Today, I want to talk about the fact that there is simply no secret to freelancing. And what do I mean by that? It’s that people reach out to me constantly through Instagram or students of my courses, people who have heard me speak on other podcasts or read my blog, and they want to know.

Like, what is the secret, though? Like, I’ve been doing freelancing for a little while, or maybe I’ve been thinking about freelancing, but I just want to know kind of the secret sauce, right? Like, this one magical thing that’s gonna help me out as a freelancer, help me get started, help me just really do better, get those clients just…

They’re looking for like a magic switch and I understand it because I was that way in the beginning when I started too. I used to think there’s got to be something, right? There’s got to be just this one secret thing that I’m missing that’s going to help me have an amazing freelance life, get all these clients, just have this incredible freelance career.

And what I would say today to myself looking back, And to anyone out there listening who’s kind of feeling that way, still searching, is that there is no secret. And what I mean by that is that I give away the information constantly. This episode is going to be all about it. But like, it’s not a secret.

I’m telling you. I’m telling you exactly what to do. The information is not hidden. It’s fully out there. I wish I’d come across this information when I was looking. It’s really what it comes down to. The only thing that is important is how you make the client feel. Okay, that is it. And again, it’s not a secret.

I harp on about it all the freaking time. That is the entire thing from start to finish. That is how you go out and find amazing clients. That’s how you pitch them. That’s how you’re going to keep them. That’s how you’re going to work with them long term over the course of years for many. If you can make the client feel the way they want to feel, they’re going to want to keep you around.

So, it doesn’t matter what you do as a freelancer. Pick anything. Ideally, something that you love to do, something you enjoy doing and you could see yourself doing for years. Because if you take this information to heart. you are going to get clients that are going to want to work with you for the long term.

So I encourage you to stop thinking so much about your skills and what you can do or what you perceive that you can’t do, right? Because I know in the beginning, starting out, we have a lot of self doubt around whether we are good enough. to do whatever it is that we are trying to do. But the reality is, if you stop and put some thought into how you can take care of the client, you’re going to be good enough, right?

Because there’s people out there that have incredible skills at what they do as a freelancer, but they have no skill when it comes to approaching the client. They can be the best in the world, but if they can’t show the client why they should be working with them, it doesn’t even matter. Your clients that you’re going after, they are a busy person.

They are so focused on other things. that they don’t care about you. And I say this lovingly, but it’s true, like, most of us have so much going on in our own lives that other people’s stuff doesn’t infiltrate this bubble of our own lives, right? You think about where you’re at right now, and what’s going on in your life, and if a friend reaches out and they tell you something going on in their life, like, you’re there for them to a certain extent.

But we don’t obsess about other people the same way that we obsess over our own lives, our own problems, all the things that we have on our plate. You get together with a friend and you’re like, Hey, how’s life been? And they’re just like, I am just swamped. It’s crazy. Every day, so busy. And you’re like, uh huh, uh huh.

Uh huh. Yeah. But in your own head, you’re just like, I’m so busy too. And I’m dealing with this and I’m like, it’s just part of being human, like human nature to be obsessed with ourselves. It’s really annoying. It’s really frustrating, but that’s just how we operate. So your client is running around out there.

They are obsessed with themselves and all the things that they have to do. And when they hear from you, you could be the best in the world, but they don’t really care if it sounds like it’s going to be more work, more hassle, more trouble. Right. And I do have some examples of this, like always. So recently I was looking for some help.

with video editing. And I posted a job to Upwork. com, the freelancing platform, and got a bunch of proposals back. Now, one person didn’t even get a hold of me on Upwork. They found my email and emailed me directly, which can be a good strategy if you have a good pitch for the client, because it’s going to pop up in their email inbox.

And it just shows that you went to a little extra mile to get their company email and reach out to them. Some people don’t like it. They prefer that you keep everything on platform. I will take a good pitch no matter where it comes from. Now, this pitch was just okay. And I want to talk about it and what the person could have done better.

So they reached out and said, Hey, I saw your job posting for video editing. I do video editing. Please take a look at my portfolio, which is not great. We’ll talk about that in a separate episode on portfolios, but they linked me to a bunch of different stuff that didn’t really show me how they were relevant to what I needed.

