Breaking the freelance stress cycle with Sabina Read

Sabina Read: Catastrophising and perfectionism are very good bedfellows. Many of us wear perfectionism as a badge of honour. Well, I’m a perfectionist, so it means I do everything perfectly – which is impossible. It’s a false statement because nobody does. So, I like to loosen the grip on perfectionism.

It’s actually not a gift, and sometimes, and this will send shivers down the perfectionist spines who are listening, but sometimes good enough is good enough.

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives.

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Lynne, how often do you catastrophise or go into a freelance stress spiral? I do it all the time, as you know, but I’m a work in progress.

Lynne: It’s interesting, because I’m not a catastrophiser, I never have been, but I’ve talked to you off the ledge a few times. That’s one of the things that makes us good partners, Rach. You are catastrophising, sometimes I’m too optimistic and don’t see some of the things that are happening. But I know anxiety is common with a lot of freelancers. I speak to a lot as you do, and it’s so easy to quickly spiral when you lose a client, if you don’t have enough work or even have a pitch rejected that you really thought would land.

Rachel: I know all those things can cause you to spiral, I think. I’m really excited that today we have psychologist Sabina Read with us. She’s going to be sharing tips on how to sidestep the freelance stress spiral and even how you can reframe situations you think are a disaster to actually bounce back from them faster.

Lynne: That’s fantastic and Sabina really knows her stuff on that score. She might be familiar to many of our listeners because she’s also a speaker, podcast host, and what she calls a Life Sherpa, which I love. You might have heard her on Melbourne Radio’s, 3AW afternoons where she’s a resident psych.

She’s also the co-host of two podcasts where we will put some links into the show notes about them, and she’s big on helping people to human better. Another thing, I love. Her words are navigate change and stress.

Rachel: Yes. Well, I know Sabina is waiting in the wings, so let’s get her into the hot seat. Sabina, welcome to The Content Byte. We’re so glad to have you!

Sabina: Great to be here, Rach. Thanks. Good to see you, Lynne.

Rachel: Okay, let’s start with catastrophising. What is it and why do we do it?

Sabina: So, it really is what we call a cognitive distortion and what happens is we jump to the absolute worst possible scenario. And then we assume that our thinking is fact. So, we attach certainty to our faulty beliefs around this worst possible outcome that we’re anticipating.

Lynne: Oh, that makes sense.  But I guess the challenge is that it’s been a tough couple of years for freelance writers. Many of our listeners are worried about losing work to AI and there seems to be a lot of people who don’t hear back from job applications. Is it normal to fall into that freelance stressed cycle when things aren’t going well?

Sabina:  I think it is Lynne, because the difference between freelancing and more regular employment is that you’ve got these guardrails around you in employment. You’ve got an employer, you might have an HR department, you’ve got a regular income, and of course with freelance you don’t have any of that.

So, the difference between catastrophising and I guess. Well, let me say catastrophising often is when there’s no evidence for bad things or negative outcomes occur. Whereas what you are talking about actually is sometimes, not always, but sometimes grounded in fact that you may have less jobs coming your way. There may be more competition. So, we don’t want to throw the baby out with a bath water. This is not a matter of let’s turn that frown upside down and everything’s going to be fine. But we need to check in with what is the evidence here and treat the evidence as information. Just information. Nothing more, nothing less.

And when we interpret it as just information, then we have the choice of how we respond. So, it makes sense to me, and you guys are talking about it already, that a freelancer might say if they’re catastrophising, well the phone’s quiet, so my career’s totally going to dry out, or I’ve got no bookings or no enquiry, so I’ve lost all my relevance. Or other writers seem to be getting more work than me, maybe I’ve been replaced. Those are catastrophising examples in the freelance space.

Often really, we say, I’m worried about dollars, which is very real, but perhaps what underpins this catastrophising and this cognitive distortion in our thinking is more – am I wanted, am I good enough, am I still needed? That is a really universal human thought and experience and feeling.

Rachel: What’s the difference between people who have those negative thought patterns and people who just don’t do it and kind of go, well, I lost that client – oh, well, the door is open for a great new one to come in. What are the differences between those two types of people?

