To anyone who’s feeling like they can’t depart from a client relationship because they “need the money….”
I’m here to tell you that you actually need to release the relationship BECAUSE of the feeling that you need the money.
The reasoning is that, while people buy from us because of our tangible/logical value-add (skills/credentials/timeline to deliver etc.), at the end of the day, humans are emotional purchasers.
And in the process of hiring a freelancer, people want to, fundamentally, feel GOOD FEELINGS from you. They want to feel excited, confident, and trusting in the freelancer they choose for their job.
And when we work with clients who introduce resistance to our days, this drains our energy–and in result–our ability to create those good feelings for prospective and current clients.
I have definitely been here. I’m not proud to say that I’ve trudged through a lot of relationships that were not in the highest service to both myself and the client–all from that grippy place of “needing the money” or liking the “consistency” of the work they gave me.
Ultimately, though, every time I exerted effort to keep these relationships going, this took up a LOT of energetic bandwidth for me.
Whenever I interacted with these clients, I would inevitably bring that energy of exertion into other areas of my business. It inhibited me from showing up from the pure place of excitement that I normally had for my work–taking up very valuable space that I could have allocated to other new, f*ck yes clients for my business.
My taxed energy was felt in sales calls that I definitely could have brought MORE of myself to. It came up in a new, unbecoming attitude I was taking on in my projects. The “have-to” that kept me in the unaligned relationships was taking precedence over the “get-to-do” energy I strive to wake up with every day.
In time, though, I realized that if I want to grow this business in the way I believe it’s meant to grow, it’s a *business imperative* for me to only maintain relationships that are energizing and that excite me for the work.
And when you trust yourself enough to release the clients who are unaligned to that growth journey, you’ll naturally clear the way for better clients, more ease, and a level of abundance that exceeds what you thought you “needed” from the draining relationships.
So….how can you build more trust in the “f*ck yes” for your freelance business?
