How can freelancers find support?

Becoming a freelancer can feel incredibly liberating.

You’re no longer beholden to a company setting your schedule or dictating what you work on.

You’re free to build a life and career that suits you.

But it can also feel incredibly isolating.

There’s no line manager supporting you. No team-mates, no colleague you can ask to check something, no HR, or finance or IT support.

Just… you.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

I want to help you build that ideal sustainable life and career.

I’ve been freelance since 2018, so I understand the challenges that can occur, but a big part of my work is helping other MedComms freelancers overcome those challenges, whether that’s through these videos or my mentoring or training activities.

I know how it can be a massive adjustment going from working within an agency to setting up on your own, and how some of the challenges that can crop up might be really unexpected.

I know, as well, how hard it can be to justify any time spent on training or development when you’re freelance, especially if you feel like you need to be working for clients every moment of your working day.

In fact, you might even need help with that mindset shift in particular – going from seeing training or well, anything that isn’t client chargeable work, as something you can’t find time for to seeing these as a crucial part of running a successful freelance business.

This is the first of three videos I’ll be releasing around support for freelancers – a topic I’ve been focusing on recently as I was invited to write an article for the EMWA journal ‘Medical Writing’ on crafting a sustainable freelance career, including how coaching or mentoring can help with this. There’s a link to the article in the video description, so do have a read and let me know what you think.

1. What do you need support with?

So what do you need support with?

Sometimes it’s really obvious what the problem is – maybe you’ve been asked to work on lung cancer, but you don’t have any oncology experience.

It’s time to learn a new therapy area!

Or maybe you have challenges with PowerPoint, or even doing your first tax return as a freelancer.

These kind of concrete problems have concrete solutions, but it still takes time to find those solutions and actually implement them.

Gaps in skills and experience will often mean that you need to find some training, but the type of training, and where you can actually get it as a freelancer might be the stumbling block.

Procrastination, or even justifying the time to do the training, even if you know it’s important, can also compound the problem that you’re facing. We’ll look at all of these things in the next section of the video, but first I want to consider more nebulous challenges.

Maybe even that uncomfortable feeling where you know something isn’t quite right, but you’re not entirely sure what’s wrong, and you definitely don’t have any idea how to fix it.

That’s a fairly common feeling for freelancers because we’re out on our own in a complex, fast moving industry. It isn’t easy to know whether you are making the right decisions or approaching something in the right way if you don’t have a sounding board or anyone you can look to as an example. It can be tough, but this feeling won’t go away if you ignore it.

Taking some time to define the problem will help you identify how you can fix it.

You could maybe journal about it, do a mind map of exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling. Maybe movement would help, so going on a walk and talk.

That could be with a friend, but I sometimes find that I don’t really want to talk to another person, so I will pop in my headphones and go for a walk and record a voice note talking through, so I look like I’m on the phone, but I’ve actually just talked to myself about whatever’s going on.

Knowing what’s at the bottom of your issue will help you find potential support solutions. Now, it may be completely obvious without going through this whole deliberation process exactly what the problem is – fair enough!

Maybe you’re finding yourself working every hour you’re awake because you don’t feel you can turn work down.

Maybe you’re struggling with networking to actually build a sustainable client base.

Maybe you can never find the time to send out invoices and then feel terrified about chasing clients for payment.

Coaching or mentoring could help with these kind of challenges.

Now, there are overlaps and coaches and mentors often use elements of both within their practice, but general definitions would say that a coach would ask questions and use active listening, reflecting back what you say to help you find solutions to your own problems.

They don’t necessarily have direct experience of your situation or the specific challenge that you are going through, but they will have training and experience around coaching people through problems.

A mentor on the other hand, will draw on specific experience to help you understand different options that are available to you, or make suggestions of potential approaches that you could use, maybe helping you put together a plan of exactly how you’re going to do those things, maybe even offering contacts or other sort of avenues that you could go down to actually solve your problem.

This is just a general rule of thumb, but coaching might be more useful if you are experiencing general business-type challenges, or maybe issues with the freelance mindset or burnout, whereas mentoring could be more useful if you are experiencing MedComms-specific challenges.

I’ll also look at both of these in more detail later on in the video, but I do want to reiterate that it’s going to be so useful if you can take the time to define your challenge, and weigh up the potential support options that might help solve it. That way, you’re more likely to find support that will really help.

3. Finding appropriate training

The kind of training that you need will depend on what kind of gap you need to fill.

