Use Your Intuition to Grow Your Freelance Business
I spent a significant amount of my life ignoring my intuition. Going against the grind is something I do best, and I guess I thought it would be consistent if I went against myself, too. Whatever the reason, I would feel the familiar pull of my instincts drawing me away from a path, and then I would eagerly start down it.
To put it shortly: I spent years taking the long way ‘round.
Somewhere along the way, I began to wisen up and started to look before I leapt. Suddenly I was no longer constantly operating in crisis mode. There was no one catalyst for my change; one day I simply hesitated and listened to what my intuition had to say. I slowly began making better and better choices, learning to rely on my instincts instead of striking out on my own.
Thankfully, I launched my freelance business after my most reckless decision-making years, but I’ve still run into opportunities where I wasn’t able to make out what my intuition was saying and ended up making a wrong turn with my business.
Though I’m much more in tune with them now, if you’re anything like me, you don’t usually think about your instincts unless you really need them, otherwise you’re pretty much on autopilot. But you access your instincts regularly throughout your day, whether or not you’re aware of it.
That’s why I wrote this article — to help you learn to listen to what your intuition is trying to tell you so you can avoid as many missteps as possible, grow your business faster, and learn to trust yourself.
Intuition isn’t random
Just because you can’t see a pattern outright doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. Your subconscious has processed all the things that have happened to you throughout your life and all the information you’ve encountered and sorted and this results in your brain being able to sense when something feels out of sorts based on your experiences and education.
Because of this, if you get the feeling that something is inherently wrong with a situation, chances are high that it is. And that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach is a good indicator that you should think twice about whatever it is you’re about to do.
Say you’re walking home from work one afternoon and you go to duck down an alleyway you regularly use as a shortcut, when you’re struck with a persistent sensation that something’s not quite right with the situation. Instead you take the long way around and arrive at your apartment safe and sound.
Can you know that something or someone wasn’t waiting to grab you? No, in most cases you’ll not ever know that you made the right decision. Maybe you’ll think you were being paranoid. But your brain recognized subconsciously that something wasn’t right with the setting, whether or not you realized it at the time.
The stakes aren’t always life or death when it comes to listening to your instincts. It could be something related to your freelance career, like a bad feeling coming over you after you meet with a potential client. Whatever it is, it’s important to honor your feelings and try to listen to what your intuition tells you.
Anxiety will try to deceive you
Some things do color your ability to access your intuition, namely anxiety. Anxiety makes you think something is wrong all day, every day, even when there’s no sign of clear and present danger. If you have anxiety and it’s not managed, it’s likely going to make it difficult for you to hear what your instincts are telling you.
For example, my anxiety about rejection has caused me to sell my professional services at a significantly lower rate than I intended to. Instead of listening to what my gut told me about working with clients who refused to meet my base rate, I persisted so as to not offend anyone or lose out on business by turning them away. And, almost always, these clients have turned out to be the most difficult to work with.
Don’t let your anxiety have control over how you make choices in your business. The more honest you can be with yourself, the more authentic your choices will be, helping you stay true to your vision.
What honing your intuition can do for your freelance business
By actively honing your intuition and instincts, you can take a lot of the guesswork out of making business decisions. For instance, when a new prospect crosses your path and you’re not sure it’s a good fit, having a sharpened intuition that you’re actively in touch with can help you steer clear of a less-than-ideal working relationship. If you decide to ignore your intuition when presented with options for progressing forward with your business, it’s likely you’ll run into situations that you’d rather have avoided in retrospect.
Here’s a real world example: I was pretty excited about taking on a challenging project, but deep down I had a persistent feeling that something about the project was wrong. My excitement won me over, and I took it on, completely ignoring the nagging feeling of incompatibility.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d made a mistake. The things that excited me about the project — the pay, the complexities, the enormity of it — kept me genuinely invested in the outcome of it, but it came with a lot of complications that I should have seen coming from the red flags my intuition raised. In the end, while I ultimately don’t regret taking on the project, if I had listened to my gut feeling, I would have charged more and taken on less alongside it.
All of this to say that taking the time to invest in strengthening your connection with your intuition is actually an investment in your freelance business because you’ll make better decisions and save yourself the frustration of dealing with missteps.
Things you can do to hone your intuition
But how can you foster stronger instincts? It would seem as if it’s something you’re either born with or you’re not, but listening to your gut is a skill that can be improved with concentrated focus and practice. Some of the things you can do to hone your intuition include giving yourself distance away from your conundrum, being sincere with yourself about the issue you’re facing, and coming face to face with the problem through journaling.
Get some distance
Putting space between yourself and your problems will help you see them in a new light. This fresh perspective is imperative to your ability to see things as objectively as possible. The more objectivity you can view your problems with, the more clarity you’ll have about what your instincts are trying to tell you.
You can put metaphorical distance between yourself and your problems or actual, physical distance — whichever method is the most appropriate for your situation. Take a rambling walk around the neighborhood if you’re sitting at your desk stumped. Unload and load the dishwasher, start a load of laundry, and make a cup of coffee or tea, whatever you have to do to create space between you and the issues at work that are troubling you.
If you can’t physically separate yourself from the problem at hand, try to get some mental separation. Switch tasks if you can, or give yourself a 15 to 20 minute break to decompress. Even just going from focused project work to checking and responding to emails can help you begin to sort out your feelings and pay closer attention to your intuition.
Be open and honest with yourself
The easiest person for us to deceive is ourselves. You know your favorite rationalizations better than anyone, and you know how to manipulate yourself into doing something that you know deep down doesn’t feel like a good choice. By being open and honest with yourself about your weaknesses, you’ll know better how to identify the catalysts that set you in motion even when you know you should be staying put.
It’s not always easy to face our weaknesses, but it’s necessary for us to grow, and it’s even more necessary for us to sharpen our connections with intuition in order to strengthen our abilities to make faster, more effective decisions for our freelance businesses.
To be more honest with yourself, think about the reasons why you’re considering ignoring your instincts. Sometimes in freelance life, we take jobs we know aren’t the best fit because they’re absolutely necessary — usually it’s financially motivated. Other times, we’re excited about an opportunity and we’re not willing to look directly at the red flags because we don’t want to see them. And other times, we’re so blinded by our anxiety that we can’t see the next step forward even when it’s laid out clearly before us.
Whatever the reason is that you’re fighting against your intuition, be true to yourself about it and the path will become clearer.
Journal
I’ve written about journaling before in the context of battling imposter syndrome, but it’s such a worthwhile habit to get into that I’m going to harp on it again here. Journaling helps you put things into perspective. It’s a good way to both get some distance and be honest with yourself because it’s such a powerful tool for self-reflection.
Journaling is also accessible because there’s no excuse for not doing it. You’ll see results from even a ten-minute journaling session, so even the busiest among us can find a few minutes to squeeze it in. And there’s no real cost commitment to journaling unless you want there to be; to get started, all you need is a blank document, whether it’s on a screen or in a notebook, and a pen or keyboard. If you want to get fancy with special, colored pens and top-tier journals, that’s totally up to you, but it’s completely optional.
You have to have faith in your ability to succeed.
If you don’t, you’ll fail. It’s as simple (and as hard) as that. If you don’t find it within you to believe in yourself, you will not succeed in freelancing. That sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but you’re gaining nothing from holding on to limiting beliefs, and they will actively keep you from pursuing your passions if you let them take hold of you. Listen to your intuition when making hard choices and believe that you’re capable of making the right decisions for your business, because you are.