Sabina: Well, first of all, we are all hardwired to scan the world for threat. We came from a species that if we just sat around the campfire saying, everything’s just great, everything’s fine, we would’ve missed some threats that that might’ve come our way. There might be someone who’s attacking the tribe or the fire could be going out. There could be a weather event that’s going to threaten our livelihood, our lives, actually, not just our livelihood. So, in all of us, we are hardwired to scan for threats, but when we become over, perhaps hypervigilant and over-indexed on looking for these threats we fall into the catastrophising space, and so a lot of what we’re talking about gets deeper as it always does.

Being a psychologist, often the ways we, well, it’s the nature nurture, lifelong story. Some of the ways we were raised and some of our genes, because you’ll see that babies aren’t born as a blank slate. Some babies are born more heightened. They might cry more, they might be more distressed. So, you’ve got that sort of nature piece. And then the nurture piece is if you’ve had a parent who said, be careful of that. Now there’s not enough of this, let’s worry about that. Then you’ve learned through the nurture experience to scan for threats more often.

So, I don’t think one’s right or wrong, but the question really becomes, how is this impeding your day-to-day life? How is it affecting the way you feel? How is it affecting your relationship with your work and also with other humans on the planet? And I guess instead of talking about this kind of person or that kind of person, it’s useful to look at what kind of mindsets might help us work around this catastrophising, particularly in the freelance space.

And I think one of my favourite words is abundance, and the opposite of abundance is scarcity. So, some of us will lean more towards an abundant mindset, others more towards a scarcity mindset. If you have an abundant mindset, you tend to believe that there is enough. There is enough work, there is enough clients, there is enough money.

If you have a scarcity mindset, it’s that if someone else gets it, then there’s not enough for me. So that’s quite a powerful shift in the way we just, not just approach freelancing, but approach life, I think.  An abundant mindset is useful, but I can hear some of your listeners sort of saying, oh, that’s all very good and well, to try and be abundant, but I’m not getting pigs, or I’ve lost the work, or I can’t pay my mortgage. Am I, barking up the wrong tree? Should I throw the freelance towel in? So, I know that there’s a practical reality here about creating work that’s sustainable and that brings in the practical needs as well as the creative and emotional needs.

Lynne: One of the things that I see, and this is totally anecdotal, but there are some freelancers who might be perfectionists. They want to do everything perfectly. And I find sometimes they’re the ones who get into these spirals. Their work is, it’s back to what your mindset about their work is not good enough will people like me and they have to do better and better, and then they get so tangled up with the work and feeling they’re not good enough.

Do you think that’s connected?

Sabina: Absolutely. So, the catastrophising and perfectionism are very good bedfellows, and so many of us wear perfectionism as a badge of honour. Well, I’m a perfectionist, so it means I do everything perfectly, which is impossible. It’s a false statement because nobody does.

So, I like to loosen the grip on perfectionism. It’s actually not a gift, and this will send shivers down the perfectionist spines who are listening, but sometimes good enough is good enough. And good enough and finished, good enough and completed. Good enough and paid is better than needing to chase the elusive goal of perfectionism, which actually tends to create a sense of anxiety and is not a place of arrival that really has any meaning. Because what does perfect look like? And can we ever deliver it? And the answer mostly is we can’t.

Rachel: That’s so true. There’s something really freeing about going, this is good enough. I’m sending it, I’m filing this story, I’m giving that to the client, and if it’s not great or there’s a change, they’ll come back to me.

Just having that – instead of sitting there for another two hours, which time in is money, and you’re just tweaking something that is actually fine.

Lynne: I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m not like that and that’s partly because I started off as a cadet journalist when I had to file lots of stuff and fast. People were faster and people were more concerned about having it on their desk than whether it was like, Pulitzer Prize winning because God forbid, I wasn’t really doing that. I was writing the wedding pages or something. I think that probably got me out of it. But I do think people today, they don’t have those big scary newsrooms that I learned in and if you’ve only been a freelance journalist in writing high quality work than I used to have to do, I think that feeds in itself. Would you agree?

Sabina: I do. I would absolutely agree. So, in some ways, that was really fertile training ground for you to get the words done; to get them out and also you get reward loop feedback happening there quite quickly. Because at some point I imagine lean in your work, an editor would’ve said, this isn’t cutting the grade, or we need it to be more like this, or less like that. So, you’re also getting feedback – okay, I’m on the right track.