I had specifically asked for help with Instagram reels and they linked me to a bunch of stuff that had some YouTube videos. And Horizontal full length YouTube videos and it’s like, well, that’s great, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. So I had to spend time going through their stuff, trying to find what I actually wanted.

The only thing that they did that really made me actually follow up with them and reach out and say, Hey, tell me a little bit more was that they included famous names, right? They mentioned some people that I had heard of on Instagram with huge followings. And I thought, Oh, okay. If they’ve done work for this person, then.

Maybe they can help me as well. But when I reached out to follow up with them, they didn’t give me any clear details on what they had specifically done, whether they came up with the idea and the whole concept themselves, or whether they were just given some instructions and told here, do this. And so the conversation kind of fizzled out because I was just having to chase them to find out what is it that you can actually do and how will that help me? The difference to this is making a client excited to work with you. And it comes from doing your research, which I’ve talked about before, going out and finding ways that you can be helpful to the client from that very first moment. So I was on a podcast recently and in less than a week I had someone in my inbox pitching me because they’d heard me on that right?

And I talk about this all the time. I’m brutally Open on my podcast and other appearances that I need help and that I always want good pitches, but people can pitch me anytime, anywhere, and I would be interested in taking a look at what they have to offer if it’s a good pitch. The small business owners need help all the time.

Most of what we’re struggling with is not finding good help, knowing that we need to go get it, but not having the time or energy or just it feels like a hassle, right? So this person reached out and they immediately connected by saying, Hey, I heard you on this podcast and that way I have a connection to them, even though I don’t know them, right?

I know how they found me. So that’s great. And they said, Hey, I’ve taken a look at your website and I have some suggestions and went through and listed, not just like you could do this or you could do that, but had basically taken a screenshot of my website and then mocked up some changes that they would propose.

And then they had included a follow up document showing, Hey, here’s why I suggest. to each one of these changes and what I think it will do for you and then invited me to follow up with them. Right now. Redoing my website is on my list of things to do along with hundreds of other things. It’s not something that I was thinking about doing this week.

However, if someone out there can do it for me and I won’t have to lift hardly a finger, just look at their designs and go, yes, I agree with this. Change that. Do that. Yep. Go for it. I could be interested. Absolutely. So that is what you want to do and create and help your clients to feel is that, wow, I have a to do list that’s a mile long.

I know I need to do this thing. And now this person just showed up and they can manage it for me. They can take care of it. for me. They can solve my issue and I’m barely going to have to do anything. It’s a wonderful feeling for a client. Now there is the chance that this person does not have the money and the budget, but maybe they’ll reach out to you again when they do have the budget because people like that with pitches like this person, if I’m not working with them immediately, they’re going to go into a folder on my email and when I am ready, I’m going to start with them.

Um, someone else I know recently reached out and they were also asking about. Video editing in terms of how could you get more clients? How could you work with more people doing video editing? And again, my response would be that it’s not about the skills that you have. It’s about getting inside the client’s head and helping them realize why they need to work with you.

And I’ll use myself as an example here. I had put that job posting out for Instagram reels. And what the majority of people will do is give me exactly what I want. Or they’ll be like, here’s the reel I made for so and so, here’s a reel I made for this other person. The difference between just pitching a client and hoping for the best and actually going in and trying to really just like knock it out of the park, like you really want to make it so that the client, they physically hurt because they can’t work with you.

You want to make them so interested, so enticed by what you have to offer and what it will do for them that they lay awake at night going. Man, I really hope this person’s got room in their schedule. Man, I really hope this person’s as good as they say. Man, I really want to work with this person. Like, just have those thoughts playing around in their head.

And I would say it is about 1 percent of freelancers that I’ve ever worked with that have given me a feeling like that. Why? Because most people just pitch. And they’re kind of going after the lazy way. They’re just being like, here, maybe, you know, we can work together. Maybe we can do this. Maybe I can help you with this.

Maybe, like they just have this energy of maybe, or I’m just trying this, but I don’t really think it’ll work. Instead of going in with full confidence. And starting out, it can be difficult to have that full confidence, right? But you can have the confidence that you are doing everything in your power to make it as easy as possible for the client.

Part of that starts with getting to know what they want. Most people want to sell more. They want to reach more people. They want to sell more of whatever they have, or they want to reach more people for just trying to grow their audience. How is working with you going to help them do that? If you are doing video editing, how does your video editing help?

them reach more people? That’s it. How do you answer that question? And if you don’t know, then you’re going to want to sit down and think about it because you can’t show the client until you know yourself. Is it the storytelling aspect? Are you going to tell stories that help them to connect with people?

