All Posts Tagged: Freelance Psychology
The Real Reason Why We Travel Even When It’s Hard–And How to Bring That into the Rest of Your Freelance Work
There is an important part of doing something new that we always seem to forget in the excitement of novelty.
Our need for novelty has been well documented in pretty much anything you read today about the technology addiction pandemic.
Whenever that little ding of a notification or flash of a new email appears on our screens, we get a hit of the chemical dopamine, the same chemical associated with eating your favorite food, having sex, and getting high on cocaine.
And when the extent of the new thing in your life is equally as momentary–scanning the latest shutdown headline, trying a new flavor of ice cream, or checking an editor’s tweet calling for pitches–the let down if it doesn’t turn out as planned is short-lived and typically doesn’t cause you to ask bigger questions about why you are doing what you’re doing and if it’s really a good idea and whether you should just chuck it all and stop right now.
But when the new thing is bigger, like, say, trying to become a freelance travel writer, and what you’ve invested in that new thing is on a scale of months or years, when you hit a snag, the reaction can be very different.
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 2: Two Private One-on-One Coaching Sessions
Today’s holiday trivia: Continuing our look at holiday traditions around the world, we travel east for a very different type of holiday. As a secular, communist country, North Korea has a different take on holidays than many societies. Its 71 official holidays include Sundays, for instance, and many holidays are based on birthdays of the party leaders and founders. Today North Korea celebrates its Constitution Day, for which the state provides rations explicitly for the holiday feasts.
When we surveyed you guys to see what you’d most like to see in our holiday specials, one of the things that came up again and again was opportunities for one-on-one coaching!
Since I’ve finished my coaching certification this year–which was a very eye-opening experience that I wish more people who offer business “coaching” would do–I’m even more excited than ever to work with you one-on-one to move your career forward.
Want to Hit Your Travel Writing Goals Next Year? Start With Your Values
When I talk for the first time to a travel writer in the process of building their career—whether they’re just starting or they’ve been at it for decades but have never felt that ‘click’ of sustainability where they know they can do this and make the money they want for as long as they want—an eerily similar thing typically happens.
It takes a lot of guises though.
These writers are typically asking me a very specific, tactical question about how to do one specific thing: write pitches more quickly, make sure their ideas fit a magazine, find the right place to pitch a specific piece, or get started with those lucrative content marketing gigs.
And as I’m explaining the answer, the odd thing happens.
Learn How to Track and Reach Your Freelance Travel Writing Goals for Just $5 This Week
At an event for business executives I attended earlier this year, the facilitator shared something that is a bit of a myth in the business world.
The short version is: in a room full of nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs, when asked how they track and check in daily with their goals, it turned out the that four wealthiest people in the room all carried a paper with their goals in their wallet on somewhere else on their person.
Let me say this again, because it bears repeating. In a room full of people who had successfully started their own businesses, the ones who made the most looked at their goals regularly.
A Quick, Easy, Empowering Weekly Accountability Check-in for Freelance Writers
How responsible do you feel to your freelance writing goals?
The answer I often here is some variant of “not very,” typically centered around all of the other factors that are in the way.
I ask because the word “accountability” gets through around a lot–on social media, in face-to-face discussions with other writers, and especially on coaching calls.
So I looked it up to dig into what accountability is meant to mean.
Why I Got Certified as a Business Coach and What it Means for You
Since I started pursuing professional coaching certification in March, I’ve had many conversations with other business coaches and aspiring coaches, and they often ask me the same question:
Why did you decide to get certified as a coach?
They’re asking me, though, because they don’t think that I needed to do the program.
Most of the business coaches that I’ve met started their coaching certification before they left their previous positions to pursue coaching. Before they even had their first coaching client or conversation.
Typically before they have any idea who they will coach, how, or why.
In their eyes, they needed to have the certification under their belt to begin the process of building a business around their coaching.
So, when these other coaches or coaches-in-training see me with this little fledgling business that I’ve spent the last two years busting my butt working 16 hours every day to build, it looks like I have what they think that coaching certification will bring them.
The 37 Books I’ve Read This Year (Plus 13 I’m Still Working On)
One refrain that I’ve heard repeated over and over again in different industries (book publishing, magazine writing, business management) is the importance of “keeping your cup full” through reading.
The idea is that, if you feel like you are out of ideas or inspiration, or suffering from imposter syndrome or an actual knowledge gap between you and what you want to do, the answer is always reading.
Not the web, but actual books.
Warren Buffet famously keeps his entire schedule clear to read and think. Book editors and agents spend tons of their time outside of the office reading to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry. My friend Chris Guillebeau, a multiple New-York-Times-bestselling author himself, told me he usually reads about 50 books a year, primarily novels.
Why Is It So Hard to Make the Changes We Need to Make to Achieve Our Dreams? (And What We Want to Do About It)
I always planned to be a professor.
Throughout college and for many years after. I laid the groundwork to go back to school for a PhD in Italian literature.
Travel writing was meant to be a way to pay the bills legally while I was in Italian working on research for a dissertation.
There’s all sorts of odd things you have to also learn about to get a PhD, at least in Italian literature.
It wasn’t enough to speak fluent, academic-level Italian. I actually was going to need to pass proficiency tests in up to three other languages, from other romance languages to unrelated ones like German. Theoretically this was so we could read literary criticism on a global scale.
I also would have needed to read and be able to speak at length in an oral exam on every single significant work of Italian literature over a roughly 1,000 year period.
How Does Our One-on-One Coaching Really Work?
If you’re still considering whether or not our coaching program is right for you, I wanted to take a few minutes today to really spell out, in detail, what our program looks like once you get started.
As we’ve been exploring in our emails on why we offer coaching, how coaching is different than consulting, what freelance and small business coaching costs throughout the marketing, and our coaching philosophy, everyone really has very different specific needs.
But that makes it really hard to know what you’re signing up for!
So, to help you visualize what we can do together, let’s start at the beginning.
Applications for Our One-on-One Travel Writing Success Coaching Open Next Week
I often get emails from people who are looking for coaching on their travel writing or just want to hop on the phone for an hour and talk about what they should do next. Or perhaps they have a pitch or a piece of writing that they want me to look at and tell them what I think.
One-on-one coaching is how everything we do at Dream of Travel Writing got started. I was attending events as a freelance writer, chatting with other writers, and thought the rates that I was getting paid like $250 a blog post (in 2013) or 50 cents or a dollar a word were what everyone was getting.
I was working part-time, spending half my day exploring new cities, and had a healthy, self-sufficient income I was proud of.