This is this approach, this good enough.  This fast, this turnaround, this is working. And I think in the freelance space, often there’s a lag time between when you pitch for something, then when you deliver the work and then when you get feedback and you may unhelpfully think that feedback will mean that you’ll be rebooked by that same client and that doesn’t necessarily stack up.

So, you might do good work. The client might be happy with it, but if they’re a one-night stand client, and so you start to interpret and if you’re prone to catastrophising, well, they didn’t book me again, so I mustn’t be good enough, then we move from these individual thoughts to globalising or generalising our thinking.

So, I wasn’t good enough for that client to rebook. Maybe I’m not good enough for any client, and then we can really go down the spiral and say, and maybe I’m not really that valuable as a writer, and I should become an architect.

Lynne: Or whatever. 

Rachel: What you are just describing, I mean, what’s happening in the brain when we get into that reactive spiral. Are we actually changing our neural pathways and making it easier for negativity to take hold whenever something doesn’t go quite right?

Sabina: Yes, that’s exactly right. Rach. So, this goes well beyond the scope of working as a freelance writer. We are starting to train the brain. The amygdala is, I like to describe the amygdala as flipping. It’s the part of the brain that’s sensitive to threat. And so, the more we perceive something as a threat – whether it’s a threat or not, it’s actually irrelevant.  But the more we perceive it as a threat, the more those neural pathways, I like to describe them as like roads.

And so, if you keep driving up and down the same road, that road’s going to create a deeper groove in the ground or on the road if it’s a dirt track and we want to get out of that dirt track and we want to create other metaphoric pathways, other metaphoric roads that create new neural pathways.

So instead of always scanning for threat – I always say, we’ve all got antennas on our head. You just can’t see them. If you can start to tweak your antennas to look for what’s working, to look for feedback that’s been good, to look for work that’s packed upon or created the impact that you or the client was hoping for, then you start to train your brain to travel down different roads and different pathways.

Lynne: Wow. I love that.

Rachel: Well, we suggest that at Rachel’s List. We talk about having this good feedback folder, and some people call it the sunshine folder, and we did a whole blog post about it, and everybody came out of the woodwork and said they had some kind of iteration of this folder. And you look at it when you’re really down. But that’s interesting to think it’s creating new pathways, looking at good stuff. 

Sabina: I’m all for the sunshine folder. It’s something I’ve talked to a lot of clients and people about over the years because sometimes we need a reminder. What have I done? That’s good. How have I been impactful? How have I met a brief and kicked a goal?  So, I think that’s useful. Again, I mean, everything we are talking about fits within the freelance space, but it also fits within every domain of our life as well.

Lynne: It’s true because I do think we’ve all got that tendency to focus on the one bad review, not the ninety-nine good reviews or the ninety-nine clients that come back and say, I loved working with you – here’s another commission. We always remember the one that didn’t work well.

Sabina: And then I suppose there is a difference here between just, walking around like Pollyanna saying, well, there’s enough in the world and I’m an amazing writer. What we’re looking for generally is one of my, this is Sabina-ism but take your thoughts to court.

If we had to take our thoughts into a metaphoric courtroom in front of a judge and jury, and we said, well, I didn’t get this gig, or I got rejected for that pitch, the judge or jury would say, and what evidence do you have? For that happening before now and in the future and most of us would be hard pressed to find evidence to suggest that it’s an ongoing story, sorry, an ongoing fact. But the story we tell ourselves is, that it is, we, again, we generalise from one experience and make it global. And that’s something we can retrain our brains out of. We can identify that this didn’t go to plan or I didn’t get this gig, or I’m not happy with my performance in this experience. Again, that is information and information is data and it’s when we do nothing with that information, like we dig a hole and cry in our soup that we are not going to shift the dial.

But what information is it telling us? If I’m repeatingly, like let’s talk practically, some of us might be getting multiple kicks and knock backs from new business opportunities. That’s information to pay attention to. What is it about what I’m putting out there that may not be landing? Could it be my fee? Is it my style of delivery? I don’t know, you guys all have better ideas, but how you’re positioning yourself, your deadlines, your timelines, who knows?

