An anti-girlboss approach to working for yourself

My slow business manifesto

Welcome to Messy Work! This newsletter is about figuring out life’s messier bits, which means I write about everything from hating your job, to loving (or not loving) your body, to performative singleness. Sometimes from a coaching psychology perspective, but mostly from the perspective of a 31-year-old human. Today’s post is about freelancing and business-building. If that’s not really relevant to you, check out the archive posts I have subtly hyperlinked to throughout this intro 😉

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No one likes to admit it—that business has been slow.

Like a shameful secret, we hide the truth from anyone who asks. Plaster on a smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes, blurt out a chipper “Great, thanks!” and swiftly move the conversation onwards. 

Behind closed doors, it’s not so great, actually.

We find ourselves obsessively scouring jobs boards, rifling through our little black books of clients from yesteryear, fighting back the urge to write strongly-worded emails to low-ballers, ghosters and piss-takers.

How the email finds me

And crucially, doing everything we can to avoid sounding desperate—even if that’s how we feel.

Because it’s better to suffer in silence than suffer the “Have you thought about getting a full-time job?” from concerned family members. Worse still, the pitying looks from fellow freelancers.

Let’s be honest, though: 2024 has been no joke in the world of self-employment. For most of us, business has, at points, been slower than we’d like. 

But recently, I’ve been thinking…what if “slow” business wasn’t always a bad thing? In fact (without glossing over the obvious imperative to pay the bills), what if it was something to actively aspire to?

The mess

The careers of most freelancers I know (including my own) have followed a similar arc. 

We started out in full-time employment: ambitious, driven and hungry for “success”. Proving ourselves worthy opponents of “ambiguity”, “fast-paced environments” and “hands-on” founders, we ascended through the glittering ranks of middle management in young, trendy startups.

Obviously, all of this gets pretty exhausting after a while (even the ping pong tables), so we burnt out. Eventually, we thought “sod this”, and decided to go it alone.

But, a bit like expecting a holiday to fix a faltering relationship, removing yourself from a toxic job can only take you so far in healing your relationship to work. 

Unfortunately, we can still be imprisoned in the cages of our own minds, as we continue to plod along with the learned behaviours that years, if not decades, of school, corporate environments and capitalism have instilled in us.

And so many of us find ourselves facing the same challenges as before—from poor work-life balance, to petulant clients—except that we now have no one to blame but ourselves.

Signs you’re a freelancer trapped in a full-time mindset

Any of these sound familiar?

• You’re working (which includes admin, marketing and new business) more than ever…even though you left a full-time job because of the long hours

• You feel guilty taking time off/not being glued to your laptop from 9-5…whether it’s holidays, a Friday afternoon, or even a long lunch break

• Your barometer for success is being “fully” booked…you strive to have retainers lined up 5 days a week, which actually means working 6-7 days a week

• You bend over backwards to accommodate clients’ needs…at the expense of your own (lunchtime meetings, scope creep, reduced rates, etc.)

• You struggle to trust your decisions…and reach for other people’s blueprints, roadmaps and handbooks, instead of writing your own

Of course, not all of these things are inherently bad, all of the time.

There are going to be busy periods. Discipline and structure are necessary for keeping a roof over your head and food on the table. Ultimately (hopefully!), you’re investing all that time and energy in your business, rather than someone else’s.

However, being stuck in a full-time mindset when you’re freelance can leave you:

• Physically frazzled: tension, fatigue, illness—is your body screaming at you to change gears?

• Emotionally fraught: whether with clients, loved ones or yourself, you find yourself being kinda negative all the time—defensive, resentful, hyper-critical, irritable, pessimistic, etc.

• Psychically drained: your mind feels foggy, vague and maybe even bored

• Spiritually unfulfilled: you don’t feel inspired, you’re disconnected from things that usually bring you joy, you lack a sense of purpose

A gap—or more like an abyss—has formed between your freelance fantasy and reality. You’re wondering how on earth you got here, and how to make the leap back to your original hopes, dreams and intentions for working for yourself.

Make it make sense

Going freelance or running a business is a scary decision to make. Because choosing freedom also means choosing uncertainty. 

As exhilarating as it is to feel in control of our own destiny, we suddenly have a blank canvas in front of us. And it’s much easier to paint by numbers—clinging to the safety and familiarity of what we already know—than to go full Tracey Emin on that shit (really enjoyed this podcast ep btw).