And if so, how? How will they know that it’s working? How will they know that it is reaching people? What results can they expect to have from working with you? Is their audience going to grow? How do you know that? Are you going to be measuring it as well? Because like, this is the thing, you’re not just selling video editing, you’re selling a result.

Your skills are video editing, but what you’re really trying to sell is a result. What am I going to gain as a client from working with you? So let me see if I can kind of walk through a scenario right now that may… I’m a client. I have my website. I sell courses. I have an Instagram. I have a TikTok that I don’t really use that much.

And I don’t have a YouTube, but I’d like to start a YouTube someday when I have more time. So let’s say I’m out and I meet someone who says, Hey, yeah, I do video editing. It’s like, okay, cool. That’s awesome. What do you do? Like, what do you actually edit? And they’re like, Oh, I do all kinds of video. It’d be great to work together.

Okay, cool. Me, as a person who is running my business, doesn’t work with video very much. Don’t really know what all goes into video editing other than stuff that I edit for myself for fun. I don’t know what this person can do that is going to help me. And so many people that I meet, that’s the extent of the conversation we have.

It’s sort of like an, I do this and maybe we could work together sometime. And the difficulty is that you are the expert in what you do. The client doesn’t know as well as you what you do. So it’s your responsibility to show them why working with you makes their life easier. Now. I am not a video editor and I don’t know exactly what they do and I don’t know how much creative license they have either when it comes to if clients are more telling them here I want this this and this exactly or if the part of what they’re presenting to the client is all in one solution like I will take your video and I will make it beautiful I will do whatever to it.

So what I’m about to walk through may be factually incorrect because I’m not a video editor, but I’m going to take you through what I would do if I was right. There may be some mistakes, but this is what I’m imagining a video editor kind of does and how I would position myself if I were going to be offering those services.

I’ve had that exchange. Oh, I do video editing person. Oh, cool. That’s great. Instead of like, maybe we should work together sometime. I’m going to send you over some information. Cool. Get the contact. Then I would go and find their website. And look around at what they do, let’s use me as an example, you’re finding me and you’re going, okay, she’s got a website, she’s got Instagram, she’s got some reels, whatever, but she’s got no YouTube presence whatsoever.

I would think about everything that I could do for this client that would make their life easier and how I could pitch it to them as. them barely having to lift a finger. For example, something like, you know, Michonne, you’ve got a ton of Instagram photos and I’m imagining from the last five years that you’ve spent traveling You’ve just got tons and tons of content in a photo library somewhere What I would do is I would comb through that footage those videos those images And I would make you pieces of content to go out every single day What I would need from you is some of the that you like, other Instagram accounts that you follow and enjoy.

And what I would do is make you stories, reels, different videos that you can use on your platform in the style of those that you already like. And already I’m intrigued going, Oh, that’s cool. Yeah. I can think of three Instagram accounts that I like. And if I give it to this person, they’re just going to make reels out of my own content that looks like that.

That’s pretty amazing. What else can you do? Well, I noticed that you don’t have a YouTube, but you’ve got tons of travel videos and stuff. You’ve been to some amazing places. I’ve heard you say you’ve been to Antarctica. You’ve been to Iceland. You’ve been all over. So here’s what I would propose. I’m going to go through.

all of the video that you’ve taken from those places, and I’m actually going to chop it down into smaller videos that we can put out. I can give you some script templates, and I’ll need you to do some voiceover work talking about what it was like when you were there, giving me more detail on what you packed, any different things that you experienced that would be super helpful for other people that are visiting to know.

We can work all that out together. I will be spearheading that though. I’ll be running it. I’ll be giving you exactly what to do as simply as possible. And then we can cut that all together. I’ll have these beautiful videos for you. You’ll be able to put this information out to your audience, give them useful information for visiting places or just share your experiences with them.

And that’s going to help you to reach more people who are then going to follow you, who are then going to learn from you. And it helps you with your mission of teaching more people about you. about freelancing, helping them design lives they love, helping them to travel more. So you’re really painting a picture for the client of why working with you matters for them and how it’s going to help them get more of what they want.

