Visualize Your Life Outside the Rat Race
Here’s a trick to help visualize life outside the rat race.
One of the insidious things about living in the rut year after year is it can rob us of the ability to even imagine being in a world outside of our boring routine and soul-draining circumstances.
Inertia is a killer in this situation. One day you wake up and realize you’ve spent ten years doing almost nothing you really wanted to do. Or twenty years. Tick tock.
Before you can break loose from that, you need to have a plan and that plan needs a well-defined direction.
Here’s a podcast from The Expat Money Show where Mikkel and I talk about safely leaving the rat race by starting an online business!
Visualize and Plan Your Freedom
One of the most potent tactics you can use is to deliberately visualize exactly what your best life would involve. That vision gives you the breadcrumbs you need to lay out a practical path for you to start following.
- Where would you live?
- Who would you spend time with?
- What would a typical week involve?
- What would you do for laughs?
- What would you do to give your life a sense of fulfillment?
- How do you want to be remembered, and how can you make that happen?
Make Some Lists
You can make these lists right now with an app on your mobile phone.
Connie and I have a lot of lists. Cities we want to visit. Things we want to do with our grown kids. Specific photos we want to get. Hotels we want to stay in. Businesses we want to build. Books we want to write.
All satisfying, rewarding things that are a joy to think about.
The Lists Are Your Path to Freedom
One of the giant values of making these lists – and I mean actually writing them down and keeping them where we can find them and review them – is that when the slightest opportunity presents itself, these future objectives are at the front of our minds.
Take the time to make a big list that is broken down into smaller lists:
- Places you want to see.
- People you want to meet.
- Experiences you want to have.
- New skills you want to acquire.
- Old things you want to do again.
- Personal goals you want to achieve.
- Professional goals you want to achieve.
- On and on.
Add to these lists whenever you think of something that would enrich your life and bring you that rare, deep satisfaction we all need but often do not get.
In a way, those lists represent your freedom. They represent what you would do if you were not constrained by time, place, and money.
Of course, none of us ever completely escapes our restraints. We’re all still human and subject to the limits of our world.
But this exercise helps anyone realize what his life outside the rat race might begin to look like. It helps us visualize a scenario where we control our lives instead of so many other things and people controlling us.
Now You Notice the Opportunities Right in Front of You
Once you can clearly visualize what your better life looks like, it’s much easier to spot the opportunities that can take you in that direction instead of staying in the rut of the perpetual rat race.
In my experience, the most common obstacle people have between their current setting and their ideal of freedom — is money. And it’s not just the amount of money, it’s the source of the money.
When other people control the source of our money we can feel like puppets on a string. We dance to their tune, and if we don’t the money gets cut off. That’s the Achilles heel of most people’s plan to get out of the rat race.
This is why it is so exciting to be alive at a time when anyone has the potential to generate his or her own online source of portable income from anywhere in the world.
It’s always been possible for an elite or privileged few to live their dream life, or for the ones with a stomach for high risk. But now technologies we all use daily make it possible for anyone to gradually and safely leave the rat race.
The Takeaway
To get your mind moving in the direction of living in freedom, you need to sharply visualize how you would live and what you would do if you had that freedom. Leaving the rat race is easier when you know exactly what direction you want to go. Once you know exactly what you want, the many opportunities for getting it suddenly appear frequently and obviously. (For example, seeing an article from a guy who wants to help you. ?)
Ready to Escape?
Are you ready to live life on your own terms – create your own portable online income? Reach out to us at Safely Leave The Rat Race. We are committed to helping you get from whatever point you are right now – to the point of earning regular, predictable online income.
Here are some articles I’ve written about leaving the rat race behind, please enjoy reading them:
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