Something funny and true hit me at therapy recently.

My therapist and I spent half of the session talking about how freelancing is such a mental game that takes tenacity and grit.

And out of nowhere, I saw an image clear as day of what most freelance motion designers look like (hopefully just metaphorically).

I grabbed my pen and made this masterpiece...

If the arm on the right (💪) is your creative abilities... and the arm on the left is your business abilities, we need to talk!

This is a strange visual analogy, but I see something happen all the time with freelancers. See if this resonates with you.

You work on your creative skills because it’s fun, it’s what you get hired for and to be fair it’s a good thing to work on.

However, when you realize you need to exercise your business muscles, it's hard to even lift "5 pound weights."

In this analogy, a 5 pound weight = writing a LinkedIn post, sending an email introducing yourself, making a list of past clients.

It's only difficult to do because your business muscles are paper thin.

So while it can be really discouraging when you don’t see results quickly, it's also reasonable to expect it to take a little while.

The truth is it takes putting in a lot of reps over long period of time before you have a strong enough arm to complement your incredible creative skills that you’ve been working on for years and years.

The workout analogy is a fantastic parallel to freelancing.

There are some tactics that you can try that might have a spike of effectiveness, but the only way to build a sustainable freelance career is to build strength in your business arm so that it brings in the creative work (with great budgets) that you want.

If you want to get your biz arm stronger so that it complements your creative muscles, sign up for the $200k Freelance Newsletter below 👇