These 4 Corporate Habits Will Quietly Kill Your Freelance Success Before It Even Starts [ Freelancing to Financial Freedom ]
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Are hidden corporate habits that have become ingrained within you quietly sabotaging your freelance success?
If you're struggling to gain traction as a freelancer despite putting in plenty of effort, the problem may not be your skills but the workplace habits you've carried over from corporate life.
This episode shows you how to recognize those patterns and replace them with behaviors that help you attract clients and grow your business faster.
By listening to this episode, you'll discover:
How to stop waiting and start making confident business decisions on your own to increase your chances of freelance success.
How letting go of the habits you learned in corporate is ESSENTIAL if you watn t ogrow your freelancing business.
How to focus on specific business growth activities instead of staying stuck in busy work or endless learning, a corporate habit you need to break today.
Press play now to identify the four habits holding your freelance business back and start replacing them with actions that lead to real client growth.
Connect with Kiri, the host:
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Episode Transcript:
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Kiri Mohan: Welcome back to the show. Today, we're on day two of this series, and this one is, like, so near and dear to my heart, I can't even tell you. This is…
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Kiri Mohan: We're just gonna jump in to talking about
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Kiri Mohan: Corporate mindsets and habits that kill your freelance success, okay?
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Kiri Mohan: And this is something I struggled with a lot. So, when I decided to try to make freelancing my full-time career, and not just, like, apply to proposals and apply to jobs, I dove into marketing and research and everything that I could.
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Kiri Mohan: Sorry, Ross, a little pause fixing my hair.
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Kiri Mohan: And I just sat in that place for such a long time. And I told myself, okay, starting in August, I'm gonna start marketing myself, starting, I think this was, like, I think I…
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Kiri Mohan: registered my business in April, so that would have been, well, May, June, July, August, 4 months, okay? So I guess it's like 4 months. In August, I'm gonna start marketing myself, and man, I… I…
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Kiri Mohan: was… Procrastinating. And pulling my… pulling my…
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Kiri Mohan: Sorry, Ross. And boy, was I procrastinating and dragging my feet on this. And eventually, I realized it was because I was the one that had to motivate myself to put myself out there and start trying to get clients on my own, and being proactive, right?
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Kiri Mohan: I thought that maybe some sign would come, that it was time to start this, and time to try it, and it never did come, and really.
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Kiri Mohan: That boils down to corporate habit number one, ladies and gentlemen, that you need to break, is waiting for someone else to tell you what to do. Because in your corporate life, you know, or any job, really, you have someone who's telling you what to do. It's very rare
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Kiri Mohan: that any of us right now are CEOs of massive companies, and even then, they have, like, a board they need to respond to, right? So it's like, in corporate, there's always someone that they have to respond to, no matter who you are. There's always a manager, a boss, or someone.
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Kiri Mohan: And I feel like, for me, I was kind of, like, waiting for the sign of someone to say, like, hey, it's time for you to go out and start marketing your business, and trying to get clients, and…
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Kiri Mohan: That is a corporate habit that you need to break. Like, you have to be your biggest self-motivator. You need to stop believing that someone else is responsible for growth, because they're not. It's you. Stop waiting for someone to tell you what to do. You are the one that needs to move forward and make decisions, and this is gonna set you up
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Kiri Mohan: To be even a better business owner as time goes on.
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Kiri Mohan: Number 2.
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Kiri Mohan: Let go of the need for approval and the need for perfection. So much when we're in a corporate job.
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Kiri Mohan: Sorry.
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Kiri Mohan: So much of the time, when we're in a corporate job, we are presenting deliverables, and we're giving it to people, and we want it to be perfect, and we need that approval. And you need to kind of let go of that. So a lot of us will tinker around with our website, try to do ideal client profiles, and like I've said many times.
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Kiri Mohan: the whole, AI thing, yeah, we'll talk to AI for a long time and try to get it to give us feedback and tell us where we should go, but you keep trying to perfect it with AI, and keep trying to get it absolutely right, and make sure that your offer is so painstakingly clear and perfect and simple, and then…
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Kiri Mohan: It never happens, because you're just waiting for that perfection, and you're waiting for approval from AI, or your audience, or whatever it is.
