Mentoring yourself
Self-mentoring involves taking responsibility for development, assessing strengths and limitations, setting goals and maintaining accountability without someone else directing the work.
Self-awareness and accountability
Self-mentoring means initiating and accepting responsibility for self-development, devoting time to navigating the working environment and strengthening competencies for job performance and career progression. It involves identifying strengths, weaknesses, needs, limitations and expectations, then setting goals, tracing a path towards them and continually assessing progress and ways to improve. That continuous self-assessment can be exhausting as well as gratifying.
For one writer moving from a micromanaging research supervisor into freelancing, flexibility brought the unfamiliar responsibility of working without anyone pushing her or holding her accountable. Alongside writing, she needed to develop marketing and financial, time and project management skills. Her freelance mentors helped her recognise that there was no single right way to freelance: a fulfilling business required goals suited to her and accountability for reaching them. She began self-mentoring before knowing the term and found that it improved her understanding of herself and her work as a freelancer and project manager.
Assessment and goals
Three months into freelancing, the writer assessed all aspects of her business for strengths, weaknesses, needs and limitations. Her assessment identified the following.
- Writing was a strength: clients were seldom dissatisfied or requested extensive edits.
- Administration needed improvement, particularly organising finances and comparing projects objectively.
- Disorganisation impaired informed decisions about project offers and pitches.
- Marketing was a weakness; it did not come naturally and some attempted strategies yielded little.
- Accountability and consistency were the main limitation: alternating excessive self-criticism with leniency meant no set working hours, harming work-life balance and business growth.
She focused on meeting her needs and removing her limitations, allowing herself a month to learn about time-tracking apps and choosing Toggl to track each task. She also set a goal of comparing projects that involved different effort and were paid by word count, whole project or hour. Within a month, time tracking and a project-comparison system were working, helping her estimate project duration, compare offers objectively and make acceptance decisions with greater peace of mind.
Routines and incremental progress
For this writer, consistency required identifying habits that prevented a steady routine at home and allowing three months to develop a system. The writer set daily working hours, used an adaptation of the Pomodoro Technique’s 25-minute work increments to reach them without overworking, and devoted the first two hours of Monday to planning the week and assigning project time slots.
Designing the system was easy, but maintaining it took longer than three months because she allowed life to disrupt it; breaking the larger goal into steps made progress easier to see. By the time she accepted a full-time job, she followed the routine 80% of the time, an improvement over having no routine. That job interrupted her next goal, increasing marketing and self-advocacy, which she intended to resume on returning to freelancing.
Self-mentoring can bring substantial benefits through systems for achieving goals, maintaining accountability and celebrating small victories, even when the term itself is unfamiliar.
Feedback and reflection
Freelancers often receive less feedback than in-house team members, and agencies often regard detailed freelance feedback as a poor use of time. Simple questions can make feedback quicker for clients: asking for one useful thing and one missing thing, or how a similar project could be “even better if…”. These questions can accompany submitted work or a follow-up a few days later; they do not guarantee feedback but may make some clients more likely to respond. The answers can identify areas for improvement or new processes and reinforce what works. Feedback should be considered for future work and, where appropriate, incorporated into working processes. Particularly positive comments can be kept in a Smile File for motivation on difficult days.
Even without client feedback, projects usually offer lessons: recording what went well, what was enjoyable and what was challenging can guide future work and suggest alternative processes. Reflection is best done immediately after finishing, before insights are forgotten; it also helps identify work to seek more of and clients to work with again.
A brief break after finishing work can help internalise the achievement before moving to the next task. A monthly record of completed projects, hurdles overcome and new clients can prevent achievements from blurring together. Without the regular reflection of line-manager meetings or appraisals, freelancers can feel they work constantly without achieving anything.