Freedom: Creating a Life on Your Own Terms

Concepts like freedom and independence are abstract. Bob Proctor taught that if you want to make money, you can't simply say, "Well, I want a lotta money." You need to set an amount. Saying "a lot" or "plenty" is too vague. The same is true for freedom - financial freedom, workplace freedom, etc. What does it truly mean to you?

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about freedom. That concept has been on my mind a lot lately, and I know that's typically a sign that somebody else, someone else who's going to listen to this podcast episode, maybe as soon as it's released, maybe a week later, maybe a month or 10 years down the road, somebody else is going to be having exactly the same inner monolog with themselves, and they will benefit from this in some way. I truly believe that Bob Proctor made a lot of good teachings and videos around the concept of money, and more specifically, why you have to define what you want. What are your money goals? Specifically, because people would tell him things like, well, I want to make a lot of money, or I want to have plenty of money. And he would look at them and say, Well, what's a lot, what's plenty? That means different things to different people. For one person, it might be, I want to have $50,000 in the bank, free and clear, that's mine to do with, whatever I want. Somebody else might look at that and say, well, that's nowhere near enough for the lifestyle that I have. I would rather have 50 million in the bank, somebody like Lord Elon or Jeff Bezos would probably laugh at both of those numbers and say, Well, I want to be a trillionaire. Which the weft, by the way, is saying that within the next decade, although I don't think it's going to take that long, we will start to see trillionaires being a billionaire is going to become passe. People will start to become in the ultra wealthy will start to become trillionaires. I like how David bear talks about there's more money in circulation now than there ever has been before at any other time in history. Now we can argue that that's not necessarily a good thing from a currency devaluation, dollar devaluation point of view, I would certainly argue that it's not a good thing in that regard, but in terms of you being able to achieve your own personal financial goals, you just have to remember money is everywhere. It is out there. It's not as though finding $1 bill is the most insane, unheard of thing that anybody can conjure in their mind, they're everywhere. So Bob would encourage people figure out what that a lot of or plenty number looks like to you, and write it down on a cart. But just saying, Well, I want a lot of money. I want plenty of money. I want to make a better salary. I want to have more money in the bank, that's inadequate. And what I'm here to say in today's episode is I believe the same concept applies to these abstractions like freedom and independence, because it's not at all unusual to hear somebody say, Well, I want financial freedom. I want to be financially independent. Okay, but what does that mean? Well, I guess when I sit down to pay my bills, I don't want to be stressed out about it. I want the money to be there. I'm tired of having more month than money, and I don't want the stress every time I need to pay a bill, or every time I need to go to the grocery store or put gas in the car. I just want to have that breathing room and not feel so stressed out. Well, it may be that the only thing that you would need to do in that situation is find a better paying job. Might not be that you're trying to attract in a million dollar idea. It may just simply be that you're overworked and underpaid, and you need to find a better job. So you want to get specific about what what does financial freedom, financial independence? What does that mean to me? How am I going to spend my time? It's like the old school exercise of pretend that you just won the lottery, and it's one of these massive, crazy, humongous lottery wins, where money is no longer an a consideration in your life, unless you really spend like a drunken sailor, you are never, ever going to want for money again, period. Now. How do you spend your time? What do you do? Because if the idea is, well, I'm going to go into goblin mode, I'm going to put on some sweats and lay on the couch, and my life, my life in quotation marks, is going to consist of allowing the sofa to just accept me as I want. Watch streaming videos and eat junk food all day. That's not a life. That's an existence, and some would argue, probably a slow form of suicide, but it's not a life. I'm reminded of an interview that I saw years ago. There was that influx of like bubble gum pop late 90s, early aughts. And I remember seeing this interview where Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was talking about the boy bands and the Pop Tarts of that bubble gum pop era. And he said it's like birthday cake. Birthday cake on your birthday is great. It's wonderful. But if somebody served you birthday cake every day. At every meal, it would be sickening. Your teeth would hurt, your stomach would hurt, and you would look at that birthday cake and think, Oh, God, how disgusting. The same thing is true with going into goblin mode. We've all had a weekend. Maybe it was raining and disgusting outside. Maybe it was snowing like crazy and the roads were closed, and it was like the only thing that we can really do is hunker down at the house anyway, a weekend like that, here and there, in the sweats, watching TV or reading a really good book and not moving very much, sometimes