We probably all have mixed feelings about customer service, from love to hate to envying those who do it well. I spent over fifteen years in frontline customer service, and am thinking about how my lessons learned there apply to my new freelance world.

I’m back with a new Daily Freelancer, coming off of a busy week last week where I learned lots of things! Today, it’s all about thinking about the customer and how to connect to their identity when marketing your company — with a little help from Simon Sinek’s TED Talk.

I’m finding that there are many mindset shifts you have to go through to become a successful freelancer — one of them being the shift to understanding yourself as an expert. Freelancing, ultimately, is not about an employee/boss relationship, but is more like a B2B business mixed with deep customer service.

I’m a writer, so my outlook on reality is a bit skewed, in that one part of me lives life while the writer part of me stands back and processes it. I’ve also been working on another project about storytelling, and in taking a closer look at the Hero’s Journey, the classic framework for storytelling, I realized that we fit right in.