Why every freelancer needs self-care (and how to start)

You’ve leaped off the edge of the 9-5 and into the digital nomad or freelance lifestyle – or freedom lifestyle as I like to call it. You went from schedule to no schedule, from many bosses to you being the boss hot sauce. This jump might have been thrilling, but now you’re on the brink of exhaustion, fighting off the stresses and anxiety of the freelance world. 

From working sporadic hours while listening to the news, or watching YouTube and researching for your next client, keeping up with your habits and your time can border on a traffic jam or Titanic level crash. Putting your health and body first can be a struggle when everything else seems important, to the detriment of your work performance. (Perhaps you’re still in the dreaming phase of becoming a freelancer, and want to overcome the career change fear, if this is the case I wrote about that here.)

How to Self-Care as a Freelancer

Freelancing can easily lead to overwhelm, anxiety, loss of sleep, and even burnout. No clients or overwhelmed from too many clients? Exhausted from trying to juggle all of the elements of your freelance job? The list is endless: cold calls, responding to leads, marketing activities, writing and sending out newsletters, social media scheduling, meetings, networking… 

To enjoy the freelance lifestyle you need a schedule, priorities, ways to delegate, and tools and resources to help you navigate the trenches on the daily. Create daily and weekly goals, organize your tasks according to a schedule and use deadlines, both soft and hard ones and, most importantly, self-care all parts of your mind, body, and soul.  

Mind

One of the main elements of freelancing is that you’re working in isolation. It can be difficult to maintain connection with people when you work from home, or a coffee shop. Try not to neglect your family and social life. Isolation, both for freelancers and entrepreneurs in general, is a huge and common challenge. It’s hard to nurture strong relationships when you’re either not in the same location as other people (perhaps after work) or in a slump working from home (can’t seem to get out of those PJs huh?). 

Work is work, and as freelancers it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things we have to do or underwhelmed by how slow the process is to get things off the ground. Make sure you prioritize your social support (schedule it if you need to). Work will always be there, but friends and family are important, both during good times and the more challenging ones. Don’t neglect the people around you. Call, text, send an email, check in with your people regularly! 

Apart from a social life try to include some form of mind work into your days: meditate, breathe, reflect, journal. And remember, always make your bed.

Body

Nutrition and physical activity are essential for freelancers. From maintaining a balanced diet, to moods, preventing chronic disease, and boosting positive emotions. You can’t work your best if your body can’t work its best. Often, we don’t take self-care seriously until we experience a serious health setback. Make sure you’re planning your meals and not breaking the bank buying fast food meals. This does twice the damage – processed meals and spending too much money. Why not try a meal planning app like Mealtime, Food planner, or Paprika? Be sure to supplement and balance with lots of natural foods and water, and try to minimize the amount of sugar. Sugar cravings can happen, and it’s a habitual trigger from anxiety, or even from skipping meals or low blood sugar. 

Slow down, take your breaks, go for walks, get off the bus one stop earlier, or sneak in YouTube videos on yoga, or simple at-home exercises (as safely as possible!). The other important thing about self-care is having a good healthcare plan. 

Be proactive and maintain your breaks for the gym, walk outside, eat nutritious food, maintain a healthy diet and get sleep. Don’t procrastinate all day, only to stay up all night to get a gig done. Sleep is one of the most vital things to ensure well-being and mental focus. 

Soul

Whether you’re a freelancer or a digital nomad, self-care is about a nourishing type of discipline (and not the punishing kind). The mind and body like routine and habit, while the soul requires more depth. All it takes is one step, and one plan to get going. Keep distractions at bay. Create a soulful work environment that helps you feel good AND succeed. Know yourself and spend time to reflect about where you are and if you’re heading in the direction you want. You can’t know until you sit quietly and listen to that inner knowing. 

Build self-awareness through stillness. This will help you to know what you tend to do, what your triggers are and how you react to situations. Becoming intimate with yourself like that will help you grow, and reach new heights.

In the end, be realistic and make sure you’re creating healthy boundaries in this new work environment, and say no. 

At first it might feel very tempting to say yes to any and all clients (and that’s okay when you have bills to pay) but do not bend your freelancing values just to accommodate everybody else first, including leads and clients. This might take a toll on your health. 

