A quick Google search will turn up a hundred and one things that you supposedly need to make it as a freelancer.
A proper working space, a 57-step sales funnel, an undying and burning passion for the work you do…
But the reality of successful freelancing has shown us that those lists just aren’t true.
In a recent episode of The No Pants Show podcast, Founder and Head Troublemaker Mike Shreeve shares the one thing you really need to make it in this business – or any business, to be frank.
And it all starts with understanding the Emotional Cycle of Change.
Developed by Don Kelley and Daryl Connor back in 1979, this cycle describes the five emotional stages we all experience when we try to make some kind of voluntary change.
The Cliff Notes version goes like this:
Any time we start something new, we’re loaded up on groundless, hopeful expectations of how this thing is going to go and what life is going to be like now that we’re making this change. This is called Uninformed Optimism.
When reality finally kicks in, we feel duped. The new thing is no longer exciting – it’s hard.
Harder than we bargained for. We’ve now reached Informed Pessimism.
And when we finally get a clear view of just how much work it’s going to take, hitting rock bottom in the cycle, we often give up.
Which is why we often fail to achieve our goals.
That point where we give up is called the Valley of Despair.
So the one thing you need to succeed in your business isn’t more funnels or the next new, shiny solution that promises to give you what you want.
It’s perseverance, so you can push through the Valley of Despair to the next two stages of Hopeful Realism and Informed Optimism and reach success.
In the podcast episode titled “How To Persevere No Matter What (The Secret To Getting What You Want)”, Mike outlines his 6 steps for developing and exercising this critical quality.
Step 1: Figure Out If Lack Of Perseverance Is Your Problem
The first step to solving any problem is to acknowledge it exists.
To do that, you need to get real with yourself when you look back on changes that you tried, and failed, to make before.
The Emotional Cycle of Change is a universal human experience, so if you can’t find an example from your own past, you probably aren’t being honest with yourself.
Chances are, you’ve experienced Shiny Object Syndrome before – you’ve ridden the emotional wave from its highest high to its lowest low, then bailed and moved on to the next shiny object that promised a solution.
You may have wasted a lot of time, effort, money, and worry.
But it’s important to recognize this past behavior as a result of the change cycle, not a reflection of you and your own abilities.
Especially if you’ve experienced this many times before, you may have developed negative self-talk that sabotages your success, believing yourself to be the problem when in reality you just didn’t know about the natural cycle of emotional change.
By learning about and recognizing the Emotional Cycle of Change in your own behaviors, you’re better positioned to prepare for and push through that pesky Valley of Despair.
When you’re at the bottom looking up at everything that seems better and brighter, you’ll be prepared to remind yourself that “you don’t know what you don’t know” about all the other seemingly silver bullets you’re being offered, just like you didn’t know when you started making the change that seems so difficult now.
Mike says:
“One way that you can tell that perseverance is something you need to work on is if you find yourself experiencing a lot of highs and a lot of lows within a short period of time.
“Generally speaking, if you are the kind of person where within a single day you can go up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down based on what’s happening in your business, perseverance is something you need to work on.”
Step 2: Develop “Outcome Independence” By Practicing Mindfulness
Part of what gets us so riled up, and therefore so susceptible to the Emotional Cycle of Change, is hanging all our hopes on the outcome of each action we take.
Instead of seeing the action as the important step toward achieving our goals, we see the result as the thing that moves us forward.
In reality, this is how we end up on a rollercoaster of stress and burn ourselves out.
To be successful, we need to be able to stay calm, collected, and cool when we make decisions.
To persevere, we have to maintain that mentality through whatever life throws at us.
That means getting caught up on every result – good or bad! – is going to derail us pretty quickly.
Instead, we need to practice responding instead of simply reacting to results.
We don’t ignore new information, and we definitely address it, but we don’t assign emotional meaning to it.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t celebrate our wins – celebrating wins is crucial to business success – but that our measure of success at any given time shouldn’t be whether we win or fail in a morning, day, week, or year.
We should measure our success by whether or not we inform new actions with what we learned from taking a previous action (regardless of whether or not the initial action made us a boatload of money) and whether or not we continue taking forward actions toward our goal.