But if there is a repeated story here, a repeated experience here, it’s worth looking at because essentially, I think we need to be pattern makers. We need to identify patterns. So, a one-off is not enough. We’re jumping at shadows if we’re responding to a one-off hit or rejection. What’s the pattern?

Something that can be really useful is actually to look at your workload and the cadence of what’s coming in and where you’re landing well over a twelve-month period. Because in the freelance space, you might have a really dry month. And if you catastrophise it, then you say, oh, well I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not in the right gig. I’m not good enough. What’s the point? See you never. If you look at that, if you sort of plot the patterns over a twelve-month period, how are you looking? How are you traveling? Where are the highs? Where are the loads? And then keep looking for data. Be curious. Why might that have been a big month? Why did that client love what I did? Why was there repeat business there? Of course, the old marketing adage, it’s better to keep working with existing clients because they already know you. They know your style; they know what you’re offering. And sometimes I think we want the shiny new and so as a freelancer we might think, well, I tick that box, but now I want something over there.

 Sometimes it’s better to invest our time in the existing relationships that we have.

Rachel: I love that.

Lynne: It’s so interesting. Is there a good practical strategy you can use in the moment where if you start going down that spiral to say – hang on, let’s get some perspective. I guess the court analogy is a good one.

Sabina:   Take your thoughts to court is one. I think the other is just, you know the old name it to shame it. I’m catastrophising. Okay. What is more likely to be the outcome? That is a useful sort of circuit breaker. And then of course there’s, basic kind of grounding. These, again, aren’t related to freelancing, but just to bringing ourselves down.

Because if our amygdala has flipped, I should say, it can take twenty, thirty, forty, fifty minutes for us to get out of that state of fight or flight. And so that’s not the time if you’ve kind of peaked with this whole story of its, I shouldn’t be doing this and there’s no more work for me, that’s not the time to act. At that point, we need to deflate and bring ourselves down until, until we’re breathing calmly again, until we’re thinking clearly again. Because when we’re in that fight or flight state, which is if you’re a real catastrophiser kind of operating in that fight or flight state all the time, which means that you’re you, it’s.

Lynne: It’s exhausting.

Sabina: It’s exhausting. And it feels like the sabre tooth tiger is at your heels twenty-four seven, and the body doesn’t know the difference between a sabre tooth tiger and a rejecting client. Or rejection switch. And so, it’s important that we do find ways to bring ourselves down and the best way to do that and it’s almost boring because we all know it, but it’s through breath and when we are breathing calmly and deeply and slowly, even for five minutes, two minutes even. It’s letting our body know the tigers not here anymore. But while the tiger is here, everything in our body shifts. It has to, because we are being responsive to a perceived, albeit not real threat. And so, when we’re in that state, literally our digestion shuts down because we didn’t need to eat a big old steak. If we were running from a tiger our libido declines because we don’t need to be all amorous while we’re running from a tiger.

So, all of these things are happening when we are stressed about work and the nature of our work and the pipeline of our work and so it’s not until we bring ourselves back down that we can start to think clearly again by naming it, taming it, and then thinking what is a more likely outcome? How cyclical is this? What is the pattern that I’m seeing and what is the evidence that I’m bringing to the judge and jury? 

Rachel: I love that.

What about like taking some of these situations that are happening in the moment and then reframing them as an opportunity? How do we do that? Is there a tactic we can try?

Sabina: I think with regards to reframing as an opportunity, it’s first of all to tease apart that this particular outcome or this particular response does not equate with my identity or my worth. That’s a really big takeaway that every human on the planet is learning, but particularly those who care about their work, who are passionate, who are high achieving. So, elite athletes think, well, if I’m not a swimmer anymore, who am I?

We need to tease apart, if I’m not a writer, who am I? And it doesn’t mean I’m not a writer because I’m not going to keep writing. It means they’ve also got other transferable skills, other strengths and other value. And when we tease apart our results or our output and separate it from our value, I think that helps us bring some perspective to the overwhelm that can come.

Rachel: I think also that something that has helped me in the past, because I’ve lost really big gigs. I was a movie reviewer for ten years and that gig was taken in-house and I got into a habit, because it happens a lot when you’ve worked for yourself for twenty-five years, you lose clients and all of that. We’ve all been there.

