Intro to The Four Types of Freedom
What motivates you to start or grow your business?
Do you want to have enough money to buy a house, take some vacations, or cover a round of drinks for your friends?
Are you most excited by the possibility of making your own hours, being able to spend time with your kids during the week, or working around your natural energy cycles?
Does the opportunity to work from wherever you want - whether that be a van in the desert, the couch in your living room, or a country on the other side of the ocean - drive you?
Maybe you’re sick of using your creativity to make what other people want you to make and you’d rather be your own boss and use your skills to bring your unique ideas to life?
These are the basic premises of what I call The Four Types of Freedom.
I developed this framework almost four years ago as I was beginning my podcast and growing my coaching business. Although my business centers around helping entrepreneurs, the four types of freedom apply to all people - no matter how you make a living.
Similar to the Five Love Languages, The Four Types of Freedom are - with some nuance - universal.
Of course, most of us want ALL four of them but, at different points in our lives and careers, one or two pops up as the most important type to pursue for the time being, at the compromise of the others.
I’ll be going over each one in great detail over the next few weeks - and they’ll be popping up in my content forevermore, so it never hurts to give a refresher of the concept.
Understanding the premise and knowing which piece of the pie is largest for you, can help open up more opportunities to see creative solutions to your current trajectory.
The Four Types of Freedom are, in no particular order, the freedom of time, the freedom of location, the freedom of creativity, and the freedom of finances.
Again, we all want as much of all of these types as we can get, but we unconsciously prioritize one or two of them based on our current values, goals, and lifestyle.
If you read that list and thought to yourself “well, obviously the freedom of X would mean that I would get all the other types of freedom, too. So that’s the most important, that’s the only one you need” - I have two things to say to you:
You’re wrong. None of these types of freedoms universally outweighs or overrides any of the others. The complete freedom of one, does not universally dictate the freedom of any of the others for everyone everywhere.
Whatever you thought that freedom was, is probably YOUR current priority freedom type, whether you realize it or not.
For example, I was having a conversation with a friend not long ago about this concept and his auto-response was that the freedom of time would automatically achieve the other three. If you had more time, you’d instantly have more freedom of creativity, finances, and location.
This isn’t the case across the board for all humans everywhere. But this man has a salaried job, a family, a small child, and is a very very busy guy who prioritizes time because that’s the one he feels he’s lacking.
In the same vein, I’ve had conversations with people who believed that the freedom of finances was the ultimate freedom type because with enough money, you could buy the other freedoms. Wrong again. *Some* people can use money to buy more time away from work, to buy themselves location freedom, or to buy themselves the ability to use their creative energies how they please. But not everyone. For many people who prioritize freedom of finances, they trade off working long hours, working in places they don’t prefer to live, working on projects they aren’t passionate about.
There’s no wrong way to prioritize your freedoms - unless you’re using someone else’s preferences as your metric.
As I said, I’m going to dive into these more and more, each individually and then all together as I share case studies, tips, tricks, and guidance.
In the meantime, based on this very brief overview, which do you think is the primary type of freedom you’re looking for right now? What is/was your parents’ or guardians’ priority? What about your friend circle?