If you are having a challenge with some kind of software or a tech issue, then you might find the answer on LinkedIn Learning or YouTube. They have bite-sized little snippets to take you through specific little problems, but also giant deep dives to get you up to expert level in basically any kind of software that you can imagine.

You could even potentially ask ChatGPT to walk you through something that you’re struggling with.

But a particularly common software that we need to get to grips with in MedComms is PowerPoint.

I would really recommend looking at the resources that BrightCarbon have. They are a PowerPoint design agency, but they’ve got a huge number of free resources, including regular free webinars on different PowerPoint and other slide platform topics.

That is fantastic for keeping your skills up to date, and I’ve found that I’ve learned things from these webinars that I didn’t even realise I needed to know, but they also have BrightSlide, which is a toolbar that you can add into your ribbon on PCs and Macs, for magical additional features.

So they’ve got a thing where you can decide whether you want to align objects to the first or last object that you’ve selected, a tool to assess the accessibility of your content, looking at the fonts and sizes and colours that you are using, and many, many more incredible things that are really useful for the kind of content that we do in PowerPoint.

If we think about the example of needing to learn a new therapy area that I mentioned earlier, this is something where you could do a course on Coursera or FutureLearn or other platforms that run MOOCs, massive online open courses. sometimes you have to pay for a certificate and maybe to get feedback on activities that you do within the course, but often there is a free option to just view the material, which can be exactly what you need.

They have a lot of different courses on different diseases and aspects of diseases, but they also have other topics that might be relevant, maybe statistics – I’ve seen one on the data analyses used in clinical trials that looked really interesting.

But there’s also pathophysiology of various different things, drug discovery, how different types of drugs work – so their mechanisms of action – and also different aspects of clinical practice.

All things that will be really interesting and could be exactly what you need to get your knowledge up to scratch.

If you’re looking for more MedComms-specific training though, it might be useful to check out the resources from various professional organisations.

All these links are in the description below, but you might want to look at EMWA or AMWA as a starting point – so they are the European and American Medical Writing Associations. They have both got conferences, journals, webinars, blogs and newsletters, and specific training activities.

Now, you do have to be a member to access some of them, but they do have a lot of open access resources too. There’s also ISMPP – the International Society for Medical Publications Professionals.

Now you might have heard of them because of CMPP – the Certified Medical Publications Professional, exam that they run. But they have a lot of other resources too, including their conference newsletter, free webinars, and even more resources for members too.

MAPS is another organisation that might be a useful one to look at – it’s the Medical Affairs Professional Society. So here we have a bit of an overlap between MedComms and pharma because obviously medical affairs is a department within pharma companies. But again, there may well be really useful resources to help you with the challenge that you are facing. And they have a podcast, a blog, a magazine, and again, many more training activities and things for members.

If you’re looking for free resources specifically though, then the webinars from MedComms Networking with Peter Llewellyn are fantastic. There’s a huge library on a massive range of different topics, including a few with me.

I also have courses specifically for Medical Writers, so I can take you through the fundamental writing skills that you need to be a Medical Writer, through storytelling in MedComms, and looking at briefing and reviewing and comment incorporation.

Again, there’s a link to all this below, but if there’s a topic that you would really like a course on, you can also let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

I’m also aware though that finding the right training is often the easy part. Finding the time and the brain space to actually do it is often where the wheels come off the wagon.

I’m here to help you with that too.

Training Tuesdays is what I would suggest. It’s the ideal day to factor in training – it’s early enough in the week that you’ve got time to do all of the other things that you need to do, but it’s after Monday, as long as Monday is your first working day of the week.

Mondays are the day where we have to deal with emergencies, or urgent tasks and also figure out what else is going to fit within the week – what we really have to get done.

If you schedule some training time first thing on a Tuesday morning, probably an hour, and then decide what your goal for that time is, and do that training before you do anything else, you will actually get it done.

So this means no email, no quick tasks, no ‘just checking in’ – it’s too easy to be side-tracked if we allow ourselves to do this.

It’s only an hour after all, and once it’s done, you will have accomplished some training because it’s much better to plod through training activities just on one hour a week, than aim to blitz it all in one session, but never actually do that session because too many things crop up and get in the way.

Obviously you need to find the time and day that works for you, but the principle is there. Schedule it, plan your goal, and don’t get side-tracked.

3. Coaching for general challenges

Coaching might be the best way for you to find support with general business challenges.

So in a coaching situation, you will be supported to find your own answers. And this kind of business support isn’t necessarily MedComms-specific, though some coaches do have MedComms experience.