that is the most blissful experience in the world, however, having a lazy weekend like that every so often, yeah, that's awesome. That's recharging, that's refreshing. Living like that every day where you're a slug on the couch and you're not even putting on proper clothing with any kind of structure. Maybe you're not even showering properly or wearing deodorant anymore, not exactly living your best life. I'm just saying. So how would you spend your time? What does financial freedom, financial independence mean? I want to be financially free and independent so that I can do what, and I'm willing to bet that after a day or two of goblin mode, you would be tired of living that way, and you'd want to do something that you feel is productive, something that you enjoy, something that you're passionate about, or something that you feel like the world needs to be exposed to. That's really what has happened for me. And I always say I want to be as transparent as I can be on this podcast, because, again, whatever I'm going through, somebody else is going through it too. Might not be in the same exact form, but it's some variation thereof. Otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here recording this episode. Some higher power, some higher level of consciousness, whatever you believe in, has willed it to be. So otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here doing got a million other things I could be doing right now, but I felt like this was important to do. So somebody out there is having the same kind of thought for me as I got into writing the book that I've been working on, tenderly and sweetly. But also, when you write a book, it's it's hard work. There's writing, and then there's rewriting, and then there's edits, and then an attorney has to take a look at it, and maybe he or she torpedoes your idea, and you have to go back to the drawing board. Or maybe the editor says it makes sense to you, but it's not making sense to me. You need to go back and make some changes, because it doesn't have good flow. A million different things can happen when you're in the process. Believe me, I'm learning it. It's hard work. But at the same time, to me, it doesn't feel that way at all, not at all. I don't get up and think about okay, here's what I need to do for the book today, and feel resentful about it. I feel excited I get to do this? I really feel like this book is coming through me. I'm used to hear Wayne Dyer quoting, I think it was Khalil Gibran, something like our children come through us, but not for us. They are the representation of life's longing for itself. And I feel that way about this book. This book was meant to get out. It was meant to happen, and it just chose me as the appropriate vessel, the appropriate vehicle, in order to make its way into the world. I don't feel like, Oh God, this is a slog. This is a nightmare. Freaking hate and doing this, I love it, and for me, it's really ignited a passion of I want to do this again. I want to do this several more times. I would love to really focus on writing, becoming a published author. I have written some things and published them as it relates to HR, work and the job market, but I've never sat down and written a proper book. This is the first time, and I love what I'm doing, and it feels so right to me. It feels like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be at this. Moment in time, I might not be sure of who's going to win the election in November, or what's going to happen in January, when the inauguration is supposed to happen, and I don't know what the Fed is going to do in terms of rate hikes or rate cuts. I don't know what the economy will look like a year from now. I don't know when the job market will heal. I don't know when the economy will get any better. We've been squeezed and pinched for a while now. For that matter, we don't know when there might be another another series of lockdowns, some kind of warfare, turmoil, my God, there's to use the Scripture wars and rumors of wars all over the place. I don't know any of those things, and I cannot control any of those things, but here's what I do know at this particular moment in time, this moment in my life, I was meant to write this book and get it out to the world. And the people who have previewed it have been so gracious and so wonderful to me about the subject matter, about my style, and it gives me a lot of hope. It's important to not get addicted to the praise of other people or to be completely sidelined by the criticism of other people. You still have to follow your own path, but it's just a little burst of reassurance that what I'm doing is precisely what I'm supposed to be doing, and I want more of that. It's a little bit like, ah, a kitten playing with a toy filled with catnip, like I Where do I get me some more of this. This is turning me on. This is exciting. I feel so alive and so vivacious and fulfilled by this kind of activity. How do I get some more of this? And that's why, for me, this concept of freedom and independence have been on my mind, my first iteration of self employment. I don't want to belabor the point here, because I've talked across platforms, not just here, but on other people's podcasts as well, about going splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I know what it's like to quit a job and essentially pray that your parachute is going to open after you've jumped off the cliff and then surprise it doesn't surprise you splattered and your carcass is just laying at the bottom, like, oh my god, this was a total and utter mistake. I should never have done this. What