What to do when you fall sick as a creator


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Season 6 Episode 1

Transcription

What's up everybody. It's another episode of The Life Creative. I'm your host, Peter Witham. In this episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about what I do and what I think is a sensible approach when you fall sick as a solo creator.

Okay. So first of all, obviously I'm not a medical expert. Don't take any of my advice as any kind of medical advice, let me get that out of the way. That's all covered. Now, what I'm talking about here is we've all been there, right? You're working on a project, you're working on something and you either start to feel like you're coming down with something or you are not feeling good.

Or, you just wake up one morning and you're like, oh, I feel terrible. Now, what should you do in those situations as a creator? And I got some thoughts on this now depends really on your situation here, but if you're just creating stuff for yourself, meaning that you aren't doing it for a client or any kind of paid work, that kind of stuff.

My advice. I immediately say to myself, okay, you know, I need to give in to this and accept that I'm either getting sick or I am sick and not try to fight it. I think that when you try to fight it, you're just making the situation worse and the work that you create just will not be as good.

It's entirely possible that you're just gonna push yourself even further down into feeling sick and forcing yourself to do something and feeling miserable. So I really think that it's best to just say, okay, I'm going to stop what I'm doing. I'm going to allow my body to be sick.

Start healing and repairing itself and do whatever I need to do to make that happen. For example, one year when I had the flu I just need to give over to this, try and sleep through it, take medications for it and sleep through it as much as I can and just get over it and just accept that it's going to take as long as it takes.

Now that's what I do, when I'm dealing with personal stuff, for example, this podcast is going out a little bit late because the Wednesday evening when I was going to record it just wasn't feeling great. And I just decided, okay, I need to just kind of sleep through this and my body will let me know when I'm ready to get going again.

And sure enough, that's what happened. And here I am now recording this podcast. Now, if I'm doing work for someone, or if you're an employee somewhere, you need to do the right thing, which is, you should really just if you've got sick time at work, take it.

Be sick. You're not going to be much use to anybody. If you're ill or sick, you'll probably make bad decisions and you'll be in a bad mood and it's just not worth it. So if you're in a position where you can take advantage of whatever the setup may be, and again, Just allow yourself to be sick and get over it.

That's what I think is a good plan. I think that's the best way to deal with it. Try and get through that as quickly as you can. Otherwise, you're just going to prolong that sickness period, and you'll just be even more miserable for longer than you would be if you just let it happen and deal with it.

Now, if you are a freelancer or contractor or something like that, and you're working on projects. Let's say, for example, you've got a client and you're working on a project, you've got a deadline and you now realized, oh gosh, I think I'm going down with something or I'm sick. I think that the worst thing you can do is try to force yourself to work through that. I think the best advice I can give there is what I have done in the past, which is contact that client and say, look, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not sure I'm going to make a deadline because I feel like I got to take some time out sick, under the weather, whatever phrase you want to use, but be honest with your clients, tell them I got a problem. I'm ill and don't try to cover it up or pretend like it's not happening.

Just let them know as soon as you can. There's going to be a problem because of this situation. And I think you're going to be surprised and find the most, if not all clients will turn round and say, yep, we understand, please go feel better and then get back to us. So, you know, I think that if you're just honest and upfront with them, that's, what's going to help you the most.

I just wanted to put those out there this week. It's just a couple of little thoughts, in this period where we're all risking being sick with various things. Hope this helps. Please share your tips in the comments or reach out to me, at PeterWitham.com. I would love to hear your thoughts on this and get a discussion going take care of yourselves.

I'll speak to you in the next one.

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