Happy solstice; it’s officially summer here in the northern hemisphere! This week, let’s talk about how to deal with anxiety a a freelancer. Whether or not you’re an anxious person, freelancing can bring up a lot of anxiety, in various ways.
As freelancers, we have pretty much zero job security (clients can use us, or not, at will), our incomes can be unpredictable, and we don’t get regular performance reviews. Sometimes clients don’t contact us for a while, and we fantasize that we made some catastrophic error the last time they worked with us. Maybe, but probably not! But in the meantime, we tend to concoct plenty of crazy mental stories about our own real or perceived incompetence. We tend to wonder:
-Am I earning enough money?
-Am I going to have enough work next week (month, year…)?
-Do my clients like me? What about the ones I haven’t heard from in a while (anxiously conjuring up images of clients talking amongst themselves about how incompetent we are)?
Our fears might even spiral into questions like, is AI going to replace me and do I need to look for a new career??
I’m definitely not a psychotherapist. I’m also not an overtly anxious person; I rarely cry and pretty much never yell. I tend to believe that things in life either work out, or don’t work out, and yet the world keeps on turning and life goes on. However, in my adult life I’ve realized that I have some anxiety-driven behaviors: specifically emotional eating, cuticle biting, and overtalking (repeating myself or just talking too much instead of listening). Thus, I’ve thought a lot about anxiety and how to address it. Here are a few tips:
First, distinguish between rational and irrational anxiety. Worrying about having enough work is rational. Worrying about being good at your job is rational. But many or even most of us tend to spiral into irrational anxiety: like, as of today, I will never have any more work, because of that all of my friends will abandon me, and I’ll die in friendless poverty. Not really rational.
Personally, I like to address rational anxiety through action and data. Here are a few examples:
-I keep enough money in my business account to cover at least three months of business and personal expenses. Thus, if I had literally no work for three months, or I had a health crisis, or someone in my family had a health crisis, or I decided to take the summer off and go bike or hike in some cool destination (now we’re talking!), I would be OK financially. This helps me avoid the anxiety of missing out on a freelance project or having a temporary dip in income, because I’m earning the money that pays the bills for four months from now, not the money that pays the electric bill that’s due next week.
–I constantly work on my translation and interpreting skills and get external assessments of how I’m doing. Realistically, a lot of interpreters don’t have a ton of formal training. After I passed the Colorado court interpreter exam, I was still too scared to accept conference interpreting work, which meant that clients would sometimes hire (actual example) the local middle school French teacher to interpret for their meeting. But, deep in my heart, I knew that until expert interpreters gave me the seal of approval, I would never have the confidence to accept conference interpreting work. So I got a Master’s in conference interpreting; not cheap, or easy, or quick, but that was what I needed to do to eliminate my own performance anxiety and impostor syndrome.
–I have a one-click way to look at my financial statistics. I use QuickBooks online (which has its issues, but its reporting feature is good!). And if I wonder, how much am I going to get paid in the next month? Am I ahead of or behind my income goal for the year? Who’s my dominant client right now? It’s literally one click to find that out, which really helps me decide whether my fears are rational or not.
And yet, we still have to deal with irrational anxiety, and not just by telling ourselves that it’s irrational. As a wise friend of mine said, “No one in the history of the world ever calmed down because they were being yelled at by someone else, telling them to calm down.” I also think that translators and interpreters tend to have (over)active brains that need a little taming. In order to calm my own “squirrel brain,” I’ve accepted that I have to:
–Meditate daily or at least five times a week. I use the Calm app and I am not at all a religious person, but I find a lot of mental and emotional value in meditation. My thoughts are less noisy, I’m less reactive to things that bug me, I’m a better listener, etc.
–Get a lot of physical activity to counteract the effects of sitting at a desk all day. I go to yoga 15-20 times a month (I know, it’s a lot, and that level was totally impossible when I still had a kid at home, so don’t take that as what you “should” be doing) and I spend at least one full day on the weekend away from screens, usually mountain biking, hiking, or skiing, depending on the season. Again, I realize that this is a privilege of having the time and money to recreate outside and living in a place where I can do all of that as a day trip, but I think that for most of us, we feel better with a significant amount of time in motion and away from screens since our work is very sedentary and screen-dependent.
I hope that these tips are helpful for you and for any freelance anxieties that you may have!
Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!
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