Natalie Sisson: The Surprising Truth About Freedom (Full Transcript)

And so today I’d like to share the three stages of freedom that I have discovered on my journey so that you can apply it to your life.

Stage 1 is to free your mind from the conventional ways of living. So it is actually about eight years ago to this very day and I’m in London, England. To the outside world, I look like I have it all together. I worked my way up the corporate ladder to end up in a senior management position, loads of pay, lots of responsibility, a whole team under me. And yet, I’m not happy. In fact, something on the inside of me is dying a little. And I realize that I’ve given away my freedom. Somebody else is telling me when to wake up in the morning, what to do, how to act, how to feel. And I realize in this moment this is obviously not what I want.

I watch co-workers coming to work each day, checking in and checking out like robots. They’re not even present, they’re missing out on the most important moments of their life. We all are. And then it hit me one day when I was on my daily commute to work, on the tube, in complete silence, squished in like a siding with thousands of others, no eye contact. I know a lot of you know this feeling. And I realized that I am wasting 45 minutes a day commuting to and from work. I’m giving up 15.6 days in a year to dedicate myself to being a sardine. I mean, isn’t it ridiculous?

And when you look at the 9-to-5 rat race, it’s totally inefficient. We go to work every day from 9 to 5 in shops, post offices, dentists, banks. They all open just as we’re going to work and they close right about the time that we’re leaving work, which means we want to get anything done we have to go out in the lunch hour or after work with everybody else and queue up to do it. This is just totally inefficient. And if this is a race, nobody is going to win it.

Now I ask myself: how did I get to this place? How did I get to a place where I worked myself into a job I thought I wanted, to earn money to buy things I didn’t need, to work for somebody else on their terms and to have zero impact on the world. Can I have a show of hands in here if anybody else has ever felt like this or currently feels like this? Right, heap of you! Now you’re not actually alone.

In a recent global study of 120,000 participants, a staggering 48% of people stated that they were unhappy in their jobs. 48%! So I figure at this point, if that’s you, you have two options. One: quit, escape now. Two: make the most of what you have. Can you ask for flexible working hours so that you can turn up to work earlier, leave a little later, and miss that dreaded commute? Or could you have some work from home days where it’s been proven you will be more productive and efficient.

Now I can guarantee you which option I took here, I had just received a promotion, I had received a raise and I bought a house in London. And so I did what any other sane person would do. I handed in my notice. I sold off everything I owned. I packed up what was left into a suitcase and I booked a one-way flight to Vancouver, Canada to play World Championship Ultimate Frisbee which I love and to live the dreams.

Stage 2 is to do work you love that supports your ideal lifestyle. So here I am. I’ve landed in Vancouver, Canada and I realized one very important thing. I am now, in fact, homeless, jobless and I have no freaking idea what I’m going to do. Luckily, I met my business partner at a networking event, and we co-founded a technology company called FundRazr.

Now the next 18 months were a complete roller coaster ride of startup world. I loved the pace, I loved the challenge, I loved using all my experience and knowledge drawn from the corporate world and applied it to this business. What I didn’t love was that we were working really long hours. We were drinking too much bad coffee, and I certainly wasn’t getting to play enough ultimate Frisbee. And I realized I’ve built myself another job. Except this one has 10 times the responsibility, way less freedom and way less flexibility.

About this time I had a chat, an honest chat with my business partner. And he said, “Natalie, I know the blog that you’ve been writing. Perhaps you should go off and turn it into a business since you’re so passionate about it”. And I was like great idea.

So a few months later, we parted amicably. This was around April 2010 and I realized I have a blog and no way of getting paid. So for the next six months, I hassled like crazy and until I was down to the last $17 in my bank account, which is not a nice feeling at all, I finally found a paying client. And then I went on to actually set up three social media workshops. And to the outside world once again it looked like I had it going on. I mean I could afford my rent, I had clients lining up and I had a good reputation around town. But I knew at this point I needed to take a risk if I wanted to live the life that I really wanted to live and have the right business, which was one that allowed me location-independence and freedom.

So I packed up my stuff, got over the risks and booked a one-way flight to Buenos Aries, Argentina to dance tango, to learn Spanish and to eat as many bananas as I possibly could. And at first, I thought I had taken control. It was exhilarating and then I soon realized that I had once again built myself less freedom. The business was the dictator of my life. I was stressed out, I didn’t have much money and the very thing that I’ve gone to Argentina to do I wasn’t able to.

And I realized as I kept traveling from country to country that when I was working on my business, I felt guilty for not being a tourist and exploring the country that I come to visit. And when I was off being a tourist, I felt guilty that I wasn’t working on my business. And in this moment of grace, I realized this isn’t freedom. I’m working harder than ever all by myself and even though I love what I’m doing, I am NOT making this happen. I am going to burn out. I’m going to end up resenting what I actually started out to do in the first place.

