I tweeted yesterday that the King's Speech showed the value of the experienced freelance. Within a few minutes I had enough responses to demonstrate clearly that 140 characters are sometimes just not enough.
So here' goes...
There's a wonderful scene towards the end of the film where the King points out that Logue has no qualifications, no training, no authority. The implication being that this made him an unskilled nobody - an accusation the King had thrown at him in an earlier scene.
Logue calmly runs through all the experiences that had given him the skills he needed to help people with speech problems. He also pointed out how many successes he'd had.
This struck a chord with me. If you work for yourself it's essential to understand what skills you have, what you've achieved and what makes you different.
You also need to find ways to explain this to potential clients. It's more important than any formal qualification.
New freelances starting out in the creative industries sometimes find it difficult to see how anyone will take them seriously - especially if they've only ever worked as an employee of the BBC and are going through a redundancy process.
The most important thing is to recognise and value all the experience you've collected, and turn that to the advantage of the client and yourself.
It didn't do Lionel Logue any harm. And having Geoffrey Rush playing you in a film about your life wouldn't be so bad either.
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