$10 million in liquid assets, working part time hours on her business. Laura Roeder didn’t just get the end result, she created an awesome process to get there too. How? And what lessons can you learn from her too?
Laura Roeder designed and then created her ideal life. All in an age when the norm is to suffer, grind and sacrifice your way to a big sale, then get out, exhausted. Lauar bucks the trend. She never compromised what mattered most to her.
This is the model of success for Adventurepreneurs — true freedom. The good news is, success leaves clues. Today, I’ll teach you the most important mindset lessons she followed to get there.
I pulled these lessons out of her fantastic episode of MoneyWise with Harry Morton, courtesy of Sam Parr founder of Hampton.
These lessons are what allowed her to live intentionally and deliberately to create the freedom she craved. If you want to streamline your personal growth, and gain clarity in your mind and business, check out the Adventurepreneur’s Clarity Course.
How To Create Ambitious Goals In Your Business You Actually Hit
It all started with a number.
“5 million dollars in liquid cash… I don’t know where that number came from, but that’s what I wanted.”
Before even starting her first business, Laura knew what freedom meant for her. She knew by applying the 4% rule she could live her dream life from $5 million in investments.
5 mil was her number, and that’s what she wanted. Consider this: she had a $28k salary at that point.
Take a moment to consider how specific that is. How it’s a big stretch goal but ultimately, attainable.
Not only did Laura get hyper clear on the specifics, she also adhered to a fundamental principle of lifestyle design: she aligned her goals with meaning.
This was never just about cashflow for Laura. This was about creating quality in her life.
Quality is a metric that is indescribable to anyone else, but highly meaningful to you.
She envisioned the lifestyle she wanted. She knew that freedom was why she was in business. She created a process she could stick to for a long time and come to love.
Laura knew what she wanted, and what she knew what she didn’t want.
Let’s break that down.
Envisioning a lifestyle = a clear vision
Metrics of success = clear goals
A focus on freedom = clear values
A way of living she loved = clear process
The cherry on the top for me as a performance coach was when Laura mentioned that she didn’t know where the number of 5 million came from but that she felt it resonated with her.
This means it’s aligned with what Laura finds meaningful. Humans are wired to pursue meaning. Meaning is our personal fuel. What you find meaningful is highlighting your specific superpowers. Meaning is the thing so many of us are missing in our lives. Laura anchored it to her goals, her vision, her values, and her process.
This sits so well with a concept called Nested Goals I teach in my Clarity Course.
There are 2 goal setting mistakes unsuccessful freedom seeking business owners make:
1 — They only have a few components of their Nested Goals nailed down, and miss the key parts. So they have goals, but no process to follow or values to hold sacred.
2 — They are misaligned. They end up chasing someone else’s definition of success. Their goals don’t line up with meaning.
If you’re going to succeed, you need clarity. Clarity is what allows founders to aim.
The lesson Laura embodies here is simple: build the highest resolution image of success you can muster.
When you create this image of success, it allows you to live your life like an adventure. This is what it means to be an Adventurepreneur. Yes, to build a life around doing cool shit, but also to live each moment of life as the adventure it is.
Clarity of aim is essential for winning, but only if it’s combined with the next step.
What to do with setbacks as a small business owner
Soon after creating this aim, Laura looked at her $28k a year job and realised there was just no way of reaching her higher goal of $5 mil. She looked around at the houses she really wanted and felt the pain of her process not matching up with her image of success.
She tried to meet up with a friend during the work day and couldn’t make the time. She had none of the 3 types of freedom: financial, time, or geographical.
I can only imagine, this was a humbling realisation for Laura. It sucks to see how far away from your goal you are. Especially when you’re working so hard, but your actor friend who’s waiting tables in her spare time has more freedom than you.
When faced with this, many freedom seekers bury their heads in the sand. They encounter so much discomfort they do the easiest thing they can think of to get away from it: they hide.
When creating a high resolution image of success, you also bring to the surface the pain and negative emotion of not being there yet.
This is enough to stop many freedom seekers in their tracks.
Laura on the other hand, turned toward this pain. She was willing to look at how uncomfortable she was in her current situation and face the music.
Laura turned toward her value of freedom. “How can I control my day?” she asked herself.
She stayed on track by paying attention to where her emotions and attention told her to look. One of the greatest mistakes many solopreneurs make is shutting out their emotions.
Emotions give us information that raw intellectual horsepower (or wilful ignorance) misses.
As Laura pursued this goal, her businesses began to thrive. She was making really good money and had the opportunity to make a hell of a lot of cash. But, she realised this would be sacrificing her value of freedom. She sold her share of the business to her partner and got out.