If there was a secret to freelancing, that would be it. The simple truth, just going in and really trying to get inside the client’s head, their business, what they want and showing them how working with you helps them to achieve that. And I find that many freelancers don’t do a very good job of this.

They know their own skill inside and out, but they cannot show the client why it should matter to them. There are some things that are very, very obvious, right? Like, let’s take customer service as an example. That is a very straightforward. skill, right? Like the client has a product or service, people write in, they need help with something.

It’s obvious how you can help as a freelancer. You’re like, yeah, I do customer service. I’m going to interact with the customer, answer their questions, help them have a wonderful experience with your service your product, whatever, right? That is pretty straightforward. We can all understand that because we’ve all been either in customer service ourselves or we have dealt with people on a day in day out basis.

We’re just constantly dealing with people in the service industry. We’re constantly dealing with people who are helping us to get the answers that we need, whether that is in a retail store or online through the computer or the phone, whatever, someone helping us out with an issue. Something like video editing can be so much more Intangible.

The client may know, okay, I get that. I get what it is. You’re taking video and chopping it up and making it look pretty. The same way we understand that like they shoot big Hollywood movies and they have hours and hours and hours, right? Of footage and they condense that down into a two hour film that you go to see in a theater.

Like I understand the concept, but The client may not be able to picture what working with you and what video can do for their business. So it’s your job, no matter what it is, if it’s video editing, for me, it’s operations management, right? My job is to show clients why working with me is going to make their life so much better.

They get to stop thinking about. All of the day to day things that happen in their business, all of the people that need hired, that need trained, how to train people, how to give access to things like passwords and how to revoke that access when someone leaves, how to deal with all the customer tickets that come in every day, how to literally anything and everything that they can think of.

It’s my job. to be in there, making sure that they don’t have to think about that. So when I’m pitching them, I’m trying to show them, look, when you work with me, you don’t have to think about anything that you don’t want to think about. That’s what I come in and do. I think about all of those things. So you don’t have to, when I work with a client, it is very specific, right?

We try to figure out what they like to do, what they are good at. And then we focus on taking everything else. off their plate. My job is not to sell them. Here is an 82 point checklist of all the things that I will manage. My job is to sell them on. This is why working with me means you’re going to feel amazing.

Okay. If you’re after that secret, That’s what any freelancer is going to want to focus on. How can you show the client that working with you is going to be amazing? One of my clients that I’ve been with for ages, we do a program where we send out Christmas gifts and like birthday gifts and stuff to some of the different contractors around the world.

And the client asked to put this in place, probably, About a year or two ago, they asked for it to be put into place. Me and my team, we put it into place and the client didn’t really think about it, just knew that it was happening, right? But things can slip over time. So just the other day, something jogged their memory and the client was like, Hey, wait, whatever happened to that birthday program?

Do we still do that? And it was just like, yeah, absolutely. Like we put it in place, it’s managed, it runs. Every single month and then we have a big push around the holidays like we take care of this without you having to even think about it. And that’s what I do for my clients. If I’m out there pitching, which again, I’ve mentioned in other episodes, I don’t have to do very often.

People come to me because when you do quality work, you’re going to build up a reputation. and people around you are going to love working with you so much that they’re either going to keep you or they’re going to be recommending you to others and you just kind of have this snowball effect of being in demand.

So I hope this makes sense and I hope this episode was helpful. I want to preach this message so often because I get the same recurring question over and over from so many people. And I just really want you all to know that just getting inside the client’s head, taking care of them, making them feel like they’re in good hands is going to be so effective for you to have long term ongoing work from clients from here until as long as you want to keep freelancing and really just thinking about how you can show the client, no matter what skill that you do.

It’s not so much about. your portfolio, the amount of work you’ve done, the amount of experience that you have, but really teaching the client why working with you matters. It makes all the difference. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. You can get my beginner freelancing course. It’s called the escape hatch.

That course is chock full of tips, advice, scripts. Templates, everything you need as a beginner freelancer. It contains all of the info that I wish I had when I was first starting out and you can get your hands on that today again at liveworktravel.com/escape. If you want to say hi, chat about anything, send in any questions, you can get ahold of me over on Instagram at liveworktravelig and if you have a longer something that you want to send just send that to hello@liveworktravel.com. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll be back next Monday with another episode. Take care.

fore in previous episodes, but it’s a question I get asked so often that I’d like to approach it today from a little bit of a different angle, because as far as I’m concerned, every little bit helps when you are trying to figure out what you want to do as a freelancer.

