Discipline

After working as an in-house translator for six years, I left the company at the end of June 2025 to re-evaluate my career path and started the full-time freelancer experience. No boss, no fixed working hours, and even no work for a period of time. I have more freedom when it comes to time management and workspace. However, there’s a catch to this freedom and my self-management was put to the test. With less work, I had more free time, which sometimes led to me just lying around watching films, reading online news, or watching YouTube videos. It was then that I realised the first reality of a freelancer’s life: Discipline is something you build and maintain yourself; it is not set by any company or organisation. Failing to maintain discipline means plunging yourself into aimless freedom, which is definitely not ideal.

Boundaries

It took me about three weeks after leaving my job to gradually establish a “new normal” relationship with my working life. This simply meant making sure I woke up before 08:00 and went to bed before 23:00. On days when I had no work, I tried to incorporate some reading or podcast listening to feed my brain.

This simple rule hit a snag when one of my clients in the UK changed their way of working. Specifically, they switched from assigning tasks directly-to-linguists to a “first come, first served” basis. As the client sent tasks in their working hours (UK time zone), I needed to stay up later to claim jobs, competing with other freelancers. For six years in the localisation industry, I never had to claim jobs myself as I was so used to getting jobs sent to me on a daily basis. This could explain why this change felt so frustrating at first. Deep down inside, I was able to tell that this new way of working would directly impact my income, appeal to greed and competitiveness, and cause anger when I fail to secure a task. These are all factors that evoke negative emotions, and I genuinely don’t want to spend my working days experiencing this kind of negativity.

This was when I realised the second reality of freelancing: The market and companies hiring freelancers will constantly adjust for their own good. As a freelancer, being flexible and adjusting to meet your clients’ changes are good, but if possible, set BOUNDARIES—mentally, emotionally, ethically, and physically—and WISELY step away when you realise you are no longer comfortable.

I continued working for this company but prioritised my wellbeing by choosing to stay up late to claim jobs on certain days and going to bed early on others. I could tell that this might not be the optimal approach in the long run so I started devising an exit strategy by acquiring additional knowledge and skills in English language teaching, while getting two English certificates: the C2 Proficiency (CPE) and IELTS.

English Proficiency…

I scored 8.5 on my first attempt with the IELTS test, after passing the C2 Proficiency (CPE) a couple of months earlier with a mark of 203/230. Two English certificates, one journey to reflect on my own English learning.

If I remember correctly, my English learning started in late primary years with the black-and-white Streamline English books. From then until the end of high school, I didn’t feel a strong passion for the language; it just felt like I learnt the subject relatively effortlessly, was good at doing textbook tasks, and knew how to imitate native pronunciation. This isn’t to say I was super good in my class, as my classmates were all very capable.

My university years passed uneventfully. Looking back, there was nothing particularly memorable, apart from a few friends teaming up with me for all kinds of presentations. My English language skills didn’t improve much during these years, especially listening and speaking, the two sound-related skills. Later, I realised I was the type that could only process one type of information properly at a time (for example, I’m okay with looking at pictures or text and then processing them in my head, but I would get rather confused if I had to read and listen simultaneously). When it comes to speaking in English, I have a tendency to rush and run out of ideas later, or focus too much on forming grammatical sentences. I still had this issue when sitting both the CPE and IELTS tests, haha.

After university graduation, I worked as a professional translator for six years, and the two skills I honed the most were reading and writing. Translation is a relatively slow process that requires attention to detail and thorough consideration to ensure a proper delivery of the source text’s meaning or message, while producing a translation that sounds natural to the Vietnamese. This requires careful reading. By having this process repeated on a daily basis, I formed the habit of reading slowly and patiently when it comes to lengthy and (seemingly deliberately) complicated things like policies, laws, terms, agreements, etc.

Improving my English writing directly stemmed from the need to argue with the reviewers of my translations. This was often a disadvantaged fight for me, but the important point is I had the opportunity to share the rationale behind my translations. Driven by the need to explain myself, I started experimenting with different writing styles, incorporating evidence, emotions, and sometimes my own attitude. This writing process differed from how I wrote for school tasks, because I now had the motivation to write for myself and to defend my opinion. I no longer wrote for the teachers to read, and certainly did not write to impress anyone with an idea randomly found online. The key takeaway is that skills improve when you have the need to use those skills to express opinions, but you gotta know what your opinion is.

After leaving my corporate job, I prepared for the CPE while still working as a freelancer. Perhaps because it is not a currently popular English exam, the preparation materials felt a bit dated, especially the readings. But I have to say that these readings introduced me to a ton of new vocabulary and question types (for example, the “gapped text”). For someone working in translation for six years with no regular updates on English exams, I considered this test format something new as I had never taken any English proficiency tests before. After the exam, I didn’t even know what I got right or wrong because I couldn’t remember the questions. But I passed anyway. One thing I can say for sure is that there are still a lot of English words/phrases I don’t know, so continuous learning is a must to reach native-like proficiency.

