Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #13, I explain how to develop more confidence as a freelance writer.

 

 

Transcript: How To Develop More Confidence As A Freelance Writer

Hey guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Today, I want to talk about confidence and how to have confidence as a freelance writer.

The reason I want to dive into this is because I feel like the prevailing advice on confidence is kind of shit. It’s like if you were playing a basketball game and your coach called a time out, got the team on the bench, and was like, “Alright guys. Here’s what we’re going to do: Play better.” That’s kind of what confidence advice is like. It’s like, “Hey, be more confident.”

I want to try to explain how you can become more confident, but in a way that actually works and allows you to take action towards getting there. To do that, we need to break up confidence into two different types:

There is natural confidence, which is what most people think of when they say, “Be more confident,” or ask, “How can I become more confident?”

That has to do with a general lens through which you view people in the world and situations. There’s a level that has to do with your own personal self-assurance, but there’s also part of it that just has to do with how willing you are to be bad at something, or how willing you are to fail and make mistakes.

Some people are really scared to fail, and it causes them to be very unconfident when doing something that they’re not good at. If you can shift your mentality, it may help you have more natural confidence across the board, but ultimately that’s not my advice for you, because I don’t know, frankly, if you can change that. I would imagine you can, but again, for me to say, “Hey, be more generally confident,” “Be more naturally confident,” isn’t really going to do anything for you.

The other type of confidence though is a different story, and it connects to a little bit to one facet of what I just mentioned, which is when you’re good at something.

So, there’s another confidence, which is what I call “situational confidence”.

To illustrate this, picture a group of your friends. Everyone’s different, but you have one person who’s maybe a bit more introverted, a little bit shy, not super expressive, not super outgoing, but in certain situations, maybe when a certain topic comes along or they’re engaging in a certain activity—something where they’re very experienced or knowledgeable or passionate—all of a sudden their personality shifts.

There’s a marked shift where they become more expressive, they become more energized, more outgoing, and it’s because it’s in their comfort zone. It’s sort of in this situational sweet spot for them where they feel very confident. Even if they aren’t naturally confident across the board, when we’re in this specific milieu, or we’re focused on this specific area, they now become confident.

And that’s what we want to do for freelance writing. We want to get you situationaly confident. The way to do that is to just do it a bunch of times. Whatever it is that you’re not confident about, you have to go engage in it and do it unconfidently enough times to where you become confident.

Whether you achieve that level of situational confidence is purely based on your own activity. If you power through and do it multiple times, you will become confident. You have to accept that, “Hey, I’m not going to be confident initially, but if I keep doing this,