Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
For those of you who are considering becoming a contractor or already are contractors and looking for peer stories this is a very personal glimpse of my experience after a decade of being a contractor.
- Energy (in)balance. It is hard to maintain the energy balanse. This job is really about radiating your energy. I need to cumulate the energy and then radiate it into the human system of the client. I invest in others, both in individuals in companies, I help them grow, I help them achieve success. Lots of people I helped got a career boost thanks to what we did together and thanks to my contribution. Some are grateful, some others are not, assigning success to themselves. Once the job is done the split of benefits is drastically unequal: career advances vs a time to leave for me. I enjoy that I helped them yet also wish there was something long term in it for me. No, there is nothing long term for me except satisfaction. It is difficult to absorb some of the energy back to compensate for the energy invested. Only a fraction of clients calls again.
- Yes, it feels lonely sometimes. I work with some of my best friends at resonate.company yet we rarely work together at the same client. Working together is exactly what made us friends and we knew we wanted to repeat this experience, but it is not so easy. So, the synergy effect suffers.
- Lifetime adjourning. It feels lonely also because I have initiated a lot of Communities of Practice within client organizations and enjoyed being the "founding "leader" and then I had to leave them. So, I know a lot of friendly people in companies, yet I have to adjourn to make space for them to grow and become leaders.
- It is you who needs to pull the trigger and leave. For hygiene I tend not to work with the same client for more than 18 months. The power of the external perspective I bring deteriorates with time and I feel I become trapped in the internal perspective as everyone else. At the same time diversity of your exposure to various clients is what makes you attractive and appealing for clients, so even when it is tempting to stay, you should leave to build your value proposition.
- Long-term sense of ownership. As long as there is plentiful of high energy emotions during client engagements, engagements are usually short term, in months, sometimes a year. There is nothing that extends for 5, 10, 20 years and you can say it is your child, your creation. No product, no business unit, no company. They all have new owners. Except for my company, the one I continuously create, of course. That is why I am a part of a bigger digital boutique together with my friends. Our company is something that will outlive me hopefully. And, except for other assets you create - a book for instance, or other acting in addition to your regular contracts. I authored a few books and that is what heals my sense of long-term ownership. As you can see, the long-term ownership becomes your own duty. You cannot rely on a ready to use logo that simply is there and invites you to build long-term ownership simply by identifying with it. By the way, this need for long-term authoring is sometimes perceived by sponsors of contracts as "not engaged enough". I find such framings very unjust, narrow, and missing the understanding. Contractor's duty to develop her own company deserves respect in the same way as a full-time employee's commitment to spend their lifetime in one company. They both look for fulfillment through contribution to something bigger than themselves individually.
- Yes, it feels great to be on my own! No boss, not an aspirational one, not a stupid one. Would I exchange it for a full-time job engagement? May be. It depends :) For sure it would need to be a full-time job with friends and with a high dose of autonomy. It happened to me that my old friends have hired me as a contractor to help them with some topics and it felt really good. I did not care what form the collaboration took formally: a contract or full-time position. It was of secondary importance as long as I could be collaborating and co-creating with friends.
- Jealous full-timers? I meet lots of people who initially feel a bit jealous of the freedom that is associated with contracting. Many people never had the courage to try, which I fully understand - it takes a characterological profile and a mixture of courage, stupidity, and risk appetite. Sometimes it just takes a coincidence. In my case, it happened naturally, as my first job back in 1998 was remote and in a small company so it did have aspects of contracting. And, by the way, if it makes it easier for you - I never thought I would be a contractor. Some people still say I have the worst profile for a contractor ever. The truth is that I start every job with a thought at the back of my mind that it is going to last for a lifetime. Coming back to my point - being jealous says a lot about the person who is jealous, about some lack, about an unfulfilled need, about questioning whether her style of investing time and building career, and sometimes about the need to go wild. Let me say, that as a contractor I experience jealousy in the same frame but in the opposite direction - I am sometimes jealous about stability, long-term focus, and ownership, about personal development budgets, about weeks of paid holidays, about paid sick leaves, etc. Again, let's appreciate we are just humans trying to contribute and fulfill our lives, and let's respect each other.