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Kiri Mohan: And guess what? You need to break that, because that is so corporate, and you don't even realize it. That is just, like, wanting to make sure everything looks good for your boss. Guess what? You don't have a boss anymore, so you don't need to worry about that, and guess what?
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Kiri Mohan: Here's another spoiler!
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Kiri Mohan: Not many people are actually paying attention to you online. You think they are, and you think that, like, putting yourself out there is just so, like, oh my god, biting my nails, everyone's gonna see me, what am I doing? No, I promise you, like, the algorithm is gonna make what you
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Kiri Mohan: put out there, like, disappears so quickly, so don't worry about that. Done is better than perfect, and just put yourself out there.
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Kiri Mohan: Number four, this habit.
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Kiri Mohan: A lot of people equate busyness with productivity, instead of focusing on income-generating actions.
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Kiri Mohan: Oh my gosh, people.
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Kiri Mohan: We love to be busy, because busy makes it seem like we're doing something, right? But are you actually putting that busyness to good work, and will it generate you income? Does it have a long-term…
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Kiri Mohan: benefit of bringing clients to you, or are you just being busy because it looks good, and you feel like, okay, if I'm busy enough, eventually a client's gonna notice, or eventually I'll start my freelance business.
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Kiri Mohan: That's not it, because that's often, like, the busyness is us just trying to hide in the shadows, and not get on calls, and not put ourselves out there, and not do, like, things that make us uncomfortable. The hard things, right? We can do hard things, and so stop…
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Kiri Mohan: Or maybe I should say, observe yourself. Observe yourself next time you're feeling like you're busy, and ask yourself, is this an income-generating action?
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Kiri Mohan: Is this an income-generating action? The first 3 things you should do every day that you work on your freelance business should be an income-generating action, which means it should be trying to get clients.
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Kiri Mohan: That busyness can come later when your freelance business is more successfully set up, and you want to have more there, maybe in terms of marketing and stuff, and you can hire people, but right now, is this something that will directly get you clients? And that, you need data, and you need to observe, but all of that should be going on right now, okay?
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Kiri Mohan: Do not equate busyness with productivity. Number 4.
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Kiri Mohan: This kind of wraps up into everything else, but it's…
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Kiri Mohan: you're spending too long learning instead of doing, okay? You want to have all the knowledge before moving forward, because if you feel like you have all the knowledge, you'll know what you're doing.
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Kiri Mohan: Another spoiler. None of us know what we're doing, okay? We just kind of make it up as we go along. Some of us follow frameworks, some of us follow step-by-step actions, but a lot of times we use our own spin on it, and we twist it, and we change it, and we're just like, maybe this will work, right? No one really follows something exactly. Even the students in my program take what I say.
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Kiri Mohan: with a grain of salt. They use it, they use what they want, and then they throw out what they don't want. And the whole problem is, when you think you need to have all this knowledge, it's gonna stop you from moving forward and stop you from seeing that success, and I feel like that is a little bit of a corporate mindset, of, like, digging deep, and some of you might have actually had roles where you analyzed
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Kiri Mohan: data.
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Kiri Mohan: and learned a lot, but you didn't have to do anything with it. You just handed it off to someone else, and they were the ones
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Kiri Mohan: that were responsible for taking that data and translating it into something that turned into doing, right? And that's really hard when you come from a background of just learning and research and methodology, because you now need to take that and scale it back and do more, and put yourself out there more, okay? So these are the four corporate habits that will quietly kill your freelance success, and to recap.
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Kiri Mohan: habits.
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Kiri Mohan: Waiting for someone to tell you what to do.
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Kiri Mohan: Needing perfection.
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Kiri Mohan: equating busyness with productivity, and then staying in this learning zone for too long instead of doing. That is just… all these are just so corporate, and I remember this from my corporate days, so try to remove those, and you'll see a greater surge forward in your freelance business, and a greater success.
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Kiri Mohan: So stay tuned for tomorrow. We're going to be going into 2… Oops.
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Kiri Mohan: So stay tuned for tomorrow. We're going to be going into money, and how much money you actually need before you have to quit your job. So stay tuned for that. I'm really excited for it, keep flourishing.
