What if you needed to ratchet up your income, by oh, 43% or so? And pretty soon.

Or what if you’re tired of scratching around with pipsqueak projects for D-list clients. You want to do work that means something, for clients with actual budgets?

What should you focus on? What do you ramp up?

Your skills? Networking? Productivity?

No. That’s the wrong end of the stick.

If you’re looking to bust out of the minor leagues, crank up your confidence.

Stoke your hubris, arrogance, audacity, nerve, your utterly uncrackable belief in your own infallibility. Cultivate some balls. From what I’ve seen (and experienced) it is the difference between the huddled masses and the elite.

At any given level of skill, the freelancer with the bigger stones, the clanking cast-iron confidence will always command higher fees, work the classier projects, win the juicier clients.

And, ergo, make more money. Twice and thrice over.

(And interestingly, do better work, too.)

Think of guts as a multiplier of skill. Call it the stones factor.

The math of brass

Extreme example:

There are maybe 913 people out there who can design as well, or better, than Peter Arnell. But I bet Arnell out-earns every one of them. Some by a factor of nine.

Okay, maybe Arnell is considered pompous and irritating. (More about that in a second.) And maybe his reputation took a dent with that Tropicana carton and the new Pepsi logo. But, irritating or not, he persuaded clients to hire him for a few million, quite a few times. (I haven’t managed that yet.) And dollars against donuts, Arnell will do so again.

Down here in the trenches, guts and confidence work exactly the same way. The mediocre, talent-free writer who’s convinced she’s a genius will run rings around the mediocre, talent-free writer who’s hiding under her desk.

It fixes a lot

When you’re working with full-on confidence, all the other productivity/networking/self-management stuff takes care of itself. You automatically do what you should be doing.

You produce like crazy, because as you sit down to work, you just know you’re about to create something amazing, and you can’t wait to see what it is. There is no dicking around and twittering and hand-wringing. You bust your chops, and like it. The process feels good.

And if clients send your stuff back marked “WTF?”, you just shrug and come up with something even better. You know there’s a box full of gems in the drawer.

When you’re feeling invincible, you quote higher fees, because that’s what dazzling work costs, after all. And if they say ‘no’, well, they just can’t afford you.

And you network in fourth gear, a few notches above your head, because you know you can play up there with the big guns. You know their pencils aren’t any sharper than yours.

The ‘But’

Huge caveat here.

That carbide-tipped confidence works best when you keep it under your coat. Don’t walk around with your hubris sticking out.

Sure, clients expect self-assurance in a freelancer. Clients want to feel you know what you’re doing, that you will solve the problem, deliver the goods. Exuding competence is good. Dripping with arrogance and ego, no.

In public, in front of the client, it’s far smarter to be understated and modest.

One of the most effective ‘sales’ guys I ever worked with, a video producer, had an uncanny knack for holding back a bit in client presentations. He acted as if he were just itching to say ‘This is going to be freaking brilliant‘, but kept it under wraps.

The effect was much like pressing your thumb over the end of a garden hose, rather than letting it gush. Pent-up energy. Clients always caught that vibe.

You can think you’re brilliant all you want.  Just don’t let it out.

That’s where Arnell blows it.

Okay, so how do you get confident?

Ah.  Isn’t this a chicken-and-egg thing?

How are you supposed to be confident when you’re working scared, with a two-digit bank account and belly full of doubt? What if the business has been boxing your ears for months on end? And clients haven’t liked a thing you’ve done since September?

Been there. Plenty of times. No magic answers, sorry.

But a couple of ridiculously simple things seem to help, though.

I heard an interview once with a morning radio DJ. I’ve long forgotten who. The question was, “How do you sound so damn happy and funny every day? What about those days when everything sucks, when you’re fighting with your wife, when you have a skull-cracking headache? How do you go on air and kid around?”

“Simple,” the guy said. “I just act as if I were having a blast. I step into the persona of a guy who’s just bustin’ out happy, and do exactly what that guy would do, even if I don’t feel it. And you know, after about 15 minutes, I actually am damn happy.”

Oddly, merely acting as if you were confident sometimes works the same way. What would the gutsiest, most self-assured person in the business do right here, right now? Call that client back? Sit down to work and kick some ass?

Conjure up a James Bond character, and play that role for a bit. How would you sound on the phone? How much would that guy quote? Fake it for now. Pretend. Act as if.

(When you think about it, being confident isn’t really the point. It’s the doing that counts. /End of profundity.)

A designer I know digs out some past work to get her juice back. When clients pound her confidence flat, she immerses herself in her private portfolio for a while, to remind herself that she really does have it, dammit.

Me, I’ve been known to re-read some old glory, too, to remind myself that I only pulled that work off because I quit being a chicken.  I just dove in and did it.

The stones factor.