I used to give myself a day to really wallow and be depressed about the whole situation. And then the following day I had to get off my bum and do something proactive about it to like to turn it into a positive and maybe do some more marketing or change my website or something like that.

Sabina: 100%! So, the question to ask is what does this lull? And it is just lull, not a permanent state. What does this allow me to do that busy prevents me from doing.

Lynne: Well, we certainly see a lot of freelancers who tend to work on badly paid gigs or bad working with bad bosses or editors being treated badly instead of looking for a better client because they get stuck in this is all I can do, this is all I’m worth and that’s sometimes hard to pull out too.

Sabina: I think in a case like that, Lynne, it’s useful to think about, not what am I running away from because in that story you’re running away from a bad boss or crap work.  Unenjoyable, unsatisfying work and think about where do I want to go to because again, when we are running from something, we’ve got no clarity, we’ve got no roadmap.  What am I, so what does ideal look like as a writer? What would the, and I’m not going to use the word perfect deliberately, but what will your preferred working regime cadence kind of work look like.

And when you get clarity on that, it’s easier to move towards it. But when you don’t have clarity on the kind of work that you want to do or the kind of writer you want to be, it’s just very easy to run from the bits that don’t feel good. And then you end up in a state of overwhelm and sort of analysis paralysis and, self-doubt and down the rabbit hole you go.

Lynne: I actually think one of the best things to that point is I think you, it’s a great thing to actually say no to a gig.

Sabina: Yes.

Lynne: And that’s quite a powerful part of the learning as a freelancer, something that’s not well paid, not your thing, not the sort of work you enjoy – whatever it is. The first time you say no is a real benchmark as a freelancer to give yourself some power back.

Sabina: I 100% agree, Lynne, and look, I can speak from personal experience in this conversation. I do all these different kinds of the work as a speaker, as a facilitator, podcast, radio, tv, and I do a lot of spokesperson work for different brands. And so, I’m forever pitching and responding to enquiries and looking at a fee scale, sliding depending on the kind of work and, and some of it’s really clear and others, I kind of formulate as I go, like if I think. So, I’ve got kind of metrics for me. These are more psychological metrics, not dollar metrics. This might be of interest, I think to other freelancers, your writers and I’ll be more of a content creator than a writer, but there’s a lot of overlap and don’t be fooled by the psychology title. So, I often think, are these people that I really want to work with. Do I enjoy them personally? Do I like what they’re about? Is there a values alignment there? Are we going to have fun? Like I’m very big on fun. So, I think about those things even when I’m thinking about a fee.

I also think is this piece of work going to help me grow and develop and stretch? So, if I get booked for a speaking gig and it’s a topic that I haven’t done before, I could easily say, oh, that’s not in my, a lot of speakers just have their set topics that they roll out.

But I love it when someone asks me to create a talk or presentation on a new topic because then I’m literally being paid to learn. And I love, so it inspires, and I think it’s the same as a writer. It’s like, oh, I’ve never written about that, or I’ve never written in that style before. But now I’m being asked to do that, maybe the dollars for that gig aren’t is as good as your usual fee or what you hoped, but you’re getting another benefit there. You’re stretching and learning. You’re getting that mastery muscle flexed. And so, I think we need to look at what our metrics of success are and shift them accordingly. So, for me, that growth piece is important. The fun piece is important and so I might take on different gigs that I wouldn’t have or explore different opportunities at different rates, perhaps because of those metrics that are meaningful to me is we need to create what those or define what those are for all of us.

Rachel:  So interesting.

Lynne:  One of the things that would you advise people to get out of that sort of negativity, particularly with social media like LinkedIn at the moment. We see, don’t we reach a lot of negative things on say LinkedIn and about the state of the economy? What do you think? 

Rachel: I think, I was reading something about it today, and it’s called critical ignoring, like what you decide to turn towards and what you decide to take away. So, if you are constantly reading, posts about companies using AI and not using writers anymore, or newsletters with writers who say, I couldn’t hack it and I’ve changed careers and this is what I’m doing now. Did those sorts of things lead to you framing your own situation as a crisis? How can you be more discerning in what you absorb?

