Top Freelancing tip: Know Yourself, Be Yourself, Play to Your Strengths

In times of crisis and opportunity, focus on your personal assets, resources, and strengths.

If you are the proprietor of a small business, leader of a small nonprofit, or, especially, a FREELANCER or independent operator, YOU are your number-one asset and number-one resource. Your success will depend heavily on getting as much as you possibly can out of your personal and professional strengths.

The most helpful starting point is to know thyself.

 Simple, Powerful Questions

The motto predates Hamilton by almost three millennia. “Know thyself” was one of three maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece.

“Know Thyself” is the motto of Hamilton College, where I received my undergraduate education. Knowing yourself helps guide Hamilton students through a broad liberal-arts course of study to enable graduates to lead a life of meaning, purpose, and active citizenship. 

More practically, knowing yourself can create a firm foundation for success in the fast rising world of freelancing.

A number of current U.S. economic trends spell opportunity for freelancers:

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, there are 11 million job openings and only 6.9 million unemployed seeking work in the US. 

Even if we add the 5.9 million who are not currently in the workforce but say they would like a job now, we would still only have enough potential workers to fill the openings and that assumes a match between applicants’ capabilities, experiences, skills, and the job requirements for the open positions.  

There are a lot of underlying causes for this situation. There’s a strong demand for jobs with an incredibly limited worker supply. The US economy has not experienced a phenomena this heavily since post-World War II.

The pandemic, which looks like it will drag on for more than two years, has caused a lot of people to reevaluate and reconsider the work they are doing. It’s encouraged them to make a change — beginning by stepping away from their current employer and their current job. It’s the “great resignation.”

The habit of working remotely from anywhere, and particularly from home, has demonstrated and reinforced the advantages of flexibility.

Employers have employed tactics to incentivize and attract workers— whether by implementing unprecedented increases in actual pay, or offering to increase pay for jobs that go unfilled. As we’re seeing, it has not been sufficient to attract workers into certain industries or to certain kinds of work.

In many ways, we are in uncharted territory. With that territory comes a host of opportunity for freelancers. Companies that can’t hire full-time employees but can get necessary work done remotely on a project basis are increasingly looking to freelancers as a solution. Freelancers will see more and more attractive opportunities as potential employers bid for their capabilities, experience, skills and work output. 

In this “crisis is opportunity” environment, it’s a good time to take stock of yourself.

Ask yourselves these questions:

• What are my values? Do I live my values?

• What is my personal purpose? My business purpose? Are they compatible and mutually reinforcing?  Am I pursuing my purpose?

• What are my strengths? My weaknesses?

• What am I best at?  What do I like to do the best?

• When am I at my best? 

• How do I actually do my best work?

These are simple but powerful questions that focus our minds and guide our behaviors and, most importantly, can help each of us decide whether freelancing is a good fit.

My Experience

I was lucky. My personal values corresponded strongly with P&G’s company values of integrity and trust, leadership and ownership, and passion for service and winning.

I joined the company at 30, after having worked a number of jobs, serving more than 5 years in the Navy, and tried my hand at two very different graduate school programs. I was self-aware and in touch with myself. I tried hard to learn from my own and others’ relevant and important experiences. I understood, from a relatively early age, that there was so much more to learn from failures and mistakes than from success.

I learned that EQ was often more effective and powerful than IQ when it came to achieving important results. And while IQ is relatively fixed over a lifetime, emotional intelligence and the EQ skills of self-awareness, self-control, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills can be learned, developed, and improved.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I was realistic about my limited experience, my very few capabilities and strengths, and acutely aware of my (many) deficiencies and weaknesses. As a result, I have trained and disciplined myself to stay focused on doing what I do best, playing to my strengths, playing my position, and doing my value-added part of the job.

Your Opportunity

Is freelancing a good fit for you? If you are not freelancing now, should you give it a try? If you are freelancing, full-time, part-time or as a side hustle, how can you become more effective and more successful?

Only you know your values, purpose and guiding principles— and whether or not you are living them. But, I have learned that your values, purpose and principles—if they are aligned and inspirational between employer and employee—are important. They impact motivation and engagement, and work is an important part of my life that takes a lot of my energy and time.

To be successful, freelancers need to focus on their strengths, be realistic about their weaknesses, and have a very good understanding of how and when they work best.

Which strengths matter most to freelancer success?

• Be clear about the work you like to do, and are best at doing.

• Be a self-starter and take the initiative to hunt for and search for available projects that are the best fit for you and have the potential of delivering the best return on your personal investment.

• While there are websites that aggregate company project requests for proposals, many successful freelancing opportunities and careers are built on connections, collaboration, networks and selling yourself and your skills. People need to know how you can uniquely add value.

• Be disciplined. You are your own boss. You are solely responsible for organizing the work, scheduling the work, getting the work done to specifications and standards.

• Execute with excellence. On time. High quality. High standards. 

• Your objective is not only to deliver on the current assignment, but also to have your excellent work lead to additional projects and sustainable, longer-term partnerships (of course - if that’s what you want and that’s best for you).

In future freelancing articles, we will discuss the most relevant and important Leading To Win 5 E behaviors and Playing To Win strategy choices and capabilities.