Motivation for freelancers: #1 tip for how to stay motivated in your freelance business

Now let's get into today's video: The number one motivation tip for freelancers… 

Here it is: Start with your life before your business.

Start with your personal life. 

Your business should support your personal life goals and your ideal lifestyle rather than the other way around. When you are a business owner, you essentially ARE your business and vice versa. So in that sense, you get to have complete control over how your business is set up. And you get to ensure that it accommodates your unique lifestyle wants and needs. 

It's also really important to align your goals with what you genuinely, truly want. This is about ensuring that your personal goals and your business goals aren't determined based on what your business friend tells you that you should want, or what your spouse tells you that you should want, or what your friends or your family want for you, or even what your past self used to want for you. 

Instead really look at: What do you want at this stage of where you're at?

We are looking at this, again, from both business and from life: What do you really want from your business? What do you really want from your life?

This is not about, “how is it going to look from other people’s perspective? How am I going to be perceived? What does success mean for our society?”

Rather: What does this success mean for YOU? What would YOU want? If all other things were equal… What do you want? When you're not worried about what other people are thinking about you, what do you want from your life and from your business?

Identifying your true desires at first glance seems simple — but as I think you're probably guessing, it requires a lot of deep work! It requires a lot of self honesty about what you genuinely want. And it also requires a lot of self-trust that you can do this; that you are fully capable of making your dreams happen and turn into your reality.

If you do not actively start by figuring out “what do I want from my personal life, what are my personal values, my personal goals, my lifestyle wants and needs,” — If you do not start with that before figuring everything out with your business, then motivation is going to be a huge struggle for you. 

It's going to be really difficult to stay on track and to stay motivated if you are working towards something that you don't actually want. And that is very common when you don't have that sort of clear and specific goal, when you don't actually know what you want from your personal life. It's really hard to ensure that your business activities are correlated to that, that they actually connect back to that, that they are in support of your personal goals. 

You're going to have a hard time motivating yourself if you don't know what you genuinely truly desire first in your life and then in your business. 

You won't have that guiding light to look forward to and to propel you forward. 

THAT is why — if you are struggling with motivation right now — then you probably aren't starting with your personal life before your business. You are probably setting up goals that don't actually align with what you genuinely want. You might have set up your goals based on what society tells you or what industry experts tell you or what your friends tell you that you should do… so your goals, your business systems and processes, etc aren’t set up to really align with what you genuinely want from your personal life. You want to make sure that your business model reflects your personal wants and needs.

All of this is going to be very very important to give you more motivation: when you start with what you genuinely want from your personal life. 

And then, look at what you want from your business and structure it from there. 

When you make this shift of starting with your personal desires and then identifying your business desires, here's what's gonna happen: 

• You will make much better decisions.
• You will stop making so many mistakes.
• Everything in your business will be fully aligned with your personal values and goals and lifestyle and personality, how your brain works, all of that will be taken into consideration with your business.
• You will be doing what you actually want to be doing. This leads to so much more internal joy, and it makes it so much easier to stay on track and keep moving forward so that you don't get sidelined makes a huge difference for your motivation.

Now this step of Identify Your Desires and ensuring that everything that you do in your business is rooted in your goals and values from your personal life — this step of identifying your deep desires is actually the first step in the Productivity Powerhouse framework.

Productivity Powerhouse is my signature anti hustle e-course designed especially for freelancers and other solopreneurs to free up 10 hours a week without burnout and overwhelm — and to finally make speedy progress on your big picture goals while also enjoying healthy work life balance. 

Here's a little taste of what other freelancers tell me when they implement this step of starting with their personal life of identifying their desires…

Bailey is a freelance writer and editor who says:

"[Now I’ve clarified] my business values and desires in a way that is helping me make more focused decisions for both the short- and long-term. This is saving me a ton of time (and headaches).

I'm more confident in how I help my clients and I'm doing better work even faster than before." 

I love that for Bailey!

Vicki, a CPR & First Aid trainer, says:

"I feel that my business is really coming together... I have never before had as much clarity as I do now. I feel so much more confident in what I need to do. Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction!"

Love it.

Kara, a registered psychotherapist, says,

"This was all very insightful [and] I have some new clarity on how knowing my values is so essential and powerful. I can't tell you my joy in seeing all of this so clearly, and being able to begin to make connections to how this knowledge can support me in achieving my goals.

The process has been breathtaking… I am soaking up Productivity Powerhouse with a full heart and much delight."

I’m so happy for Kara!

So: How can you get similar results to Bailey, Vicki, and Kara? 

Your action step is to get clarity on your lifestyle goals, your personal productivity style, and your strengths and weaknesses. 

Everyone has a different way of processing information and experiencing the world. And the more that you tap into your unique brain, the better and more easily that you'll be able to strategize and take very intentional action with your business. 

Now, I like doing this very in depth with my clients. There is a lot of stuff that we do inside the Productivity Powerhouse framework that leads you to that because you really do need to go deep in order to figure these things out.