Sabina: I think this is a really good question because of course, the way algorithms work, that if you start looking up, what do I do as a writer, not getting enough, or is AI replacing the written word or, writing, then you’re going to get more and more of that through the algorithm, through your feed, and suddenly we think that’s all there is out there because that’s the thread that we’ve been following.

We need to bring an awareness and a mindfulness to that process. But the flip side of that is saying – oh no, AI’s not going to have any impact on me. I’m not even going to look at that. And there’s an ignorance in that. So somewhere between the two to be discerning and you kind of talked about it, Rach, to be discerning in the kind of content you look for. Ensure that its evidence based, that it’s rigorous, not that it’s not just sort of alarm bells ringing to stir the pot, which a lot of content is. And then think about how relevant is this and again, there’s an information piece there that’s an invitation to tweak or course correct what I’m offering in the kind of business that I’m creating. 

Rachel: I love what you said about the algorithm because I’ve really gained my algorithm and here’s a hot tip for anyone out there who wants a Facebook feed full of golden retriever puppies – you just have to like look at them once or twice or like it, and then your whole feed just becomes this beautiful bountiful golden retriever puppies. So that’s it.

Sabina: Well, that’s good to all of us, doesn’t it? You literally look up an eyebrow pencil and the next minute you’ve got fifty-thousand eyebrow pencils in your feed. But is what’s happening if we’re looking for this sort of worst-case scenario content out there in the opportunities and you’ve already talked about your, did you call it your sunshine file? Whatever it is. Part of taking your thoughts to court is recognising what your offering has been and what has landed and reminding yourself that you’ve got a skillset here and look, having a conversation about AI now is far more in depth and complicated than the scope of this chat. But it’s a reality that AI is bringing extraordinary opportunities, which is changing the landscape of the whole working landscape. So, to ignore that would be at our peril, but to run in fear from it would also be at our peril. 

Lynne: Such a balance. So, are there practical ways for our listeners and writers to build some sort of psychological resilience to handle these so it doesn’t – so you take it as information without going down that spiral? Are there good ways to do that?

Sabina: Well, I think one of them is what we’ve already talked about, and that is to not overly identify our worth and our value and our offering with the feedback that we might get as a one-off and the things we’ve talked about. To look for patterns so that we’re actually making sense of what’s happening. And then if you do need to course correct, well do it. Don’t live in a state of denial. 

Lynne: Or fear.

Sabina: Or fear. Because avoidance is the greatest fueler of fear.

Lynne: Yes.

Sabina: Or anxiety, I should say. And so often when we are feeling overwhelmed, we avoid and when we avoid what we’re teaching ourselves is – so if I avoid putting in some more new business proposals because I’m frightened that I’m going to be rejected, then we don’t give ourselves the opportunity for another story to be creative. So, avoidance means that we haven’t had to put ourselves in the firing line, which is uncomfortable, but we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to learn to tolerate that discomfort.

And often when we procrastinate or avoid, it’s not the task that we’re avoiding, it’s the emotion that comes up with the task. So, if I think, oh, I really should set myself a goal of doing three pitches a week or two new business proposals – whatever it is a week. If we don’t do that, we feel like we’re dodging a bullet, but really, we’re not teaching ourselves to tolerate what might happen that we don’t want, which could be rejection.

So, the word, you asked about the word resilience, how do we build our resilience, Lynne, and I think the word resilience is sort of overused and overly misunderstood because resilience is purely the experience of building and adapting to hardship.

Every freelancer is building resilience. It’s through non-avoidance but also practicing some non-attachment. That’s nuanced, I get that by talking. When I say non-attachment, I’m kind of tapping into something more Buddhist like in that I won’t be overly attached to the outcome, but I’m not going to avoid the process to avoid the discomfort of possible rejection.

That’s not going to move me closer to my goal. And I think the final thing I would say here is go back to basics. Why did you sign up to be a freelance writer in the first place. How is this an extension of your skills, your passion? It probably took you into a state of flow, maybe even as a child where just time passed you by long before you were getting extrinsic recognition for your craft. Long before you’re even at school and you got perhaps, a grade for your writing or now a payment for your piece.

Go back to those intrinsic drivers, those things that drove us or motivated us before we were told, you’re a good girl. You’re a good boy. Here’s an A plus. Here’s a gold star. Here’s a pay rise. Because that’s probably what started you on the journey in the first place. And I think sometimes we’re in a state of catastrophising, we lose sight of that to go back to our intrinsic drivers.