was I thinking? Going through a subsequent dark night of the soul, a serious, profound depression, reading Camus, trying to imagine Sisyphus happy and struggling to do so. I don't want to belabor the point there, but I was thinking about all of this the other day in the context of freedom and independence and what those things mean to me personally, your definitions are likely to be completely different, and they should be. They need to be personal to you. But what does it mean to me? And I thought back to my very first day of self employment, because I resigned from my job on a Friday. I had the weekend to decompress, and I will tell you when I resigned from that job, it was like a wonderful breath of fresh air. I felt so good. I'm free. I'm away from that environment. I'm free. Nothing else matters, because I'm out of there. I don't ever, ever have to set foot in that place again. It was like a total hallelujah moment. So then Monday morning rolls around, and I had been getting up in order to get my farm tours done, in order to make the commute, shower, put on dress clothes, all the stuff that I was having to do when I worked outside the home. For other people, I would typically get up somewhere between four and 430 if I was really lucky, if I was feeling like a real lazy bones, real decadent. I might allow myself to sleep until five, but I typically was up between four and 430 so I know what it's like to do the rise and grind routine, to get up and do farm tours, to get some exercise, to cook breakfast, to groom yourself and bathe yourself, and have to sit trapped in the car anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to commute to some soul sucking job. I've been there, been there, done that. So when I went into business for myself, I'm like, I'm not doing that crap anymore. I'm not going to get up at four, 430 in the morning. That's that's past tense. We're done with that. So I got up at six, and that part of it was wonderful. However, as I went outside to start taking care of my animals and doing my morning farm routine, everything felt so foreign, even though I was doing these chores that I had done hundreds of times before, it was, you know, as we say in Russian, Ничего нового, nothing new. I. It was like Stranger in a Strange Land. I'm not gonna have to go back in the house and put on dress clothes, take a shower and then groom myself and put on a full face of makeup and put on dress clothes and perfume and high heels and drive to this freaking job. Everything felt weird and wonky. It was such a it's such a bizarre feeling. I almost don't even know how to describe it to you. It was just weird. So very weird. And when I got back in, took a shower, just put on some casual, athletic type clothes, and sat down at my desk to start working, it was like nobody knows what I'm doing right now. Nobody cares, and it was vaguely traumatic. I had been in these environments, these open air, bullpen environments that I can really only describe as introvert hell. If you've never worked in an environment like that, get down on your hands and knees and thank whatever God or higher power that you believe in, because in my opinion, they suck. They're totally awful. Everybody can see you. You can't even get up to use the bathroom or discreetly put a feminine product in your pocket without everybody seeing what you're doing. It's horrible. So I've been in these loud, boisterous bullpen environments, and then suddenly I wasn't. I was sitting in a desk by myself in my own home. Nobody monitoring me, none of the looky loo behavior. What are you doing? Where are you going? How many calls have you made today? When is that next deal going to close? What have you got in the pipeline? How many emails have you sent everybody? Heads up, because we're about to have a sales contest, whoever makes the most phone calls today will get a $5 Starbucks card, crap like that. None of that was going on anymore. And don't get me wrong, it was freaking great to be away from all of that, but it was like I spent so much time thinking about what I was running away from that I never thought about what I was running towards. I just felt like the proverbial coyote that gnaws its own limb off to get out of a trap I just wanted out. So that morning I'm sitting there. I'm like, What the f nobody knows I'm out here. Nobody knows what I'm doing. Nobody cares. And I had to tell myself, you know the things that lead to success? You know how you would schedule your day if you had gone to that job this morning? You know exactly what you would have been doing. So just do those same things for yourself. But it was eerie. It was weird to be totally free and unencumbered and to also have complete privacy. As I said, nobody knew what I was doing and nobody cared. And that started to wear on me, particularly in that first iteration of self employment, because I had so few clients, I worked constantly. I made the phone calls and the cold calls, and I sent out cold emails, and I would do the email threads, all of that stuff. You know, no offense. If you like doing that. You do you. But I certainly didn't. I thought it sucked. I did all of that, and it was like, I'm not helping anybody. I'm not even helping myself. Nobody is benefiting from this business. It just feels like a weird abyss, some sort of dastardly Whirlpool where hopes and dreams go to die. Lot of lot of negative feelings, a lot of depression and negative imagery connected to those days. So we fast forward in time. So many people during the pandemic that were involved in white collar work were sent home with a laptop and told, well, the