Mike says:
“It’s not gritting your teeth, it’s not punching the wall and I’m going to persevere. It’s actually your ability to disconnect from the outcome. Detach meaning from every little thing that happens because you cannot predict the future.”
Which brings us to the next step…
Step 3: Stop Trying To Predict The Future
Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.
The most of the future we can predict is the first order consequence – the very next event in a chain of events.
Sometimes we can’t even predict that much.
But most of what happens to us are second, third, even seventh order consequences – outcomes we couldn’t have possibly known about.
Mike says:
“There’s a concept called second order consequences – the chain reaction of events that occurs when something happens. It’s why you can’t predict the future.
“It’s this idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings in San Francisco, a tornado happens in northern Texas.
“The reality is that this idea of second order consequences is why holding onto the first order consequences is such a mistake. They’re such a small and insignificant piece of the picture at large.”
That makes worrying about the future pretty much a waste of time.
It’s like all those times you’ve sat down and planned out a difficult conversation or confrontation you know is coming, only to have it go completely differently no matter how many times you ran it in your head.
Instead, focus on the action you can take in the present to better your situation and move toward your goal.
Use what happens to you to inform your decisions, but don’t base your worldview and belief of what’s possible for yourself or your business on any single event or result.
Step 4: Recognize What You Can And Can’t Control
It’s easy to burn out when you believe you can control every outcome and are blaming yourself for everything that doesn’t go your way.
Persevering requires you to continue working at this one thing for a long time, so burning out is not an option if you want to be successful.
That means the only way to persevere for any length of time toward success is to understand what you can actually control and what you can’t.
In particular, understand how little you can actually control, and don’t get hung up on the results.
Only our own actions, reactions, and responses are within our control, which is why mindfulness is such a key component of successful perseverance.
Mike says:
“When you come to a conversation with a client, you can’t control whether they’re going to say yes or no.
“No matter what sales techniques, no matter what sales tactics, no matter what some hardcore ‘closer’ is going to teach you, you cannot control another person’s desire to buy from you.
“And even if you could, you wouldn’t want to because I’ll tell you what you definitely can’t control – getting a client in and then controlling their regret because they bought from you under some kind of duress and you pressured them into something and now they’re really regretting paying you that money. Now you’ve got real problems and you definitely can’t control that.
“So perseverance is about letting go of the things that you cannot control.”
If this is something you’re struggling with, head back to steps 2 and 3 and keep working there.
The ultimate goal is to be outcome independent whenever you’re going in to an interaction with a potential client, because then the pressure is off, you’re not feeling nervous, and the prospect isn’t picking up on your uncertainty or desperation.
True outcome independence requires you to understand and fully believe that there are more than enough clients out there who need your services, so there will always be another opportunity.
Step 5: Simplify By Identifying “Minimum Viable Actions”
Figuring out what actions to take, among an endless ocean of possibilities, is often what trips freelancers up – at any stage of their business.
So this next step helps you figure out what the exact right action is for you and your business.
The easiest way to determine this is to find someone who has achieved the version of success you want, and study what they did.
Boil that down to the simplest action you can take to follow in their footsteps, and remove anything else that clutters it up.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to know everything.
You just need to know and focus on the simplest, most viable path for you, individually.
Mike shares:
“What you do is you identify what I call minimum viable actions – what are the things most likely to lead to an outcome? What are the fewest of those things you need to do and then what is the daily habit you will establish to continue doing those things?
“Let me give you some examples. My best year as an author was multiple six figures in revenue. Why? What makes me different than other authors? A lot of authors spend most of their time doing everything except writing because they’re trying to control the outcome. They’re researching, how do I make my book better? Instead of writing books, they’re on forums, looking at how can I control my marketing?
“Now you may say, well, how did you know that book writing was a thing you should do?
“I studied the success of other people. As Jim Rohn says, success leaves clues. All I did is I looked at what other authors were doing and I noticed a lot of them just wrote a lot of books and I thought, ‘Okay, well that’s what I gotta do’. So what’s the thing I can just show up and do every single day to simplify everything I’m trying to do down to this one little thing?
