Weeknote #9: Coping with rejection

Last week I missed out on two pieces of work I was excited about. While there were reasons in both cases that I didn’t get the work, and I appreciate it’s business, it did hurt.

While there are other possibilities in the pipeline I’m remembering something Lauren Currie mentioned the other week about finding a reason to say yes.

Finding a reason to say yes by Lauren Currie

I’m really trying to spend my first year of contracting being guided by what I enjoy, while feeding this back into the proposition for Joy. I want my reasons to say yes to be either:

1. I am excited by the work
2. I’ll learn and deepen my practice
3. It’s a cause I believe in

Ideally I’ll be hitting more than one of these with each piece of work I say yes to.

I also know what I don’t want. I don’t want to be involved in organisational politics. I don’t want to line manage people. I don’t want to have to justify ‘design’ as an approach. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognise the need and value of these things – I just don’t want to do them right now.

This is something I’m much better at. Knowing what I don’t want and moving away from it. It’s pretty much how I’ve progressed my career to date. However, for the first time I’m thinking I need to take a forward facing look at what I’m doing.

It’s hard to say no to things that don’t meet one of my criteria when you also need to pay your mortgage. This is the first time I have felt this feeling before. I’ve always had a full time job, pretty much non-stop for the last 15 years. Being a total squirrel when it comes to money I can see this is going to be one of my biggest challenges.

I’m hopeful I can line up one more piece of work for the new year in the next three weeks so that I can relax and enjoy a long Christmas break. I’m learning to sit with the uncertainty of not having guaranteed recurring income and try and trust myself to generate the income I need. This feels hard on a daily basis.

I’m looking forward to spending three days by myself in one of my favourite places – Broadstairs – to reflect on the year and put some proper thought into Joy and what it is I want to do. Hopefully building more detail around my early do’s and don’ts and the first draft of my proposition for Joy.

This feels like something I just haven’t been able to do working 4 days a week for Lloyds and filling my Fridays with new business calls. However, on good days, I feel positive that I have 3 months worth of great chats with people, lots of initial feedback and 10 weeks worth of weeknotes to feed into this reflection.

Lastly, but most importantly, I also had some bad news last week about someone close to me. I still feel like I’m untangling my feelings about this from my feelings about Joy and my work for next year. Especially as everything happened in a 24 hour period.

Could it be that having less work through January is something I need right now to support the people around me?

So for me this week is about taking stock and not rushing into anything. It’s about untangling the personal from the professional. It’s about really trying to connect to what I need and want from next year and finding my reasons to say yes.