Lisa Beaumont: What Would You Do With Financial Freedom?
Posted on May 27, 2019 by Lisa Cherry Beaumont, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
The route to instant happiness? I asked thousands of people what they'd do if they were financially free; are their top 4 answers the same as yours?
My eyes are tired of rolling back in my head from the overuse of the term “financial freedom” as the route to instant happiness.
“Ohhhh, financial freedom – if only…”
It’s the same as, “I’d be happy if I could just win the lottery.” Cue gazing off into the middle distance…
No, you would not! If you’re saying that, you’ve never thought it through.
Do you know what’s keeping you stuck where you are? Your mind. And a fat stack of cash will never, ever change that. (Don’t panic, that’s actually good news.)
You don’t need a money printing machine to do the things that’ll make you happy, you just have to make a list of things that’ll make you happy and start doing them!
A few years ago, a colleague and I asked thousands of fledgling entrepreneurs, “What would you do if you were financially free?” and here are the top answers:
I WOULD TRAVEL!
Well, travel, then! Stop making excuses that you’re not “financially free”.
If your excuse is that you’re flat broke, move into a dirt cheap house for a bit, get yourself any old job working as many hours as you can, save up a bit of money, sell all your stuff and go and do a workaway (part-time volunteering for bed and board) in a foreign country.
If your excuse is that you’re “stuck” in a well paid job then you’ve probably got a mortgage on a house full of expensive items gathering dust. Rent your house out, dust your stuff off and sell it, go traveling.
If your excuse is that you have children, well, newsflash! They let kids on planes these days, you know. Take them out of school and give them life lessons that no suburban classroom could ever provide.
I WOULD VOLUNTEER!
You don’t have to own the charity, you know. Just go find one that does what floats your boat, and help them out for a couple of hours on a Thursday night. Boom.
I WOULD SPEND MORE TIME WITH FAMILY!
Quit Facebook, problem solved.
Yeah, OK, I know that’s very simplistic but how much time are you wasting on pointless stuff?
And what can you outsource? Do you need to be “financially free” to hire a cleaner once a week so you can spend a few more hours with your loved ones? (The answer to that is no; no you don’t.)
I WOULD WRITE MY NOVEL!
You don’t need any money AT ALL to write and publish a novel. Just carve out some regular time to write and get on with it. Then stick it on Amazon, totally free of charge. (Yes, really. Google it.)
What you really need is to stop making the excuse that you’re not “financially free”, and stop believing that you’re trapped and can’t do stuff without loads of money, because it’s not true.
Make a shortlist of things you want to do, and go and do them. Be resourceful, be brave, think outside the box a bit.
Not even sure what’s important to you? That’s really common, don’t worry. If you’re sick of running on the work-supermarket-home-bed treadmill, and would love to inject some meaning and, gosh, dare we say it, “fun” (remember that?!) into your life, drop me a message.