Rachel: That’s so true. Well, this has been a brilliant chat, but we have to end it off with our new fast three questions. Which is a sort of new thing that we’re trying, so we’re going to fire them at you and see what comes out.

Okay, first question. Favourite tools you can’t live without.

Sabina: I’m guessing that I meant to speak with some sort of grand authority in the workplace, but I just want to say my new Dyson Airwrap, which has got nothing to with work.

Rachel: Well, one of our other guests mentioned it, what was it? Her potato ricer.

Lynne: Her potato masher.

Rachel: So, if it’s going in in wildly different directions, whatever works.

Lynne: Whatever works.

Sabina: The other thing that comes up for me is, and it’s so obvious, is my phone. I mean, I know we need to be very aware of being attached to our phones, but I’m in constant communication with so many people and because communication is my jam and this supports my work, I don’t know how I’d cope without my phone.

Lynne: I know.  If you never have it for whatever reason, you feel quite awkward and naked without it, don’t you? You’re right. 

Rachel: Definitely.

Lynne: So, question two, is there a habit you have that genuinely saves you time?

Sabina: I think one of the things I do, I get a lot of enquiries, a lot of conversations, a lot of client talks that dialogue that I need to have. And so, I now bundle that up and have those conversations when I’m in the car. And sometimes it’s tricky because people will say, can we talk at three o’clock about that? And I’ll say, look, I’m going to be in the car tomorrow between four and five, so I can’t even wipe in point of time because traffic it’s like that. But that is a real time saver for me. It means in the car, I just make the car, my office and start returning phone calls. So, some are pre-arranged, sometimes they don’t know I’m calling, but that’s the time they’re going to get the call back.

Lynne: Oh, fantastic.

Rachel:  That’s actually a really good time saver, a really good idea for me though. I would have to have my laptop there recording the call so it would come with some annoying tech situations.

Sabina: Well, it depends on the kind of work you’re doing. No, you wouldn’t be doing an interview. I wouldn’t be, and things I would not do in the car.  But some often people are looking for advice or it’s a new business conversation and I can have it before then going back to the desk.

Rachel: Absolutely. Okay. Final question. One thing you wish you’d done sooner in your career.

Sabina: I think it probably would be the abundant mindset piece. I really deeply embody that now. I believe it wholeheartedly that if things are a bit quieter at a certain period of time, I don’t have fear. I don’t catastrophise. I just know that more work will come my way. And if you back yourself, if you’re offering a service, or a product or whatever it is that is valuable, that’s impactful, that’s needed, then the doorbell will ring again.

Rachel: I love that.

Lynne: I love that too.

Rachel: And it’s so true. It’s really so true.

Lynne: And I certainly find that the longer you’re in business too, you get more perspective. I think it’s back to your initial point about looking over a twelve month and now of course I look over twelve years, but there’s ups, there’s downs, comes back, clients call again. It happens.

Sabina: Yes. And if they don’t, as we’ve already said, that’s information that might need a deeper dive and a course correct and that’s okay too. That’s growth. That’s progress. We’re not designed to stagnate in the same lane from now till the end of time.

Lynne: That’s fine.

Rachel: Fantastic.

Lynne: Well, Sabina, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your patience with all our tech issues, which yes, listeners won’t know about, but that was challenging and it was such a useful conversation. And I think we’ll feel a bit more positive and constructive going forward. Thank you.

Sabina: And as I said, for all your listeners to think about why you are doing this and to stick to your guns because you chose it for a reason. Whether you’re in the early career stages as a freelancer or are more established, you’ve picked it purposefully and mindfully is most likely the case. So, back yourself and keep writing.

Rachel: Yes. Fantastic.

Lynne: Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you, Sabina. We will put all the links on where to find Sabina and connect with her in our show notes. And we’ll see you next week!

Lynne: Okay. Thanks for listening. 

Rachel: Thanks. Bye.

Credits:

Find Sabina at sabinareadpsychology.com.au 

She also hosts the Human Cogs podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/human-cogs-podcast/id1525840415 and The Separation Guide Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-separation-guide-a-starting-point-for/id1542151561 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au

 

Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel’s List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details.

Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co