TLDR: If you're thinking about going independent, skip the tactical advice — the real shift is mental. Three years in, these are the four mindsets that rewired how I work.
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A lot of people have been reaching out lately wanting to know what consulting life is like. My honest answer will always be that it’s chaotic, uncomfortable, and completely different for everyone … but also worth it.
Three years in, I'm not going to pretend I have it all figured out. What I have figured out is how to be okay with not having it figured out … which, as it turns out, is mostly how this gig operates. As a person who likes control, the level of discomfort I sit with daily took a long time for me to be OK with (I still struggle with some days).
The mindset shift is very real and it’s something I’m constantly working on. Consulting requires you to think like a business owner, not an employee, and that rewiring takes self awareness, time, and practice. So instead of sharing tips on how to get started as a consultant, I’m going to share the four mindsets that changed how I work and I think are the most valuable to embrace from day one of your consulting journey.
Mindset 1: Reserve the right to change your mind.
As long as you’re running your own business, your are going to pivot, and start over, and pick up an old scrapped idea to play with again with new learned context. Being a consultant means what worked yesterday might not work today. You are constantly learning, and what that typically results in is you are going to change your mind a lot. The most dangerous mindset for how to run your business is ‘I already said X publicly, now I have to do it this way, because I said that’s how I would do it.’ Just know that changing your mind means you’re likely learning, and that’s a good thing.
Mindset 2: Build the plane as you fly it.
I’ll explain this one by telling you a story. About three months ago, I kept getting the same request from founders about how to help them figure out their story, but a $10k/month retainer for a seed-stage company was a non-starter. So I had a theory: what if the narrative itself was the product? I built the Living Narrative before I had a single client for it. The website went up before I had a case study. I had a price point ($5,000) before I had proof it would work at that price. I was guessing — educated guessing, based on what I was seeing in the market — but guessing all the same. But it worked, and I learned more about what founders actually needed from those first few engagements than I could have from six months of planning what to build. I had a product because I made a bet on what I was seeing and built toward it (not because I had all the answers).
Mindset 3: If no one’s coming to save you then no one’s coming to stop you either.
This has been my battle cry for my entire consulting career. Essentially what I’m getting at here is that a high agency mindset is critical for survival. You need a strong sense of personal control (aka ‘everything that happens to me is because of my decisions - I can do anything’), the ability to proactively problem-solve (aka ‘yes this works but it’s not efficient, how can I make things better?’), and a refusal to be limited by circumstances or conventional rules around you (aka ‘no means not in that direction’ or ‘everyone is going right, what happens if I go up’). This sounds empowering in theory, but in practice, it can be isolating. No one is going to tell you that you can’t do something, and no one is going to tell you what you do. Everything is up to you, your imagination, your goals, and your experience. If you fail, it’s your fault. If you succeed, it’s your fault. And you also have to believe that you can do it – which leads me to my last piece of advice.
Mindset 4: Be okay with nobody agreeing with you.
With the pace of change we’re seeing across every industry, everyone is learning and trying to figure things out for themselves. No one knows what they are doing. Therefore, the only path you have is to find out what works for you and create systems around it. As a business, the only way you are going to stand out is if you think for yourself and form your own opinions. And this means people are going to disagree with you. For consultants this can look like pricing structures, products you create, packaging structures, when to use AI, when to not use AI, speed of delivery … and a million other things I’m not thinking of in this moment. Just know that whatever works for your business and whatever is attracting the right clients for you is all you need.
None of this sounds revolutionary written out. In practice, it demands something most of us were actively trained out of in our in-house careers, which is the willingness to be visibly wrong, to ship before it's perfect, and to change course without apologizing for where you were before.
In-house comms rewards consistency. You protect the brand, stay on message, and have the answer before you raise your hand. Independent consulting requires the exact opposite operating system. You're forming hypotheses in public, testing them on real clients, and updating based on what you learn. The job is to learn faster than the market moves — not to arrive already knowing.
If you're figuring this out, or want to stop figuring it out alone, that's exactly what Comms People is built for. Join us here.