You might want support with general business planning to suit you and the way that you want to live and work.

You might need support with putting systems in place, whether that’s for finances or project management. These things can be really tricky for MedComms freelancers coming in on the medical writing side in particular, because when we’re working in an agency, client services handles all of that stuff. We don’t necessarily get exposed to it.

You might also need some support figuring out your business structure options, or tax support. These kind of things are probably better coming from an accountant, but a coach might also be able to point you in the right direction there.

Mindset or burnout issues are something else that a coach might really be able to help you with.

Now, this is not counselling or psychiatric support. If you are really struggling, see your GP and get some proper specialist help to get back on an even keel before attempting coaching. There’s only so much that you can do in one go, especially if you’re dealing with clinical depression or anxiety or other issues.

But if you are embarking on coaching, they will help you define what’s important for you and put together strategies with you to overcome any challenges that you are facing.

So that could be things like uncertainty or instability that is inherent in the freelance life and can be very challenging to get your head around.

Sometimes that means that people take on every piece of work that’s offered, which leads to burnout, and sometimes it’s very difficult adjusting to not having enough work some of the time.

Now, both of these different considerations are partly about your mindset and adjusting to this new way of working, but it’s also partly about business planning, knowing what ‘enough’ work looks like, and having a cushion for slower months, and a plan for building a broad client base so that slow months are less likely to happen, but you know what to do if they do.

We also, as freelancers, often need to unlearn things that we’ve picked up during agency life for a more sustainable freelance approach. Freelancing is different from in-house work, and we need to make more proactive decisions about how we’re going to do things and also potentially what we’re going to do.

I talk about this in more detail in my video about taking control of your freelance career, so you might want to watch that to get some ideas about what I’m talking about.

In general, agency experience that you may have had is likely to colour how you approach things, but it isn’t the only way. You need to find your own approach as a freelancer and allow it to evolve over time, because life changes you and you don’t have to be rigid, especially as a freelancer.

We often also need support with boundary setting and tools to help us enforce those boundaries. Now, these tools are particularly important because watching people trample all over the boundaries that you have worked hard to define is almost worse than not having the boundaries in the first place.

So, this might be around your working hours and days, maybe creating time for things outside work, maybe caring responsibilities, but also maybe fun stuff, sport or exercise or hobbies. These things are important too.

Once we’ve defined what those boundaries are, we need a safe space to practice enforcing them, or work through any objections or mindset issues that we might feel around actually enforcing them in practice so that we can do it effectively when put in that situation.

It can feel really wrong to say no to a client or ask them for more time or defend your rates.

It is not wrong. It is not wrong to do these things.

It’s hard the first time, but having a strategy and sets of tools that you can use will make it easier and help you get used to it in the long run.

Freelancers sometimes also need support around building, focus on other areas outside of work, so that our self-worth isn’t inextricably tied to our work and what we are doing day-to-day.

We always take work seriously in MedComms, I know, and Medical Writers may well have some perfectionist tendencies.

But if work becomes all-encompassing and we take everything really personally, then we end up not having the time or capacity for any other things, and burnout becomes a real risk. This is definitely something that coaching can help with, but when you are choosing a coach, you need to find the right person for you.

They’re not all the same, obviously, so look at a few different coaches. Maybe ask friends or relatives for recommendations. It’s really important to feel safe talking to them so that you are able to be vulnerable, to get the benefit.

When you find some potential options, look at their website, any social media, and think about whether you would really click with them and whether they are talking about the kind of challenges that you are facing, so that you know whether they will have a good chance of being able to help you.

Most coaches will offer some kind of free introductory session or discovery call so that you can have a chat with them before you pay for sessions to check that the chemistry is working between the two of you. This is a really important way of making sure that the relationship is going to be right and you are going to be getting the right kind of support.

4. Mentoring for MedComms-specific challenges

If the challenge that you are facing is MedComms specific, then mentoring might be best for you.

A MedComms mentor is someone with experience that you can benefit from, but not necessarily follow that experience exactly. They will give you options or ideas to try, maybe contact details of people who could help you with specific things and potentially also help you with skills, like how to approach a particular project or therapy area.

This could be someone in your network. Peer mentoring is a fantastic way to solve challenges, and it might be that you’ve got a work best friend that will help you with this. It’s great to have someone that you can chat with, even if you don’t necessarily have a specific issue, so someone that you can moan to about a rubbish project or annoying client, but also celebrate finishing that rubbish project or signing with a lovely client.