The CPE preparation helped me realise two things: It was less of a discouraging experience when reading things I might not fully understand, and my listening skill hadn’t improved much. The obvious sign is the dip between my speaking and listening marks on the CPE report! After taking the IELTS, I had an additional takeaway: the IELTS reading and listening tests feel more relatable and current, while the difficulty levels might vary. Another important point is there are a lot of IELTS resources that can be easily found online, with test interfaces that have almost-the-same experience as the actual one. This helped me feel more comfortable while taking the IELTS because I was better prepared, and as a result the reading and listening marks were high.

Regarding the writing and speaking tests, I think CPE is a lot more interesting than the IELTS. In the writing test, both require two tasks to be completed, and CPE’s Task 1 is quite similar to IELTS’s Task 2. For Task 2, CPE offers three choices. These can be an article, a review, a report, or a letter. I prefer the CPE probably because of this freedom of choice, and I still remember being really excited to have the opportunity to write an article about the movie In Our Time (1982), which I really enjoyed at the time. In the IELTS test, I always struggle a bit with interpreting different types of charts, and I didn’t complete Task 1 fully on test day. The 7.5 writing mark seems to have been carried by Task 2.

In the speaking test, if the IELTS is a 1:1 interview format, the CPE is a 2:2 or 2:3 format, meaning there are two examiners and two or three candidates taking the test together. People may experience several things when taking a test with others: feeling dominated, wanting to dominate others, everyone showcasing their own skills, or cooperating to nail the test together. The CPE speaking test has this format as there will be a discussion session among candidates to reach a decision, assessing the candidates’ ability to express opinions, persuade, and show agreement/disagreement. Strategically, I think cooperating with the partner candidates brings confidence and positive feelings, as all candidates are in the same boat. That day, I was lucky enough to be paired with a friendly and cooperative guy, combined with a nice examiner, so the speaking test was not overly stressful.

Conversely, in the IELTS speaking test, I got assigned an examiner with a rather… judgmental tone and somewhat frowning expression. I know examiners are trained to assess language competency based on certain descriptors, but are they trained to separate personal biases from the candidate’s views? It felt like the examiner’s tone was somewhat dismissive of my points. In Part 3, it sounded like they wanted to challenge me until I admitted my opinion was not so good. But I managed to keep my cool, answer with calmness and say whatever came to mind, knowing that I was about to see the light at the end of the tunnel. When the result showed a 7.0 for speaking, I immediately submitted a remark request and eventually got an 8.0 as the final speaking mark. This helps me get 8.5 as the final overall. At the end of the day, the biggest achievement of this journey was to help me rediscover my love for learning English and better understand my English language competence.

And English Language Teaching Skills

To ensure I had a proper approach to teaching English, I chose to take a 1-month TESOL course. Because the duration was short, what I learnt was at a basic level. I respect the teaching profession and do not believe that simply completing a course like this is enough to make me a good teacher. However, I must admit it is through these basic courses that students or outsiders like me get the chance to break in and explore the profession.

The course introduced me to some important theories of language acquisition, learning, and teaching, alongside practical methods that I believe would be applicable to young learners. As an introvert who worked in the corporate world for six years and has been somewhat “worn down” by adulthood, I honestly took quite a while to adjust my behaviour and emotions to feel at ease with the activeness of the classroom. At the end of the course, I think I was a little more comfortable and “open-hearted,” and I’m happy about that.

Throughout the course, I was guided to find ways to incorporate interesting activities or games into my lessons. I don’t believe this guidance is totally right or wrong as it depends on the learners and the things being taught. For example, I must admit the TPR (Total Physical Response) method is very engaging and highly effective for vocabulary retention. But in my experience, it’s difficult to apply when teaching those who need intensive exam prep, or for teaching phrases whose meanings differ from the surface words (such as “burn the candle at both ends” or “speak of the devil”). This conclusion might be due to my limited experience. I believe a capable teacher will be able to pick the appropriate method for their lesson and their students, and hopefully I can become one.

This course helped me experience a crucial shift in mindset: from someone who seemed to learn English by instinct to someone who knows how to help others learn the language, or at least knows how to be more understanding and patient in helping them learn English in the least painful way. To have this shift, I thought about my feelings when learning French with a very competent teacher who could not understand why I struggled with verb conjugation. I realised one important thing: in a classroom, the teacher is better and more prepared than the students when it comes to that specific subject. So, a teacher focusing on showcasing their competence actually does nothing to help the students’ understanding and progress. The important thing is knowing how to guide, elicit and support so that students want to take action, speak, and express themselves in that language.

Who Am I Without Work?

Since starting freelancing, I have had more time for myself and for thinking about my relationship with work. If I didn’t have those six years of employment, those clients, or those certificates, how would I introduce myself?

In university, as I had nothing related to a career, I often introduced myself like this: “My name is Tan, I’m an Aquarius, and I like cats.” Since starting a part-time job, I’ve introduced myself by my job and no longer mention my interests or passions. At some point, the job will end, or worse, be lost. Tying my identity to my job seems like a convenient way for society to know who I am, but it doesn’t help me know who I am in this life. I haven’t found the answer to this thought, and I will probably still use my profession to introduce myself. The difference perhaps is that from now on, I will also share one thing I love.