What Bad Clients Teach Us

Freelancing can teach us a lot about our standards and boundaries, as well as the compromises we make when bereft of other options. In this video, I talk about one of the worst client experiences I’ve had in game audio. I won bad-client bingo: late communication, collapsing rates, impossible deadlines, ignored invoices... the slow psychological degradation of convincing myself that all of it was acceptable. It would be easy to complain for 15 minutes. The more useful exercise is the exploration what fear does to one's judgement. How professionalism can get mistaken for endless tolerance. Why every freelancer needs a barometer for knowing when flexibility has become self-erasure.