The stability vs freedom paradigm

Lola had two asks for our business coaching work together: Over the course of 12 sessions, she wanted to find more stability in her business. But she also wanted to maintain the freedom she already had.

She noticed that whenever she tried to add stability to her workload, she started to freak out. What if putting clients into a less chaotic workflow meant that she had less freedom? She loved being able to surf whenever she wanted. She loved being able to take a week off without anyone noticing. She ran her own business because of the freedom and she didn’t want to be accountable to anyone else. But the chaos was also starting to wear on her.

The word stable can be defined in a few different ways. At a basic level, something that’s stable is not likely to overturn. If something is stable, it’s fixed — often to the ground or the wall next to it. But stability is also defined as sanity and sensibility. And it something is stable, it means that it’s not deteriorating.

Often, people come to my coaching room worried that stability and freedom are polar opposites. Like Lola, most of us get into self-employment because we want to control our time. We want to have the freedom to do what we want when we want it.

But placing freedom and stability at opposite ends of the spectrum is what we call in the coaching world a false dichotomy. This is black and white thinking. It says: Either I have freedom, or I have stability. I can’t have both.

If you buy into this, you’ll reject stability in your business at the cost of your own mental health. If stability is all about sanity and sensibility, and if stability is non-deterioration, then not implementing stability in your business means losing all of those things. You’ll start to feel deterioration! You’ll feel less sane and less sensible!

Avoiding stability meant that Lola ran a business where the revenue fluctuated month over month to such a degree that she ended up with more than she needed one month. The next, she couldn’t pay her bills. In her business, a lack of stability was also obvious in her non-repetitive client relationships; each month, she had to start finding work from scratch. For others of us, a lack of stability shows up as a business where you struggle to explain to other people what you…