Freelance Tutorial: practical exercises to discover your strengths

Learn to find your strengths and build your trajectory with these exercises proposed by Mònica Rodríguez Limia

Mònica Rodríguez (@rodriguezmon) is a business mentor for creators and creatives. She considers herself passionate about her work and believes that everyone has a great capacity to improve. For Mònica, education is the key and she believes that through it we still have time to change the world.

For this reason, Mònica proposes in this tutorial several keys to get to know yourself better before starting an entrepreneurial project, through some simple exercises that will allow you to discover your strengths. You can see them below in the video:

What do you already have in your backpack?

The exercises proposed by Mònica start from a fundamental principle: before starting your business, you have to be aware of what personal and economic resources you have to undertake it. Discovering your personal profile can be done in many ways, and Mònica proposes several.

Review your previous work

The idea is to make three columns: one for the things you are good at and also like to do, one for the things you are good at but don't like to do, and a last one for the things you neither like to do nor find easy. You just have to fill each of them with those skills or personal likes and dislikes that best fit: it's a simple and visual way to start to see better what your creative profile is.

How you see yourself, how you think you are seen and how others see you

Ask two friends, two family members and two present or former colleagues about your strengths and weaknesses. In this way, you will be able to compare the vision you have of yourself with how you think others see you, and especially with the reality of how those who know you see you.

Related to this, another exercise you can do is to ask yourself, when these groups of people approach you to ask for something, what do they ask of you? This way you can also understand what you mean and what your skills mean to them.

Choose your benchmarks

Finally, another simple but very interesting exercise: choose four companies that are references for you, and describe why you like them: for their products, the image they project, their mission... ideally, two of them should be large and with international projection. It doesn't matter if they are in your sector or not: the essential thing is that they inspire you as a professional.

If you liked this tutorial by Mònica Rodríguez, don't miss her online course "Business models for creators and creatives" where you will learn how to create your personalized business model, taking into account the particularities of the creative sector, to develop a career path with maximum opportunities for success through a specialized business canvas.

You may be interested in:

- Money and financial management for creatives, a course by Mònica Rodríguez Limia
- Freelance: keys and tools to succeed being your own boss, a course by Martina Flor
- LinkedIn: build your personal brand, a course by Núria Mañé
- Visual Storytelling for your personal brand on Instagram, a course by Marioly Vazquez.