joke is on you, because we've known this whole time that our jobs could have been done from home or work from anywhere. We just wanted you to all sit in the office so we could monitor you and make you feel like old school serfs and I think the cat as it got out of the bag. In that way, more people became comfortable now some people didn't the highly extroverted people that would prefer to be in an office environment chewing the cud with other extroverts around the water cooler. They might have been miserable, but I think for a fair amount of the population, they realized this is awesome. I don't want to go back into an environment where everybody sees everything that I'm doing, if I have to blow my nose if I have to put a tampon in my pocket, I don't I don't want everybody knowing everything that I do all the time. Having some degree of privacy is way better than having zero privacy in the workplace, where people monitor your bathroom schedule and they know what you eat for lunch every day, I have got. Myself more accustomed to that level of freedom and privacy, so that years ago, when I started my first business that ultimately failed, it felt weird, it felt foreign, it felt wonky. It felt like I was going against the grain in such a huge way, and it made me feel depressed. Now it doesn't now I fully embrace it. I'm like, ain't nobody's business what I'm out here doing. She eat. They don't need to know. That's my concern. That's my business. The time that I go to bed at night, the time that I wake up in the morning, the time that I decide to do this or that, when I'm hungry and I feel like I want to make something for lunch that's not anybody's damn business. I'm a grown adult. For me, it's really become addictive, sort of like the book. Okay, I'm having this experience and I'm loving it. I want more of this same thing with freedom and privacy. I'm having this experience and I'm loving it. It feels second nature to me now, and I want more of it. So it's been important to me to start defining what that looks like, not just to say, well, I like freedom, well, I like privacy, well, I like writing, but to begin to get more specific and really use the Bob Proctor method of taking out a card or a sheet of paper. Like, okay, well, what is it specifically? What? How can I put more definition around these abstract concepts? For some people, they might want to be an intrapreneur and freedom to them, or workplace autonomy to them. Might be something like, I want a boss that maybe I connect with once or twice a month. But other than that, they're not in my sandbox. They don't know what I'm doing day in and day out, and I'm free to really run my desk and take care of my book of business the way that I want to, but I'm doing it within the auspices of a company. I don't want all the liability, I don't want all the responsibility on my shoulders, but I do want to plug in somewhere and be productive and start making a lot of money. Again, define it. I want to start making a million dollars every quarter for the business, which in turn will lead to X amount of dollars for me in commission. Some people want that for me, I don't know if it's part of the aging process. I don't know if it's just me particularly. I'm not sure, but I'm like, No, I want some more freedom. I really want to get to the point where I can somehow finesse things around to be more focused on writing. Now, notice I didn't say tomorrow or next month or next year, I'm planning to slam the door on my business. I'm thinking more of a transition, and while I'm thinking of what these concepts mean to me, I'm just sifting and sorting and refining. And as I meditate or do visualizations. Well, how would I want to spend my time? See, I've been doing that same exercise. Let's let's play pretend that I won the lottery tomorrow. Money was no longer an option. Or, excuse me, money was no longer a concern. I didn't have to worry about it. What would I want to do? Well, not go into goblin mode. I'm not that kind of person. Anyway. Again, a lazy weekend now and then. It's fun, but, you know, I started to just get antsy. I've got, I've got too much energy. I can't, I can't sit for an entire weekend and not move off the couch. I think my skeleton would hurt. That's another thing about the aging process. After you've sat or laid in a particular position too long, your bones hurt and you feel like you've got osteoarthritis setting in, I wouldn't want to just sit up and watch television and eat junk food and slowly watch my body atrophy into some flabby blob that's not of interest to me personally. Okay, well, you've said what you don't want to do. What do you want to do? I want to write. I want to do research and I want to write, that's what I freaking want to do. So all of the major new thought teachers will tell you, you don't get caught up in the how. How is that going to happen? Couldn't freaking tell you, but I never would have imagined this anyway. I never would have imagined this if you had told me, even just this time last year, let's say last October, october 2023, if you had told me so you're going to be spending your summer and your fall and into the winter months writing this book about Dag Hammarskjold That is a labor of love, where you're really bringing his story to a different generation of people and to a category of person that would never, ever go in a library, some dusty library, and pick up some dusty, 9000 page book written by some dusty academic. Make about a UN Secretary General that died years ago, like you are doing this to bring this amazing man's story to a whole different category of people, because