And every week, month and year? Then it starts all over again? 

Yep! That’s about the size of it, unless you’re really lucky then there are zero guarantees of income. 

If you work as a freelancer that’s scary enough, but if you then take on other people to work for you, then there’s the added pressure of your need to ensure they still get paid every month.

Then there’s any overheads, but even if you have zero overheads, you’ll still have some costs related to running your business, and of course the ultimate nemesis, tax! Depending on how your business is constituted there may be several taxes such as VAT, Corporation Tax, local, these are all before you pay any personal income tax. So someone to sort all this out for you and do it right isn’t cheap.

Help!

I said I wouldn’t get into the specifics of the recent pressures I’ve been under, suffice to say, it’s a combination of all the above. In the grand scheme of things, none of it is really serious, but add them all together and you find yourself feeling crushed by the weight of them all… often with no one to talk to.

All sorts of thoughts and emotions come to the surface; feelings of failure, stupidity, helplessness, fear, are some that come to mind. However irrational they may appear when written down, they are very real for those of us who are fighting with a tough week.

At this point, something else happens. Often all the things we use to relieve the pressure get pushed aside; exercise, sleep, eating well, therapy, time with loved ones, relaxation. For many of us we find ourselves anxious, isolated, and without any of the usual support mechanisms working.

For some, more than others, asking for help doesn’t come easily in these moments. This is a recipe for disaster. If you’ve not come across the work of the artist Charlie Mackesy, then I can’t recommend him enough, my wife gifted some of his art to me. Two come to mind; 

What Next?

As I said at the beginning of this article, this is as much catharsis as it is advice, if it’s that at all. I suppose what I wanted to say is that often freelancers feel alone, we feel that we have to deal with all this stuff without the help of others, after all isn’t this what we signed up for?

Perhaps you’ve been reading this and thinking I’m writing all about you, if that’s the case then we know we’re not alone. However stressful, there’s nothing unique about our situation.

In closing, I want to say some things I’ve done to try and deal with this, this was of course after a week or so of trying to deal with it on my own. I told my wife what was going on. I thought I shouldn’t worry her, that it was my job to sort it out. However, when I told her, she sat and listened and then rebuked me for not trusting her enough to be able to handle it. Then I told some other trusted people. I told at least one of them I felt foolish and stupid for the situation, to which they asked why. I think it’s because I’ve bought into the lie that we’re supposed to fix things by ourselves. I also think a huge dose of imposter syndrome played a part.

I did have some minor wins. I lost 6.5kg (14lb) in January and on Saturday ran my first ever 10K, in quite a reasonable time too. I’ve also been learning to bake bread, and some have come out almost edible. I think it’s vital when working alone to have some other activities that are unrelated to the business where you can go and have some success.

A successful small business isn’t one that doesn’t have challenges or failures. It’s one that has more success than failure. Not everything will work out. We make mistakes. I think the biggest one is thinking we can do it without any support.

As I write this I know I’ve learnt some valuable lessons, I only hope I’m wise enough to remember them for next time, because there will always be a next time.

Discuss