And so I bit the bullet. I hired my first-ever contractor, Margaret, my virtual assistant. And in two weeks, I handed over everything that I knew that she needed to do to run my business without me. And then I put it all to the test. I signed up to Tour dAfrique, which is a bike ride of 6,500 kilometers or 4,000 miles. And I found myself cycling from Nairobi, Kenya to Cape Town, South Africa.

Now what did I learn? First off, I learned that I got really really sick to 10 lines. Second, I had a massively sore back and it never stopped hurting. And thirdly, I got so many flat tires, they nicknamed me Flatalie.

What else I learned is that while I was watching wild elephants cross my path and see hyenas and giraffes come into our camp at night, that I was, in fact, making money online. I also knew nobody missed me on social media. Nobody cared that I wasn’t Facebooking or Tweeting or answering their email. And as I cycled 160 kilometer plus days, raising money for Women Win and going on the biggest personal challenge of my life, I felt incredibly free – the free as I had never felt.

So when I got back from that trip, I decided to take it to the next level. I put systems in place. I hired more people in my team and essentially I said about creating a sales funnel that was automated. I worked myself out of a job and into the position of leading my company The Suitcase Entrepreneur dedicated to helping 1 million entrepreneurs create freedom in business and adventure in life. I even redefined what freedom meant to me. I made up a new adjective. I am now a freedomist. I can do what I want, when I want, where I want. I’m making more money than I ever realized. I’m having more fun, I’m having more adventure, I’m living the dream. And what’s more — I was meeting hundreds of people around the world doing this for themselves, creating their own freedom plan, like the Denning family of six children who travel around the world while they run their freelance business. To Sam and Janine in New Zealand who both have businesses they run from home and 20 hours a week or less, they can spend quality time with their adorable children. To Jodie and Nat who are full time professional house sitters they get to live around the world for free, looking after adorable dogs and cats. To Paul and Sheryl who basically make and sell TV programs from their yacht while sailing around the world. I mean these guys have got it made. To designers and developers and entrepreneurs who work on cool projects while traveling like Hacker Paradise community.

And I found out that there is literally nothing that you can’t do when you appreciate what your perfect day is and then you go about creating the right freedom plan to make it a reality, which leads me into Stage 3: define your own version of freedom and live it.

So it’s summer of 2015 and I find myself in beautiful Portugal. I’ve rented an apartment with this amazing view. I am drinking Sangria like it’s going out of fashion. I’ve got good looking Portuguese men around me. But my little scooter I’ve nicknamed Blue Steel and I’m racing around town, working from rooftop bars and cafes and hanging out at beaches. And I realized for the first time in six years, I feel like this is a country that I could call home. My community and my podcast listeners tell me that I sound happy and I am happy. And I feel free. For a couple of weeks and I’m speaking to 500 digital nomads at a conference honored to speak to them actually and tell them all about creating their own freedom plan and building a community. And I walk off stage and I’m on a real high and then I get the worst call of my life. It’s from my sister back home, she tells me that dad is in hospital and they’re not sure that he’s going to come out.

Now when you’re halfway around the world from the people that you love most, this is a really difficult thing to hear. For the next couple of days, I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can barely function. And then my mom calls me from the hospital bed crying, and she says, “Nat, can you come home?” And I’m like absolutely. So I jumped on the first flight out of there, packed up my bag into a suitcase, gave back my scooter and go on the longest 36-hour journey back to New Zealand. When I get there jet lagged, sleep deprived, I go straight to the hospital.

Now mom warns me that he might not be able to recognize me. Fortunately, he did. But the next five months were the hardest roller coaster ride in a different kind of roller coaster that I had never experienced emotionally. He relapsed twice more and on the third visit to hospital he never came out.

Now that day, on December 1 of last year I lost not only an amazing father but I lost my best friend who I adored. And I had two very important life realizations in that moment. One is that my definition of freedom had found a new meaning. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, when I wanted, where I wanted. Now it was the ability to drop everything in the moment to come halfway around the world to be with the most important people in my life who I loved. And I am so fortunate and grateful that I have built a freedom business that allowed me to do this. And had I still been in my nine-to-five or in my non-freedom related business that I felt trapped in, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford the flight let alone take more than two weeks off really. And I would have been pulled between working on that and being with my family.

And the second point that I want to make is that your definition of freedom is completely unique to you, whether you want to wake up in a yard in a forest, whether you want to sail around the world, whether you want to take six months off around the world with your family to live and work anywhere. Perhaps freedom to you means the right to vote, the right to education. Perhaps it means the right to be single or married, to have a beautiful home, or to have no home at all. It might even mean that you want to be the world’s fastest flat tire changer which is a title that I am very happy to give back to you.

So once again it comes down to choice: what do you want your life to look like? What is your freedom plan?

Imagine if you had an extra 10 hours a week and more income, where would you wake up in the world? How would you spend your time? Who would you spend it with? What would it look like, sound like, smell like, and feel like? No more excuses, no more Sundays, you do have time, you do have choice. You do have the right to choose freedom.

 

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