As a freelancer, you need confidence. And you need its cousin: daring to take up space. If you doubt yourself or whether your point of view matters, any client will sniff that out. Confidence is part of the appeal. They have a problem and they cling to any certainty that you can solve it.
Common advice is to get your reps in. Get enough happy clients under your belt and you'll develop your confidence. You've seen what works, now you know. But there are two problems with that.
Since we value negative feedback so much more than positive, this will take a very long time and a perfect run of successful projects. Secondly, our unconfident minds will always find possibilities why the success was due to outside circumstances. Call it humbleness, but it's also self-defeating.
In our conversation on De Gebakken Peren, Maaike mentioned two interesting ways to develop more confidence. One was performance theater, with a piece in which she expressed her anger at white men for their role in shaping the world's history (think: establishing colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy).
Something you should know about Maaike is that being angry is very foreign to her. Acting out your anger is akin to taking up space. And acting angry time after time again, made her less conflict-avoidant. It took the scary edge off. In other words, she became more daring in speaking what she had to say.
Another one she mentioned was that she feels the time pressure we have as a society to get our 'sustainable act' together. It's now or never. She's so certain about the importance of her work that it spills over in her confidence towards clients for the work. And, perhaps, it allows her personal worries to take a back seat.
(Btw, as I've seen, becoming a parent is a double whammy of these approaches for a confident posture. You act like a pro over and over and you become one. Plus there really is no way not to deliver when your kids depend on you).
The red thread of our conversation was developing your craft and discovering the role you have to play and growing your confidence. And we also talked about the power of poetry and spoken word.
