When I Called Myself a Writer, the Money Came In
What you tell yourself matters
Since I started my business 9 years ago, the title I’ve given myself has changed. My business has changed, I have changed, so it seems natural that what I call myself has developed over time.
The trouble is, I’ve always struggled with that part. When people say “What do you do?” I’m always stumped. I started my business with the focus of supporting women to return to work after taking time out to have a family. This part was always clear, but my role within that wasn’t so clear.
At first, I called myself a coach, and that was effectively how I started. I worked with women on a one-to-one basis to support them with anxiety about returning to work. As time went on, a big part of my business became writing CVs, cover letters, applications, LinkedIn profiles. Writing has always been what I love and in addition to this, I was writing about food, parenting, careers, and business for publications on the side.
Coaching was never my thing. I prefer to be behind the scenes, but I didn’t have the confidence to call myself a writer. It was coaching that brought in the most money, even if it was only 20% of my work, so that’s what I continued to call myself, even though it felt icky.
Even when the CV side of things took off and I was able to land big enough clients to stop coaching all together, I still picked titles like “CV expert” over “writer”. Writing CVs wasn’t the writing I loved, it was content writing I enjoyed so in my mind, I didn’t deserve that title.
As I started to get more writing gigs in the careers niche, I was able to put a team together to write the bulk of the CVs for me, and I was free to concentrate on writing content more often for a number of different clients. At this time, something clicked. Someone asked me what I did and I said,
“I’m a writer”.
It felt good. I didn’t feel like a fraud. I WAS a writer. 100% of my income was from writing or editing the CVs other people were writing for me.
With this simple mindset switch, I suddenly had more belief in myself. Instead of being a careers coach who also offered writing services, I become a writer and consultant.
Things took off massively and I was able to land a new Fortune 500 client that gave me a years contract and paid me 5 times what by best client at the time was paying me.
The message?
This long drawn out story is to demonstrate that how you see yourelf matters. The words you tell yourself are what your brain believes. What you call yourself is what you become.
A few more things…
- If you like this and want to learn more about how the words you use and the way you think of yourself becomes your reality, you might like these articles:
2. If you are expanding your business and want to recruit a team, or find freelancers to outsource to, my go-to place is Upwork.
3. Join other like minded people who have re-imagined their career to mean more than money and status by signing up to my fast growing newsletter REDEFINING SUCCESS.