And the reason that this episode came about is because I want to acknowledge how difficult it is in this when it comes to choosing something to do as a freelancer, but in so many other areas of life as well, we get so up in our own heads and we can’t see the forest for the trees, right? We don’t know the possibility of everything that exists out there.

So how could we possibly make a choice about what we want to do with our freelance career? Reminds me of being 18, a high school student trying to decide what I wanted to study in university. Now, I had friends and I’m sure many of us had friends who from a very young age knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.

My ex partner, for example, wanted to be a teacher since he was young and that was just his thing. He went to school, he studied that, he became a teacher, he’s still teaching. To this day, well, I always envied people like that because it was not like that for me at all. I looked at that long list they give you when you’re in your high school guidance counselor’s office and it’s just words on a page.

There’s all these different potential majors that you can pick and then careers that come out of those majors. But I was 18 and clueless. I really had no idea. I don’t know what it meant be a marketing manager, for example, and I swear to goodness, I picked marketing as my major because it sounded easy, that’s it, the logic of an 18 year old.

I’m going off to college. I don’t want something that’s too hard. I’ll just pick marketing, whatever. It satisfied my dad’s requirement that I get a business degree. That was his strong suggestion that if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, at least get a business degree because you could always do something with that down the line. That was all the thought that went into it. And so in freelancing, it can be a bit of the same. You are interested in starting up a career, perhaps leaving the career that you have right now and switching over into freelancing. And maybe you don’t want to do the same thing that you’ve been doing day in and day out in your career nine to five.

But we can only sort of choose things that are within our worldview. And when you haven’t been in the freelancing world, your worldview is obviously different. It’s smaller. It fits inside a little circle versus the big, expansive circle of all the possibilities that exist. So how do you go from that small view to the bigger, more expansive view?

Well, there’s a couple of ways. This came up the other day when I was on a coaching call with someone from my audience who was interested in career changing into freelancing. One of the things I asked her to do was to sit down and write out really brainstorm and then write out all of the things that she would love to be doing.

If she didn’t have to worry about money. And I’ll admit, it sounds cliche, right? If you asked me, hey, if you don’t have to worry about money, what are you going to spend your days doing? And it’s like, okay, yeah. Like sleeping and reading and eating good food and just traveling. It seems impossible to make a career out of that.

But that’s. What I would advise you to do because what you’re going to be doing is really narrowing down and getting clear on the things that you love once you take money out of the picture, once you take the idea of it’s impossible to earn a living that way, so I shouldn’t even bother putting these things down because that’s what our mind will tell you.

It’ll be like these are all like hobby things. These are just things that I kind of dabble in. There’s no way, there’s no way, there’s no way. We have been told since we were kids, right? That there’s no way to make a living doing the things that we love. Occasionally we may have had some supportive people along the way or some family member or some teacher, someone who supported us.

But the overwhelming majority, I would say, are people who unfortunately just like spend their time telling us why we can’t. And it’s not necessarily their fault. I feel like they also came from a long history their whole life of people telling them why they can’t. It’s unfortunately a really sad pattern in our society that we just seem to want to live in a comfort zone bubble, seem to want to live in this area where we have to do the same things.

You know, it’s easier to go to work every day to a job that you hate if everyone else beside you also hates their job and hates their life. But if someone else were out to get out of that little controlled environment and break out and be starting to do something that they love, start to be happy with their job, start to be happy with their life, it’s very uncomfortable if you’re left Unhappy because you have to look at the situation and go, wait a minute.

Is it possible for me to do that also? But that requires change and not everyone wants to change, right? So going back to the brainstorm, think up the types of things that you would be doing if you didn’t have to worry about money. If you were independently wealthy, where would your time and energy go?

What would you love to be doing? Even if you didn’t get paid to do it as random as it is, like put down everything. If I were financially independent completely didn’t have to work for the rest of my life, I would still work in lots of different areas because so many different things are fun to me and they wouldn’t even seem like work.

One of my random things that I feel like I would love to do wouldn’t even feel like work is just being a consultant for brands. in their brick and mortar spaces and telling them all the things that suck about what they’ve done for the consumer experience. For example, go into a trendy restaurant and it’s got great ambiance and all that, but the bar stools are uncomfortable as hell.