Be proactive about your freelance self-care. Whether it’s a 10-minute meditation in the morning or turning off all your electronics after 7 pm and taking a bath. 

Freelance self-care always starts with your well-being and the choices you make. Make sure to develop the self-trust necessary for stepping into your own power. In the end, if you’re not feeling well it’s going to be difficult for you to maintain that freelance lifestyle you dreamed of – and that you now finally have.

3 mindset shifts for greater confidence

I have absolutely awesome clients. Not only do they achieve the most amazing things, they are my greatest teachers, offering me the most valuable lessons. Often those lessons come in the form of questions. Like the one I got from one of my business mentoring clients last week, a creative entrepreneur who will soon blow your socks off with her amazing audiovisual work.

When faced with the prospect of landing a big client, she felt a lack of confidence that made her doubt herself, as well as her capacity to do a good job. So she asked me how we can appear more confident in cases like this, you know when we don’t feel like it. I’m sure we’ve all been there. At least, I know I have. The bigger the opportunity, the smaller we feel.

I believe there are two ways of looking at this question.

The obvious one is to take on an external point of view. What can you physically or verbally do to appear more confident? After a quick search online it’s clear this is the way most people understand, and answer this question. The problem with this is that it doesn’t improve your confidence at all, it only emulates it for a limited amount of time.

I’m not a fan of fixing symptoms. I’m the kind of person that loves to dig a little deeper to fix problems. That’s why I think there’s another, more interesting way to address this question: what mindset shifts can help you be more confident in yourself? Because once you’ll feel more confident you’ll most likely appear more confident as well. So here are three mindset shifts to be more confident in yourself:

#1 People don’t see us the way we see ourselves

The way we think we behave when we lack confidence is not per definition the way others perceive us to be. We might be sweating, or feeling like our knees are made of cotton. Although that might be uncomfortable to a point that we’re unable to ignore it, it doesn’t mean that anyone else is aware of it.

Often (if not always) we feel afraid or insecure but it’s not showing at all. Keeping this in mind helps to relieve some of the stress we can experience when in an interview, a difficult meeting or important sales conversation. So remember that what you’re feeling or experiencing, even if it’s extreme anxiety, will probably not show.

#2 What type of confidence are you modelling?

This is a big one. When I started out with my first company I thought I had to appear as big, and as strong as the big boys in the industry. But of course I wasn’t. As a result I would feel less than when going into sales meetings, fearing that the potential client I was sitting in front of would see right through me.

The thing is though, there’s no rule saying a freelancer starting out, an online entrepreneur, a startup needs to be identical to bigger, well-established companies. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It took me awhile to get it, but once I figured that my differences were my strengths, I never pretended to be bigger than I was anymore, and I gained a lot of confidence from that. In other words: don’t model your confidence off anybody else’s. Instead be authentic, own who you are.

#3 Let go of the outcome

We’ve all heard this one before. Although I’m a firm believer of not clinging to the outcome of anything, in this case my take on it is a bit different. As I mentioned above, I believe our lack of confidence can come from how we think others perceive us, and how we think we should be perceived by others. Getting clear on this can help you to make powerful mindset shifts to become more confident.

There’s a third way we undermine our confidence in ourselves that I think deserves to be mentioned. It’s one that I believe is often overlooked, but that many of us deal with. It has everything to do with how we look at opportunities. In the light of opportunities it’s easy to link lack of confidence with a fear of failure. But what about big opportunities and fear of success? With the fear of success, rather than letting go of the possible big and successful outcome (which I would advice people with a fear of failure to do), my take is to downplay the outcome altogether. Hang on to the outcome if you want to, just make sure you see it for what it really is. What I mean by that is that too often we blow things out of proportion, make them so big that we can’t imagine what would happen if we actually achieved them.

But the truth is no opportunity will open all doors at once, propel you to super-stardom overnight. Big opportunities might be big wins yes, but there’s probably an even bigger road ahead of you before you get to where you think this opportunity will take you. Your life won’t change overnight, so there’s no reason to be afraid it will.

I hope these tips will help you to be more confident about yourself. In the comments below I’d love to know what your tips are, or what you’re struggling with when it comes to being confident. So let me know.