All Posts in Category: Freelance Psychology
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.
The First Humbling Lesson of Building Your Own Business
At the airport on the way back this week from an author’s conference, I was magnetically drawn to scan the best seller lists and consider who was there and why.
There were so many of those names you’ve see there over and over for decades, like Nora Ephron or Dan Brown. An entire, multi-shelf section devoted to Ann Patchett. The requisite books about how companies can motivate millennials next to Mark Manson’s bestselling The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life.
My eye caught on a cover simulating (well, graphic-designed rather than photographed) a page torn at the top and bottom with a lowercase title etched out in a watercolor-style gradient migrating from aquamarine to forest green like descending through a cross section of the ocean.
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.
What “Impossible” Things Can You Do Next Month?
What do you tell yourself is impossible?
I don’t mean the quite difficult things, like base jumping, becoming a competition-level ballroom dancer, or learning a new language in one week.
I’m wondering more about the things that you just don’t allow yourself to imagine as possibilities.
Sometimes they hide in the places we haven’t travel, the activities we haven’t done, or the way we describe ourselves.
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.
Why Do We Avoid the Simple, Easy Steps that ACTUALLY Move Us Toward Our Goals?
I have had a reminder to myself for weeks to do the smallest, simplest thing: email one person I’ve met several times over several years to reconnect and ask for advice.
The reasons I kept thinking of it and not doing it immediately are myriad, even removing busy-ness from the equation.
A very small number of you that I’ve met in person may have heard me mention in passing a narrative travel book I have in the works, My 15 Big Fat Indian Weddings.
(I’ll share the story of how it immediately got 22 very well-respected agents hungering after it my first time out pitching it–and how you too can have the same experience in our next webinars series on How to Publish Non-Fiction Books Easily, available live starting mid-October to members of our Dream Buffet and coaching programs.)
When Was the Last Time You Met a Travel Magazine Editor?
I just returned a few days ago from the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference and was delighted to see the seats full of writers who are already making freelance travel writing their full-time occupation or are on their way there.
But even more than hearing their stories of taking the leap, quitting their previous professions, and making travel writing work for them, I loved seeing them interact with editors.
It is so easy to have an “us vs. them” mentality about editors as a freelance writer.