Discourage

verb [ T ] UK ​ /dɪˈskʌr.ɪdʒ/ US ​ /dɪˈskɝː.ɪdʒ/

discourage verb [ T ] (MAKE LESS CONFIDENT)

B2 to make someone feel less confident, enthusiastic, and positive about something, or less willing to do something:

The thought of how much work she had to do discouraged her.

Freelancers have to deal with discourage as a daily thing. There is no automatic pay-check and often clients have different reasons for who they work with. Sometimes you are outside their budget or they choose their friend instead or simply don't know how great the results would have been if it was you who had taken the pictures. And it feels like you have to start all over again and take a look and force growth. The only encouraging thing is that after 7 years, I have seen that discourage is not there to stay and it pushes you to improve. Sometimes it isn't your work but their budget what the problem is.

I had just gone through a process of a few days of contact with the potential client and everything was perfect, they seemed to really like my work and I felt confident in being able to provide what they needed according to their briefing. At the end they say they went for someone else and I asked for the reason, simply as own feedback. The contact person was kind enough to provide this for me and it indeed came down to last minute budget changes.

I was less discouraged when I heard that this was the reason, specially because it was also mentioned that they had other projects in mind they were considering me for where there was an available budget. But before getting this feedback I felt like I had just thrown my time to the container.

I would like to hear, how do you deal with discourage?