Negotiation, or How freelancing saved me thousands in psychotherapy
5 Mar
Negotiation.
It’s a word that you normally don’t equate with happiness. You might think of it when you think of a business deal, or peace treaties. But over the last year I’ve realized it’s the core of all relationships, and the core of my unhappiness with myself. And I have freelancing to thank.
With freelancing, everything is a negotiation.
- Negotiating your price on a contract
- Negotiating the contract itself – what is included
- Negotiating with clients during the project itself
- What happens AFTER the project is done, maintenance.
During all this is ongoing client negotiations. Unlike a “regular” job, you don’t have the luxury of history and trust, you and your clients are unknown to each other. Gentle negotiation is necessary to have a good working relationship.
If you have multiple clients (which is a necessity to be a successful freelancer), you must multiply all this by 100. You are ALWAYS negotiating. And if you don’t know how to state what you are worth (your fee) and what you will put up with (if client gets unruly and makes unreasonable demands) you are not going to be successful. This past year has been hard for me. It’s the first year I’ve done freelance fulltime. I’ve learned some very practical lessons about being a freelancer that only come with experience. Most are along the lines of all the old adages, like “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” and “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and “sometimes clients go psycho” – oh sorry that’s mine. But it’s the interpersonal lessons that have made the most impact and made me realize I AM A HORRIBLE NEGOTIATOR.
What happens in freelancing though rarely happens in relationships. When you meet a client for the first time, they ask you right out, “how much will you charge to do X?” You have to do a calculation of your worth, the time spent and how much of a pain you think the job will be.
*Freelance tip: apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to add on a PITA fee (pain in the ass) if you think the contract is going to be unpleasant.
Of course, you can ask for whatever you want, and the client is free to agree or refuse. But hopefully, you will NEGOTIATE a price acceptable to you both. My problem is I undervalued my worth. So I would do the project at a price that wasn’t acceptable to me (even though I was the one who came up with it!) I didn’t even give the person a chance to negotiate. So I did the project, feeling resentful, and the client might have felt they got too good a deal, and then wouldn’t respect me. Which brings me to my epiphany.
I realized that the reason I was having trouble in freelancing was the same thing that caused me trouble in relationships – instead of knowing my worth, and negotiating when I’d encounter behavior that would challenge that worth, I undervalued myself and put up with what I was given. Or when I encountered trouble in a relationship, I thought it meant the relationship was BAD and I left. For a while I entered into relationships that I knew wouldn’t give me any trouble – what I call my BORING period. What I didn’t know was:
That there are going to be issues in all relationships, and it doesn’t make a relationship BAD and worth leaving.
After a while (I can see now) I just started picking people (and jobs) that I knew wouldn’t give me any trouble, people and jobs that I knew were beneath me in terms of the challenges they’d give me in personal growth. While it allowed me to live without needing negotiation, it didn’t allow me to LIVE.
It didn’t let me realize something else:
When two people encounter a problem, and negotiate a solution, it makes the relationship STRONGER.
When I would run from a problem in a relationship, it meant that the relationship couldn’t progress any further. If I was in a relationship with no conflict, it may have been easy, but it could never be deep. Same with jobs. Jobs without conflict are either ridiculously short, or ridiculously boring.
It makes me really sad to think of all the time I have wasted settling for boring friendships, relationships and boring jobs because I was afraid of negotiating for what I wanted, afraid of a challenge.
But it’s only too late if I don’t start NOW.
Freelancing has made me a better negotiator in business, but now it’s time to do it in the rest of my life. And I’m READY.
*whew* I have to say that writing this post scares the hell out of me. Being from the midwestern school of “suck it up” and “nobody has any problems” this is pretty scary.
I would LOVE to hear your stories of your experience with negotiation.
