Financial freedom wasn’t something I dared look toward for a long time in my life. I was comfortable with the model I’d grown up with – find a good job, work really hard and get promoted.

Then one day I found myself in a retreat about abundance. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do – at that time I had a good paying job, I was paying off my own property and I had money to go on holidays and buy nice clothes. I was comfortable. But the retreat was a core model of the training I was doing at the time and so I went along.

Boy, was I in for a surprise. The entire weekend I kept getting flashes of a completely different life to the one I was living. One which allowed for far more freedom in every aspect of my life. I remember coming out of a meditation and saying to my friends, ‘Well my life is going to have to change radically if the picture I’m seeing in my head is going to come to fruition.’

And guess what? It has.

In many ways that was the first real inkling I had that self employment might be for me, and that self employment might hold the key to all kinds of freedoms that I wasn’t allowing myself at that time – financial, creative, lifestyle – to name a few.

That retreat was about 8 years ago and I’ve now been running a business for 5 years (in fact, next week marks my 5 year anniversary!) – always profitable and always sustainable. Not always mind blowingly profitable though. (I think on my first retreat my partner and I might have made just a few dollars after expenses.) But all those years of working in Government and being accountable to millions of people for millions of dollars, plus being a daughter of an accountant turned banker, turned out to be incredibly useful in preparing me for entrepreneurship.

Combining that experience with what I know about internal blocks of all kinds, has put me in good stead as a business owner, and still the move away from an old consciousness about trading time for money and about ‘money not growing on trees’ is not achieved overnight. It requires some vigilance to truly overcome those stories so that you might start relating to money in a new way.

That’s why financial freedom is the first type of freedom we’re exploring at The Freedom Collective.

To kick things off, I’m sharing an interview I convened recently with financial empowerment mentor Sylvia Chierchia. As we grow the Collective I’ll be sharing more and more Conversations in Freedom with members, but for today, we all get the benefit of Sylvia’s wisdom. The video is broken into two parts. Today you’ll see part 1 where we dive into:

• the significance of financial education
• taking women’s heads out of the sand when it comes to money
• the essentials to creating change in your financial circumstances
• the #1 money story people tell themselves, and
• overcoming money fears.

Until next week,