Mindset Mastery is a weekly newsletter about the psychology of self-employment from Jenni Gritters. If you’d like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber for $5/ month! Paid subscribers receive access to newsletters on special topics. (Like this one!)
🚨I’m hosting a workshop next Monday, the 26th, all about how to build a stable financial floor to support your journalism & creative writing. It’s called The Jump Playbook. Y’all, this is the best curriculum I’ve ever taught. The 90-minute session includes nine practical steps I took to move my business from $4,000/ month to $20,000 month; plus you get a portfolio review from me; a 21-page handbook full of templates, case studies and a marketing plan; and a small-group, mastermind-style brainstorm to help you figure out the most exciting ways to diversify. Join us? Tickets are going fast! 🚨
💸Are you confident in your prices? Do they cover your immediate needs and move you toward your long-term financial goals? Are they exciting? If not, now's the time to reconsider how and what you charge. My friend Austin L. Church just published a book called Free Money, and it's got the step-by-step process for identifying your 7 key numbers. It's also a good read if you've got a complicated relationship with money or need to reconnect with why you chose this independent path in the first place. 💸
Today I want to address a question I get all the time from self-employed creatives. It goes something like this:
“Jenni, I just do so many things and I’m not sure how to express that in my branding. I’m not sure how to explain that to people.”
Being creative — literally defined as being a person who has a deep imagination and constantly comes up with new ideas — often means you will have many different wings of your career and your life. We are prolific. We love newness and we feel most on fire when we’re leaning into our next idea.
The client who asked me this question most recently had retired from working in media and was moving into another career. But she still loved many different things and struggled to put herself in a distinct “career” box. While this felt absolutely authentic, she admitted that she had trouble figuring out how to explain her work. What should she write on her LinkedIn bio? What should she tell her extended family over the holiday break?
First, I gave her permission to accept all the winding pieces of her career, each of which was absolutely necessary in getting her to where she is today. While it used to be expected that you would stay in a career path for decades, it’s much more normal now to have several careers. (In fact, a recent report I read said millennials and Gen Z-ers will have an average of 4-6 careers over their years of work. Whoa!) The idea that you need to stay rooted in one place to do good work is an old one.
Then we talked at length about her many non-linear career choices. We looked at the themes within them and talked about how each thing she’d done had led her to the next one. She could see the through lines, resonating clearly as we took a step back.
Then I told her something I want to tell you, too: You are responsible for owning your narrative. You are NOT responsible for everyone else’s acceptance of that narrative. But it is your job to figure out how you want to tell your story.
As we started story crafting, we dug into this question together: What is the golden thread of your career? Put another way: Even if you’ve been doing a bunch of different kinds of work, what is it that you really care about? What is your mission? Where are the commonalities?
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