FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR BUSINESS

Close your eyes and think back to elementary school career day. Whether you wanted to be an artist, the president, a doctor, or a pro wrestler (marketing strategists are criminally underrepresented on elementary school career day) — how did you want to feel about what you did for a living? 

Usually, our earliest ideas of work are pretty grand. When we’re totally unconcerned with limitations, our career aspirations are throttled only by our imaginations. Seven-year-old you fully expected this sector of your life to be fulfilling, significant, and most of all, fun. Anxiety, indifference, imposter syndrome, and the Sunday Scaries weren’t even on your radar then, so where the heck did they come from? 

Like any relationship, your relationship with work is constantly evolving and reflecting your core beliefs back to you. If you’ve chosen the freelance life, there must be at least a little bit of a hopeless romantic in you. You wanted more for yourself than a traditional employment arrangement could offer, and you took some risks to pursue it. That’s probably why it can be especially frustrating when our negative feelings around work rear their heads even as we build our own businesses. 

If your schedule feels like a slog (even though you made it) and your micromanaging, hypercritical boss turns out to be you, you may have lost that loving feeling. Here’s how to get it back. 

Unpack Your Core Beliefs About Work

Even if you grew up in a very supportive environment with lots of people rooting for you, most of us don’t get to stay in the career day bubble for very long. We learn pretty quickly that there are barriers to entry into almost everything. 

Soon it becomes brutally apparent that you need a top-tier GPA for med school, lofty family connections for world-stage politics, and insane athletic abilities for professional sports. Maybe you were inundated with messages about how creative fields are highly competitive and artists are usually poor. Maybe you heard the adults in your life complain about their jobs, resenting that they had to tolerate exhaustion, boredom, or disrespect because they counted on the money.  

Regardless of your upbringing, most of us make it to adulthood with one or more of these beliefs about work:

• The point of work is to make money. 
• It’s not supposed to be fun, that’s why it’s called work. 
• We work hard so we can enjoy the non-working part of our lives. 
• Suffering is an indicator of a strong work ethic.
• Your choice of career is a fundamental part of your personality. 
• Earning money at work is how you show your family you love them. 
• Prioritizing work makes you a girlboss/real man/badass
• Work can fill gaps in your personal life. 

We don’t set out to feel so un-loving about the thing most of us will spend nearly half of our waking lives (or more) thinking about, yet here we are. Fortunately, acknowledgement is a crucial first step. 

Once you identify the less-than-helpful parts of your mindset around work in general, you’re well on your way to reigniting the spark that made you want to build a business in the first place. Whether you’ve been self-employed for months or decades, take a second to hit the reset button and look at your business with fresh eyes. You’re pretty good together, huh? 

Do More of What Makes You Happy

As a freelancer, you’re on your own time. Why not use this freedom to tailor your business around the things that make you feel happy, challenged, and fulfilled? 

Of course, it’s not feasible to love every minute of each workday, but too often we take this to mean that trying to create more joy is totally pointless. It’s not. If you secretly hate copyediting, phase it out of your service offerings. If you love working with nonprofits, pursue those clients. This could also entail outsourcing or simplifying the parts of business ownership that bum you out. Hire a subcontractor. Hire a bookkeeper. You’re the boss. 

The fear that making your work more enjoyable will make it less work-like and therefore less profitable is completely irrational, so kick it to the curb.

Know Your Worth

If you’re still sorting through toxic work beliefs or recovering from an abusive employment situation, asserting that getting by is no longer good enough can feel audacious. 

If you haven’t raised your rates in years, habitually lowball project estimates to ensure you won’t be underbid, or consistently find yourself working out of scope or outside of business hours, fear is likely to blame. It’s scary to elevate your standards and set boundaries when you’re of the mindset that all opportunities are good opportunities.

The fact of the matter is, you have to let go of the things that are weighing your business down to create room for the things that will build it up. If your working agreements aren’t mutually beneficial, they aren’t a good fit — and that’s more than okay. 

You deserve to do more than hustle frantically and make ends meet. Break up with that which no longer serves you, and dump that love on your business. 

Ride the Waves 

No matter how much you nurture it, your relationship with your business will have peaks and valleys. If you’re in it for the long haul, it’s important to remember that tough quarters (or even tough years) are an unavoidable part of the journey — setbacks are not confirmation that you are destined for a life of mediocrity.

When things hit a slump, an attitude of curiosity can override some of those feelings of anxiety and indignation. Sometimes just remembering that you have the tools, skills, and network you need to solve your problem can stop a spiral. Whether or not this year was more profitable than the one before it, you’re still building something. 

Trends, technologies, and people will continuously change. The strategies that are working for you right now aren’t supposed to work forever. Solopreneurs can expect to keep learning, adapting, taking calculated risks, and rebounding from mistakes from day one through retirement. With the right mindset, staying off of autopilot will actually keep you reexperiencing work in exciting new ways.  

Keep challenging yourself, exploring opportunities, and creating the relationship with work that elementary school you always dreamed of. Your business will love you back.