The lesson to adhere to if you want to create the freedom you desire in your life is to pay attention to your feelings.
They all signify the true cause of our limits which is the next lesson to learn.
Breaking through your current limitations in your pursuit of freedom
When you start succeeding, you encounter glass ceilings. No matter how hard you try, you can’t break through to your next level.
The root cause of these limitations is your collection of beliefs and stories.
Despite having almost total financial freedom at this point, Laura encountered real resistance to her newfound success.
She felt the need to “hide the fact that I work part time… I should be more ambitious.”
She also felt deep resistance to spending money. As a coach, I can see this as being pulled back to mediocrity by her beliefs.
You see, our beliefs work hard to keep us operating in our Zones of Mediocrity. When we start to escape that mediocrity, self-doubt, indecision, and overwhelm can pull us back in.
They encourage us to play small.
In one story Laura tells, she had the option to work with an interior designer on her new home. This was something she’d always dreamed of doing, but when it came to spending her money, she felt resistance.
She gave herself pep talks to work through this resistance.
What Laura teaches us here is that we don’t have to totally banish our negative self-talk in order to move beyond our beliefs; we have to learn to navigate it.
In fact, much negative self-talk is a sign you’re on the right path, not a sign you’re failing.
In the part of the podcast episode where Laura’s beliefs are discussed, the idea of therapy comes up and is suggested to be essential for everyone. This is the one part of the show I disagree with.
Therapy is great for many, but doesn’t work for others. Some need coaching, some need breathwork, some need Stoicism. The answer depends on your personal limits which I discuss how to overcome in this article.
How To Turn Your Lack of Time Into Your Greatest Advantage
At this point, Laura had sold a couple of businesses and along with her husband, decided to fulfil another part of their dream life: to have children.
You’d imagine they might just sit pretty at this point and, seeing as they could, take a long period off building businesses to spend time as parents.
In fact, Laura started another business just months before her baby was due.
Many use kids and other responsibilities as an opportunity to settle for a life without freedom — to give into the life they deep down despise.
Laura used her upcoming responsibilities as a reason to create freedom. She used the date as a forcing function to get her business working without her.
Where others may find excuses, Laura found reasons.
“Everyone should go on parental leave as soon as they launch a business because it’s an amazing forcing function. The business can’t rely on me,” Laura explained.
Without giving ourselves strict deadlines, we lose the power of Parkinson’s Law. In terms of work, this law means “a task expands in complexity to fill the amount of time you allot it.”
Many freedom seekers create a modicum of freedom, but then have no urgency to create more.
The lesson Laura applies so well here is to use deadlines as forcing functions for success.
I did exactly this when I booked my ski mountaineering trip to Pakistan. I knew that by the time I went away, I would have to have my business together. I grew more in those 9 months, than I had done in years prior.
As an expectant father, the same is happening right now as our baby is due to be born in a few weeks.
So what happened when Laura finally hit her goals? Where did Laura go from there? Well, there’s one more lesson.
How To Love The Process Of Building Your Business
You may ask why Laura and her husband continue to build businesses when they have $10–11 million in assets and have achieved their freedom goals. They’ve got $2–3 million in other properties. Laura’s current business is worth “somewhere around the $5 million mark” too.
If Laura’s goal was $5 million liquid, then isn’t she falling prey to the dreaded Scarcity Mindset? A belief that we must continue to accrue ever more and that no matter how much we have, it’s never enough.
Well, this is where things get really interesting.
“Even though we could live off our investments now, we still run our businesses. We love [author’s italics] our businesses. I’m still excited about it. I want to grow.”
Think back to the high resolution image of success we spoke about at the top. Meaning and purpose are a vital part of that image. What they inform is a process that is valuable in and of itself.
Laura and her husband have found a process of living that is meaningful in, and of, itself. It just so happens that it creates a lot of cash for them too.
That’s why creating alignment in your goals is so essential. It’s back to those Nested Goals I teach in my Clarity Course.
In order to really succeed, you have to know what’s meaningful to you.
As Laura mentions, “we only get one life and [if I were to die tomorrow] I would want to be happy with the choices I made along the way.”
Summary: How To Emulate Massive Levels of Success.
To create a lifestyle of freedom and growth — really the life of an Adventurepreneur — follow the 5 key lessons Laura followed:
Create the highest resolution image of success possible.
Listen to the information your emotions — negative and positive — provide you
Don’t let your beliefs control your outcome
Use deadlines as a forcing function to make goals happen more quickly.
Continue to follow what is meaningful
If you’re looking to follow a tried and tested process for becoming who you’re meant to be, check out The Adventurepreneur Bundle where you can get the Clarity, Calm, and Character Courses at a big discount.
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