And there’s like a huge bar and there’s probably like 30 of them and it’s like, who the hell designed this? Why isn’t this better for the customer experience? Or you’ve got a bathroom that is super swanky and nicely designed, but you’ve got to touch the door handle to go out. And it’s like, ew, gross, like nobody ever wants to do that.

Or there’s no full length mirror in the women’s bathroom. I was once in this place. It was such a cool restaurant, like so very cool, but they had like a tiny little oval. And I know that that fits in with the vibe that they’re going for, but it’s like women want to check out a reflection. Restaurant was a great place to come for a date, but you go in the bathroom just like squinting in this dim lighting to try and touch up your makeup.

It’s weird. It’s like who designed this? Was it a dude? Because like, no, this doesn’t work well. Anyway, that’s a random tangent, but like, that’s such a weird out there thing. And okay, most people aren’t going to pay to have that done, but it tells me the direction that I’m leaning. I love to make things more efficient.

I love to make things more useful for aesthetics.

with what the customer actually needs, what the client actually needs. I love to look at things with a critical eye of, okay, that is something that is just for beauty only. So it can be used in this scenario, but we also need to meld it with comfort and usability. So those things are In one hand, they’d be something if I was actually doing that out consulting for brands, what it tells me about myself is, okay, yeah, I’m in the right space in many ways as a freelancer, because I’m able to do stuff like that for my clients.

I’m able to look for the balance between what the company needs on the inside and how we relate that to getting our own systems running well. And so they work for people, but also get them to work for our customers. I often have to run the balance between clients of them focusing only on what they need internally or focusing fully on the customer and completely forgetting about what their team needs internally.

I kind of am the balance between those two things that have to be well done and work for both sides, other areas. that I enjoy the traveling. I’m well suited to work for my travel clients because even though they may be doing things that are different than my style of travel, if I work for a high end, very luxury travel type of client, that’s not what my day to day looks like, but I still know enough about travel and I know enough to really put my heart and soul into my work.

So what I did with my coaching client was I had her start to think about some things that she would like to do. And naturally her brain came up against the, well, no one would pay me to do that. Well, fair enough. In the beginning, it can seem like that. But the nice part about doing this exercise is, we’ll bring to part two, which we’ll talk about later, which is getting in touch with other people who can see the broader vision.

Immediately once she mentioned some things, she mentioned hiking and just like being with her dogs and some other things, she was interested in doing similar work to me. So that operations management piece for a client, which when you do what I do, it doesn’t necessarily matter so much what the client’s business is.

The parts that I do are coming in, creating order, creating systems and helping to run the day to day and inside a business, no matter what type of business it is, there are so many things that are the same. The need to deliver the product to the customer, the need for marketing, the need for customer service, the need for good people, the need for hiring, training, firing, all that kind of stuff is the same, right?

The bits and pieces vary, but it’s at its core the same. And so by doing a little bit of brainstorming, I was able to tell her, well, look, just those interests that you’ve put out, those are going to help you figure out what kind of clients to go after and look for.

Because I could see you working with a travel and adventure company. I could see you working perhaps. It’s a small company that does hiking, curated, and bespoke hiking trips. They put together itineraries. They take small groups out and they do all of the planning, all of the logistics, getting people into these wonderful experiences that they wouldn’t have found on their own.

And there’s so many of these little companies popping up and they need help with managing all of the bits and pieces because not only is it difficult to deliver a standard product to a customer, just a regular customer clicks by and then they get this either online product or something shipped to their house.

There’s a lot that goes into that. But when you add in multiple stops on a tour and you’re working with all kinds of different vendors to provide the experiences to your guests. Along the way, that’s a lot of moving pieces. It’s a lot of moving piece help. And that could be a dream job for her to come in and to organize that same with pets.

Pets are a huge market. People will pay loads of money for their pets to keep them happy and also to provide them with loads of things that they don’t need. I mean, I know this. I was a pet owner for many years. All of my pets have passed now, but I had three dogs and a cat. And yeah, the sheer amount of spend that we do as humans on our pets is astronomical.

So working for a boutique, small little company who provides some sort of pet, either products or services could be a thing that she’s naturally drawn toward. Because again, when you love what you’re doing, that’s when it’s not going to feel like work, right? That’s when it’s going to feel just so good to get up and to go off.

