Financial freedom. It’s an endless topic and one I’ve become fascinated by. If you’ve read my previous blog posts you’ll know I am always studying financial mind-set and what it takes to become financially successful. And the logical destination for anyone running a business is financial freedom at some level.
So over the last couple of months I’ve made a commitment to start my own personal journey to financial freedom, to study what it means, what it takes to achieve it on a very practical level, and to share that journey with my clients and with you if you keep reading! I really wasn’t sure about going public with it, but this is my life’s work – helping business owners reach their financial potential so they get to live their dream. This is the ultimate accountability for me.
What do you believe?
This wasn’t an easy thing for me to commit to, because I have NEVER actually believed that I could ever achieve financial freedom. I thought it was for my clients, for other people, but not for me. You may recall I have a tendency towards a scarcity mind-set resulting from the trio of financial disasters I went through in the early ‘90s. But the studying I’ve been doing recently has made me realise that this actually is available to anyone who decides it’s possible. So I want to learn everything I can and apply it to how we work with our clients, so we’re all moving forwards to a point where the work and sacrifice will have been really worth something.
I want to prove that this isn’t just about the traditional passive income streams that we read about, but that normal business owners can build a great financial future with the security I’m pretty sure we all want. I also want to prove that financial freedom is possible without sacrificing our health, families and personal lives, and that we can actually be happy on the way. Wouldn’t that be fantastic!
What would financial freedom mean to you?
This financial freedom thing isn’t a simple as it first appears. There are a ton of variables and you have to be clear on a couple of things:
- What, exactly, does financial freedom look like for you? It can’t be a vague idea of something way off in the future.
- This has to be your individual journey – it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks you should want or aspire to. Being financially free for you might be something very modest, completely outrageous or somewhere in-between.
If you want the result of your business efforts to be financial freedom sometime in the future, you have to define what that looks like for you and start mapping out the journey. Trust me, it won’t happen by accident.
Why hardly anyone will end up financially free
There’s so much written about financial freedom. There’s not exactly a shortage of information, so why will most people never get anywhere close? Personally I find that the people who are dominant in the field, people like Tony Robbins and T Harv Eker, although they’re brilliant and I’m a huge fan of their work, I find it hard to make the leap of belief to relate to their situation, as they’re multi, multi-millionaires. I want to show that more modest small businesses like us can also find our own way to financial freedom, whatever that looks like for us.
Just 2% of people make it to financial freedom
Research I read recently said that only 2% of people retire financially free.
The bar is set very low so it should be easy to beat if we know the rules. And that seems a good place to start. If we don’t know the rules, we’re never going to win the game.
I found this list of the main reasons why people never achieve financial success when I was doing the Tony Robbins Wealth Mastery programme:
- They don’t understand their finances and delegate / abdicate that understanding to others. (we see this one SO often) If you don’t understand your finances, you’re never going to master this area.
- They never clearly define what wealth and success means to them.
- If they do have a target, they keep moving the goal posts, so they never reach success, and they never win.
- They define the figure in such a way that it feels impossible to achieve.
- And because it feels impossible, they never even start working towards it
- They never make it an absolute must to be financially abundant.
- They don’t have a realistic plan to ever achieve success.
- Or they get a plan but they never follow through on it.
This is obviously a huge topic, and one I’m going to spend a lot of time mastering, so I’ll be discussing lots of different ideas, realisations and discoveries with you as I go. This is something we’ll be focussing on in depth during our Radical Financial Results Retreats, helping our clients get this stuff embedded in how they run and grow their businesses.
Will you join me on the journey?
So that’s me, cards on the table. How about you? Is financial freedom something you think about? Do you believe you’ll get there one day? I’d love to hear your thoughts.