comfort

expert

The term comfort zone for me doesn’t speak of a set of circumstances that are necessarily comfortable. No, being in your comfort zone just means being in familiar territory. However, in this case I’m prepared to make an exception and I think it’s a good idea to start your life of freedom by tackling something you are familiar (comfortable) with.

In this little series of New Year posts about making the change over to living the way you want, I’ve been considering that annoying human invention, money, and how to best deal with it in order to live a free life.

So far I’ve discussed my favoured route to freedom which is to make a living from my life and avoid having a job that eats up my time and gives me little reward for my efforts, otherwise known as the Hamster Wheel of Doom.

I’ve tackled the issue of just getting started and how that means you need to step out of your comfort zone and be unprepared…and excited!

Yesterday we got down to the practicalities of planning this (because even a restless-peasant plans sometimes) and I proffered my Mindmap® (which took all of 5 minutes to create).

By the way, I love the distinction Leo Babauta makes between Resolutions/Planning/Goals and Habit changing; this is in essence all about changing your behavioural habits after all is said and done.

Forward!

We now have to take some practical steps and choose one item from that Mindmap® to tackle head on to forge our first income generating project from. If I cast my mind back to when I started in earnest, I found it hard to overlook my existing skills and previous work experience…and if you are also finding this hard…don’t fight it.

How can you use your existing skills, previous training and previous work experience to your financial benefit without getting a job? This could be time for another Mindmap®!

Here’s mine:

previous

For a long time, I was a Greenkeeper, which led on to me following a career progression through managing, planning, project managing and building golf courses and all sorts of other stuff.  When I started digging my tunnel to freedom, this is where I started. You can consider this low hanging fruit in your own quest.

However, you will notice that none of the items on this more focussed Mindmap® mention simply just keeping on as a worker in that industry. All of the options I’ve come up with are based on me feeding into (and feeding from) that industry as a freelancer…not an employee, please don’t fall at the first hurdle. However, tempting it seems, don’t take another job as an employee.

Your Turn

Now, from the Mindmap® I suggested you make yesterday, can you pull out one item that seems doable and make a new Mindmap® in order to explore all of the opportunities you could make happen for that one subject area? Of course you could. Get to it, share it if you want.

Tomorrow, I’ll take this on one more level to make sure you understand the full power of this and then we’ll move on to something else.

Photo Credit: Visit Anchorage PR via Compfight cc

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