It softens the blows and enhances the highs if we can share them with someone who really understands, and this person can potentially mentor you or help you mentor yourself through particular challenges. They might also be able to give you a bit of a mentoring exchange if you have different strengths and experiences that you could potentially share with each other.

If there isn’t anyone that you can think of who would be able to act in that capacity for you, then you could potentially join freelancing or MedComms networking groups to try to find potential mentors and build your network of relationships that way.

Another approach that you can take if there isn’t someone that could be a peer mentor for you, but might also be useful no matter what your situation is, the mentor in your head.

This is something that I developed for myself when I first became a team leader for a variety of very complex reasons, it was a baptism by fire. I didn’t really have much senior support except from the Managing Director, and he was great, but he didn’t have a scientific services background. I had a lot of decisions to make and a fairly inexperienced team who needed a lot of leadership.

It was a massive step up for me. I’d been a Senior Medical Writer before that, and there were definitely moments where I felt absolutely crushing imposter syndrome.

But, I had a secret weapon. The mentor in my head.

My line manager in my previous job was fantastic and had taught me a huge amount. Whenever I was faced with a situation that I didn’t know how to handle, I just thought ‘What would Gary do?’

Assessing my instinctive reaction against Gary’s, even just in my own mind, helped me make those tricky decisions effectively and make me feel more confident about what I was doing.

We can all do this.

We all know someone whose judgement that we trust, who knows what they’re doing. We can choose someone to be the mentor in our head to help us fight those imposter syndrome feelings and make those decisions that feel really complex.

So who could be the mentor in your head? Just think, ‘What would they do?’

And this process sometimes makes it much easier to actually follow your own instincts.

Medical Writers tend to be perfectionists, as I said earlier, and we overthink things, but looking at it from someone else’s perspective can short-circuit that process so that we can actually find a path and act.

Now, asking that question and thinking what would they do doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to follow the same thing that we think they would do, but it might help you see how you want to do things differently. Either way, it gives you confidence and can really work to trick yourself out of imposter syndrome.

There are definitely situations though where you need professional mentoring support.

I am obviously the MedComms Mentor, but there are others out there. We have specific MedComms experience that will help you through MedComms specific challenges, acting as a sounding board to help you navigate through those challenges.

So it could be things like networking and business development through that MedComms lens, project challenges, helping you approach new things or tackle tricky things that you don’t quite know how to get your head around.

I also work with mentoring clients around the mindset and burnout challenges that I mentioned earlier with coaching, and also things like systems, finance challenges and general confidence.

I also help people define their ideal role, so making sure that if they are working as a freelancer, it’s in the right way for them and they know how they’re going to be working, why they’re going to be making particular decisions, and it fits together in a sustainable way so they can have the life that they want.

I also work with some clients who aren’t sure whether they want to freelance or work in an agency, and I’ll help them define what their ideal role is in this situation too. And sometimes that will be looking at different types of agencies and figuring out where they would be best to go, and help them find that ideal position.

Either way, if you are interested in working with me as your mentor, then you can sign up for a free 30-minute call to discuss your challenge and see if we would be suited to working together.

I’ll give you some options of how this could work, plus some resources that might help you get started even if you don’t sign up for mentoring.

I will also tell you if I don’t think I can help and where possible, I’ll give you contact details of someone who might be better suited to overcoming the challenge that you are facing.

And just in case there’s anyone from an agency cheekily watching this freelancer support video, I also work with agencies to provide mentoring support for team members, so do let me know if it would be useful for me to support you or your team.

Download the PDF summary

I hope this video has shown you that just because you’re a freelancer doesn’t mean you should be isolated or give up on career development, and that there are lots of different options that you could take depending on what challenge you’re facing.

1. If you start off by defining exactly what you need support with, it will be easier to identify potential options that would be suitable
2. If it’s a skills or experience gap you can find appropriate training and implement Training Tuesdays to ring fence that time
3. Coaching might be your best option for general business challenges or issues around mindset or burnout
4. Whereas MedComms specific challenges could be tackled via mentoring. Maybe someone in your network, someone in your head, or even with me.

In my next two videos, I’ll be looking at mentoring in a bit more detail.

Firstly, looking at how you can get the most out of mentoring, no matter who your mentor is.

The video after that will focus on how you can be an effective mentor.

If you’ve found today’s video helpful, please do give it a like and maybe share it with a freelance friend in your network.

You can download a free PDF summary from a link in the description below, covering everything that we’ve discussed today, along with my article published in the EMWA journal.

Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or any suggestions for other video topics. I’d love to hear from you.