Often, what we are clinging to is an internalised a set of beliefs and narratives about what it means to be successful. Things like:

To succeed, I need to be stressed.

To succeed, I need to be busy/productive all the time.

To succeed, I need to know exactly what I’m doing all the time.

On a deeper level, we might swap “successful” for “worthy”.

Because now we’ve had the audacity to reject the career paths our teachers and parents laid out in front of us, the self-assurance to step outside the institutional safety nets of employment, the daring to question the authority of a boss, well, we’d better bloody prove ourselves.

By becoming more dutiful, diligent and hard-working than ever. Checking Slack or Gmail as soon as we wake up, bringing our laptops on holiday, smashing out our daily LinkedIn posts, firing off a “sure!” or “no problem!” to five different clients at once.

Spoiler alert: this never ends well.

The work

I’ve experienced burnouts not once, but several times in my career as a freelancer. This year, for example, started out in a flurry of of productivity and objective success: booked 4.5 (read: 6) days a week with reliable, lucrative copywriting clients, somehow also managing to train and qualify as a coach, and maintaining a consistent social media presence that meant I became embarrassingly familiar with people saying “I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn”.

See the full post

But, as I’ve learned the hard way, this kind of output is never sustainable. My body had other ideas and so did the economy. This summer, I found myself in and out of hospital and, as pursestrings tightened, with less work than I’d anticipated. 

So I decided to do something radical: rather than fighting the slowness, I embraced it.

I swapped busy work (frantically refreshing the ‘Past 24 hours’ filter on LinkedIn jobs) for more intentional, deep work, like user research for my coaching business. Stripped of the excuse of being busy, I left the house to cowork with other freelancers. Sometimes, I simply sat on park benches and did nothing.

None of this has magically transformed me into a brand new person, who has left behind stress, people pleasing and poor boundaries forevermore—I’m only human. But it did open my eyes to different ways of doing and being.

Because acknowledging our humanness is precisely the point of slow business; rather than striving to become something or someone we’re not, it’s about accepting who we really are, and designing a life and career that honours that.

A slow business manifesto

We’ve had slow food, slow fashion, slow living—is “slow business” another crunchy hallmark of the privileged and self-satisfied? Probably, yes. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to slow down.

But for those of us who do have the freedom to decide how we work (it’s called FREElancing after all guys), well, why not make the most of it? 

So, in an effort to boot myself off the hedonic treadmill once and for all, I wrote myself a slow business manifesto.

To me, slow business is about…

1. Being led by values, not vanity metrics.

2. Prioritising real relationships over reach.

3. Putting health before work.

4. Following my intuition: not depending on other people’s “hacks”, “how-tos” or “blueprints”, and listening when I encounter resistance.

5. Trying to be curious, not clever.

6. Aspiring for courage, not confidence.

7. Having faith in abundance, rather than a fear of scarcity.

8. Making joy, integrity and connection my KPIs (not numbers).

9. Creating/posting on social media when it feels authentic and inspired, rather than forcing myself to stick to an arbitrary schedule.

10. Embracing the ebb and flow—of energy, opportunities, money, life!

These are guidelines, not rules. There will be contexts where they don’t apply and some come with caveats (e.g. I need to cultivate the right conditions for creativity, which may require discipline).

But I want to do my best to hold myself to them—especially now I’ve shared them on Substack! I also wanted to share them in the hope of sparking ideas and conversations about what it really means to unsubscribe from full-time employment, and start carving out your own path.

How do you want to do business?

Is “slow business” a term that resonates with you…or does it make you roll your eyes?!

My manifesto has been informed by conversations with brilliant people in my network, so if you’re a fellow freelancer or business owner who’s done with hustle culture, I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

What would be on yours?

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About me + Messy Work

If you’re new here, I’m Lucia, a freelance copywriter, accredited career, creativity and life coach, and enthusiastic Substacker.

This newsletter is dedicated to making sense of, moving past and really celebrating the messy work of life through personal essays, coaching insights, and memes.

Please do muck in and say hi!

1:1 coaching for recovering high achievers and independent spirits

Feel like your career and life are being ruled by some of those pesky, outdated beliefs about what it means to be “successful”? Coaching can help you explore where they come from and rewrite the script. If you’re curious to learn more (or sceptical about coaching!), drop me a message and we can have a chat 🙂