“For me, it was this simple. All I had to do was write 2,500 words every single day, period.”
It’s all about finding the simplest possible action to repeat every single day that will move you toward your goal.
It’s not about complexity or pizazz, it’s about something you can commit to that you know will take you one step closer to your endgame, and then ignoring everything else going on so you can just keep doing it until it works.
Step 6: Show Up Every Day And Just Do It
Perseverance is nothing if you aren’t persevering in your actions.
Once you determine the minimum viable action, that single small action you’ve determined will get you where you need to go, you need to commit to taking it every day.
The action needs to be so minimal that showing up every single day doesn’t sound like a huge chore. It can’t be so time-consuming that it requires you to give up everything else.
Then, using the skills of mindfulness and outcome independence you gained in the previous steps, just don’t worry about the rest.
Focusing your perseverance on one, relatively small task is the best way to maintain it long term, so you can do it until you succeed, not if you succeed.
Mike says:
“We have someone in one of our programs who went from zero to $10,000 in 30 days.
“All he did was focus on a hundred emails a day or a hundred Linkedin outreaches a day. He just did that thing even when it was boring, even when it didn’t seem like it was working, even when there was the ups and downs and the rejection and the yes.
“It was identifying the minimum viable action and then practicing the art of outcome independence and perseverance.”
The Six Steps To Persevering No Matter What
If you want to be successful in your freelance business, you absolutely need to cultivate the art of perseverance.
It’s critical that you understand the Emotional Cycle of Change, where we inevitably hit a rock-bottom low in the process of making any new change in our lives, and that low will make us believe that any other option is better than the one we’re working on now.
But we now know that’s not true, and persevering through that Valley of Despair is how you get to the riches and rewards you’re looking for.
Here are the six steps to doing that:
1.Figure Out If Lack Of Perseverance Is Your Problem:
Are you experiencing a lot of lows and a lot of highs over the course of your day when it comes to your business? If so, you probably need to work on perseverance.
2. Develop “Outcome Independence” By Practicing Mindfulness:
The rollercoaster of lows and highs can only be stopped when you stop giving emotional value to the results or events in your business. To persevere, you need to keep a cool head and see results and events as new data to inform your next steps, rather than successes or failures.
3. Stop Trying To Predict The Future:
While we can sometimes predict the very next event in the chain of events occurring to us, we will never be able to predict the entire chain of events. By understanding this, you can stop wasting time worrying about the outcome of every action and the possible futures they hold, and start taking the actions you can take based on the information you have in the present.
4. Recognize What You Can And Can’t Control:
You can only control your own actions, reactions, and responses. No matter what anyone says, you can’t control someone’s desire to buy from or work with you, and you certainly can’t control the regret they’ll feel if they bought from you after being pressured or manipulated into the sale with “closing tactics.” You don’t control the outcomes, you only control the action that produces them.
5. Simplify By Identifying “Minimum Viable Actions”:
Look at people who have the kind of success you’re looking for, and figure out what their most impactful actions were to get them to that point. Then, boil down the one or two key actions they took into a daily habit or two you can do. Make them as simple as possible, and then commit to ignoring everything else while you focus on them.
6. Show Up Every Day And Just Do It:
Repeat your simple daily action habit every single day, regardless of any outcomes, and push through. Use your newly gained outcome independence and mindfulness to fuel your ability to persevere.
To sum up, Mike says:
“What is something that you can do every single day?
“Disconnect yourself from the outcome. If you struggle with that, you need to practice meditation. Use the Headspace app.
“That’s a great place to start and practice the art of perseverance so that you can move through the ‘Valley of Despair’ and get into ‘Informed Optimism,’ which is the real good place to be.
“If you remember Kelley and Connor’s Emotional Cycle of Change, ‘Informed Optimism’ feels as good as ‘Uninformed Optimism,’ except you’re actually getting stuff done so it feels even better.”
Listen to the full podcast episode here.
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Need help staying on the straight and narrow? Join us in The No Pants Project.
We have a whole group dedicated to guiding, answering questions, and holding you accountable to your intentions to push through the Valleys of Despair and through to 6-figure success!