And to do that, so you can apply the core operations management to almost any business, but it’s going to help if you start with businesses that you know that you’re interested in. So right there, she’s got some ideas for pet businesses, travel businesses, hiking and adventure type businesses, and it doesn’t even have to be the actual business.

That she’s going out and doing hiking or traveling stuff. It could be just providing services around it. It could be working for a place that makes incredible hiking products and gear. But at her core, I could tell that she’s very much like me. She’s a helper. She wants to help other people grow their businesses, and help other people have good end results.

Most of us feel good when we have a purpose. And for many of us, a purpose of helping others is the greatest thing that drives us. So you can find that in many, many different ways. And so I gave her some ideas and some examples around that. And that leads me to part two of this episode, which is the idea of getting out there and trying to find people who can see bigger than you can.

Whether it is sending me an email or a DM and asking me a question or other people online who are already kind of living the life that you want, ask them some intelligent questions. See if you can get a little bit of their time. See if you can study them and what they’ve done in order to help you go from expanding that small circle of understanding that you have now into a bigger circle of understanding.

Because here’s the thing, when I was back in the small circle, I had no clue that people would pay me to do what I do today. How could I know, right? And how can you know unless you talk to other people, unless you try actively to expand your understanding.

There are so many people who will pay for services that I just didn’t even dream of back in the day. Couldn’t have imagined because it didn’t exist. In the world that I lived in, it was only when I broke out of that world, expanded into a larger one that I realized, wow, I had no idea. And you can’t know except by conscious expansion.

So I would highly suggest just really, really, really, we live in a world where there’s more opportunity than ever to connect. with other people to learn about what other people are doing for a living in a way that will just blow your mind. We no longer live in a world where jobs are super concrete all the time.

Everyone knows what a teacher does or a doctor does, but we have all these other options for jobs that sometimes don’t even sound real. I have not done this myself, but I would recommend getting on Google and YouTube probably and just doing some searching around jobs that people have like out there.

I can’t believe I get paid every day to do this. I can’t believe that this is the work that I do. It’s not always the stuff that we see on TV or in our reality show. And they put together stuff for TV that feels very for TV. There are loads of regular people out there doing jobs. that are much, much cooler than the ones that my high school guidance counselor would have led me to believe existed.

I have a friend, for example, who is a geologist and I knew nothing about geology before meeting him. And just some of the things that he’s been able to do, some of the travels that he’s done, some of the places he’s been and just like the amount of time he spends outdoors working and in cool places is really, you know, really wild.

It was eye opening. I remember taking a geology class in university and it was incredibly boring. I hated it. I thought it was dull and a waste of time. And kind of thought that geologists spent a lot of time in labs. I don’t know why. That was my headwind at the time. But seeing how much of his life he gets to spend, yeah, in the office sometimes, but also just tramping around in the outdoors is really cool.

Again, just mind expansiveness to understand other careers better, other options for us better in order to make more informed decisions about what we want to do. So, to break it down into just a few steps, I would start with the brainstorm. List out everything you would love to be doing, no matter how big, no matter how small, if you did not have to worry about money.

Then start to do some Googling, do some YouTubing, try to find people who are doing random cool jobs that you didn’t know existed in areas that you maybe never thought to yourself was possible to have a job like that. And also spend some time online on Instagram, Twitter, whatever your medium of choice is, and go out there and find some people who are doing some cool things.

See if you can start to develop connections with them, ask some intelligent questions, creep on their profiles, read the things that they have written, try to learn their journey and how they went from where they were to being in that career now. One last. thing is just like I really didn’t understand when I was younger either how much movement there is when it comes to careers.

It’s almost never this straight shot that they sort of made it out to seem like in high school that it was just pick this major and then go into this job and then you’ll do this job forever. It’s really not like that. People try different things, experiment with different things. Stumble into different things.

And a lot of it happens just by meeting the right person or the right company at the time and having an opportunity open up. So the same can exist in freelancing. If you start to expand your circle of knowledge about the options out there, almost a guarantee that things will start to move for you and things will open up and you’ll start to be presented with more and more options that you really just had no idea were there.

That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. As always, you can check me out online at  Instagram @liveworktravelig is my Instagram handle and you can always get ahold of me anytime by sending over an email to hello at hello@liveworktravel.com. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll be back next week with another episode.

Take care.