The Surprising Truth About Freedom | Natalie Sisson | TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

imagine waking up tomorrow with no monetary constraints no limitations at all actually and the freedom to choose your perfect today close your eyes if you wish and imagine where in the world would you wake up how would you spend your time who would you spend it with what would your day look like smell like sound like and feel like you can open your eyes now I have asked this question to literally hundreds of people over the years and guess what 99% of them can't even answer it they have never actually thought about or imagined their perfect day let alone how to describe it in detail now why is this well I believe is because somewhere along the way we stopped chasing our dreams we stopped imagining what our perfect life would look like and we started handing over the reins to society who told us what to do and how to live and I was one of those people for a while I'd given up on my freedom and now I wanted it back so what is the definition of freedom you may ask well according to the oxford dictionary it is the power or right to act speak or think as one wants now these days I've become a little bit obsessed with freedom and for the last six years I have been living out of my suitcase traveling to 69 countries around the world and essentially figuring out in experimenting how to live and work from anywhere and I finally found the perfect freedom business model that allows me to do this I believe freedom is a right not a privilege 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 State one 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 responsibilities 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 sardine 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 that ridiculous and when you look at the nine-to-five rep race its totally inefficient we go to work every day from 9:00 to 5:00 and 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 if we want to get anything done we have to go out and 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 asked 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 who currently feels like this right Oh heap of you even at the back right now you're not actually alone in a recent global study of 120,000 participants a staggering 48 percent of people stated that they were unhappy in their jobs 48 percent so I figure at this point if that's you you have two options one quit escape now to 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 earned 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 loved and to live the dream Stage two 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 fundraiser now the next 18 months were a complete roller coaster ride at startup world I love the pace I love the challenge I love using all my experience and knowledge drawn from the corporate world and apply 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 know that blog that you've been writing perhaps you should go off and turn that 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 is around April 2010 and I realize I have a blog and no way of getting paid so for the next six months I hustled like crazy and until I was down to the last seventeen dollars 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 sell out free 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 gave away the rest and booked a one-way flight to Juana saris Argentina to dance tango to learn Spanish and to eat as many empanadas as I possibly could and at first I thought I'd 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 two toward our freq which is a bike ride of six and a half thousand 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 sexy tan lines second I had a massively sore butt and it never stopped hurting and thirdly I got so many flat tires they nicknamed me flat early what else I learned is that while I was watching wild elephants crossed my path and see honey's and giraffes come into our camp at night that I was in fact making money online I also nobody missed me on social media nobody cared that I was at facebooking or tweeting or answering their email and as I cycled 160 kilometres last days raising money for women when and going on the biggest personal challenge of my life I felt incredibly free the free as I had ever 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 and business and adventure and life I even redefine what freedom meant to me I made up a new adjective I am now a freedom Asst 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 Jeanine in New Zealand who both have businesses they run from home and 20 hours a week or less so they can spend quality time with their adorable children to Jodi 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 Cheryl who basically make themselves TV programmes 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 late hacker paradise community and I found out that there's 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 three 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'm drinking sangria like it's going out of fashion I've got good-looking Portuguese men around me got my little scooter over nicknamed blue steel and I'm racing around town working from rooftop bars and cafes and hanging out at beaches and I realize 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 straight forward 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 can't eat I can barely function and then my mum calls me from the hospital bed crying and she says net can you come home and I'm like absolutely so I jump on the first flight out of there pack up my bag into a suitcase give 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 mum 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 and a different kind of roller person that I had never experienced emotionally he relapsed twice more and on the third visit to hospital he never came out now that day and December 1st 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 new meaning it wasn't what I wanted to do when I wandered 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 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 yurt and 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'm 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 some days you do have time you do have choice you do have the right to choose freedom

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 64,793

Rating: 4.757576 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Entrepreneurship, Freedom, Women in business

Id: lNNCMu1OjRQ

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2016