he was amazing. He is amazing, and more people should know that. Damn it. If you had told me that a year ago, I'd have thought you were totally insane. Like, what the hell are you even talking about? I'm not going to do that. Bada, boom. Bada, bam. Here we are. Life's crazy like that. So I don't know the how I can't tell you the how, I'm just telling you that I have so genuinely loved putting this book together, working on even when it's been hard, even when there have been some pockets of frustration here and there, or I got some bad news, or, well, I don't think you're going to be able to do it this way. You need to do it that way. Or this isn't flowing, and you need to do a rewrite, even in those situations where something might on the surface, let's say it seemed that something was not going my way. It always seemed to come back around again to something that was even better, an improvement, a real way of making the book better. It's challenged me to not be so stubborn and hard headed about things, to be more flexible about the outcome, but I have absolutely loved doing it. And as I said, it's like, well, where do I get some more of this? I want to keep feeling like this. I watched an episode of Bob Proctor's one at one of Bob Proctor's series just last night, where he was talking about people who love what they do, whether it's a musician, an artist, an athlete, there are people out there that get to do something they absolutely love, and they they're not going in every day going, God freaking hate this. What a nightmare these people are. On my last GD nerves. I just want to get the f out of here. That's not their day to day existence. Now I'm not going to say that even when you're doing something you love, you're not going to have a bad day or a bad morning or something that rubs you the wrong way. That's life. We're going to have contrasting experiences, and sometimes we're going to run into somebody that's just a jerk. That is life, that is the human condition. However, I really do not think that life is meant to be miserable every day, every hour of every day. That's also not living in the same way that in my mind, sitting on the couch going into goblin mode, watching streaming and eating pizza and ice cream all day and not taking a shower. That's not a life Well, neither is being totally and utterly miserable and constantly stressed out. Where you hate your life, you hate your job, you hate your family, you hate everything that's going on and you just want to get out of it. That's not a life either. It might be an existence, a miserable existence at that, but it's not life. So these are the concepts that I have been working on, defining what freedom means to me. Freedom in order to do what I want, financial freedom in order to well, to write more, to have more time that I can devote to research, to writing, to editing, and to make that a bigger component of how I'm spending my time, not immediately, not tomorrow, not next year, necessarily, or whenever, but just thinking about that process of like an on ramp to get to that highway I'm driving along. I've started to have these compare and contrast sifting and sorting experiences. I'm getting clearer on what I want. How do I get there? I don't know, but I trust that at the right time, the right the right circumstances, at the right time. I'll know when it's time to put on the turn signal and take that on ramp to a different highway to make some different choices. And I'm excited for it. I think it's freaking great. So that's that's my point. Wrapping it up, bringing it home. When you're thinking about freedom and independence, whether you're thinking about workplace autonomy, you're thinking about financial freedom, financial independence. Start to consider what that means to you, not the guy next door, not your neighbor, not your parents, but what does it mean to you? I want to be financially free. Okay, well, what does that look like? How much money would you define as financial freedom? Get that clear like Bob Proctor talks about, you can't just say, well, a lot, plenty, I want to pay my bills, I guess. Get clear on what financial freedom means to you. What's the dollar amount? What needs to happen for you to feel financially free? Even better, if you can start to feel free before it shows up, but you at least need to consider what that number is going to. Be. And then how are you going to spend your time? I want to be financially free and independent with X amount of dollars in the bank in order to do blank and the more specific, the more vivid that you can become, the better it's like Joe Dispenza talks about getting into a meditation, maybe even a walking meditation, where you feel like you have stepped into this new life already. How does it feel? What are you doing? Like his daughter had a trip to Italy that she wanted to take, and he would tell her, imagine yourself being there, speaking the language, going to the museums, going to the tourist attractions, eating the food you're going to go in a restaurant and order what? And really imagine yourself having that genuine, authentic Italian pasta or that beautiful gelato, whatever it is that you're wanting to do when you're there. Picture yourself doing it. Same thing, whatever it is that you think that that independence and freedom will bring to you, start to imagine that and get clear around it. It's much more powerful than just Well, I want to have a lot of money. I want to be free. I don't want to have a boss that's a jerk. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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