I'm recording this one from my bed, surrounded by the dog, the laundry and my daughter's panda, because (as usual) I'm navigating chaos: the floors are being replaced and there's nowhere quiet left in the house. Which, as usual, seems exactly right for exploring Joy First Decision #7: the decision to stop chasing freedom, put down roots... and have kids.

In the last episode I was gleefully drifting around Europe, taking selfies with my Frenchie in front of the Eiffel Tower and in Venice. This is the episode where I start making the opposite sort of choices: ones with roots, responsibilities and very sore nipples.

I'm getting into all of it: why being a kid mom (or a dog mom) never seems to add up on paper, and how the joy stacks up anyway. What it was like to be one of the only women in my world who chose kids (when my friends and peers mostly chose pets instead). The horror and the richness held together, including the birth trauma we're not supposed to mention and the fear I carried my whole life: that motherhood would become my entire personality.

In this episode:

• Why the "should I have kids" maths never adds up (and why that doesn't matter)

• How I guarded against motherhood swallowing me, and how it changed me anyway

• The surprising way motherhood deepened the way basic human decency has radicalized me

• The club I got an instant free pass to that I wasn't expecting

• The one thing that makes it all possible for me to cling to my sanity while navigating through survival mode

If this resonates, follow the show and leave a review (thank you so much 🙏). See you next time for Joy First Decision number eight.

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I will never forget standing in a tiny grocery store in Lake Como, Italy... holding a lemon almost as big as my hand with the leaves still on, and realizing this wasn't a holiday. It was my actual life.

I would I have posted those lemons on instagram, but what you wouldn't fave seen there, is what it actually took to finally be standing there.

I'd built a business I could run from anywhere (a six-figure online membership and consulting business, run entirely over Zoom). I had been running it from my tiny terrace house in London. I could be anywhere, but instead I sat at my kitchen table, day after day... sometimes splashing out to the coffee shop down the road.

What was the point of having autonomy if I was too scared to use it?

In this episode (Joy First Decision #6) I tell the whole story of how my husband and I came to live in Lake Como, Italy, Morzine, France, and Mallorca, Spain after losing my heart dog Olivia, becoming reluctant landlords; moving into a spare room in someone else's house, and then actually hitting the road for the digital nomad life. All while running the business, working with clients, writing a book, and getting paid to speak on stages.

In this episode:

• Why you can build total freedom and still never use it

• That the biggest joy so often sits on the far side of the discomfort you're avoiding

• How the whole thing started with one small choice: a single change to my calendar

If this resonated, follow the show and leave a review. I will see you next time for Joy First Decision #7.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As you may know, in this season I’ve been sharing the top ten joy first decisions of my life in a nice orderly chronological countdown, and then yesterday happened and had to through out the plan and have this conversation instead.

So, totally out of order, this is joy first decision #5, arriving early and slightly out of breath, with my friend Nicole Begley.

Not that many weeks ago I asked Nicole for ten minutes to hear me out on idea sort of related to our annual launch of the Commercial Pet Photography Academy - and I asked her to listen and not say no before she let me finish.

We have both spent nearly two years streamlining our businesses, cutting and refining programmes, and getting really good at saying no.

Well, long story short, it’s about 8 weeks later and here we are. Yesterday we launched a new brand, a new program, have merged significant revenue streams from our separate businesses into a shared one, and retired a launch we had a great time running for five or so years.

This thing we’ve created is called the Creative Freedom Rebellion.

Today we’re exploring how you tell the difference between being flaky and moving into more alignment (something I refused to let myself do 2 yrs ago which made big, big problems for my biz).

We also share the 4 things we’ve found our most successful clients have in common (even though their versions of freedom, joy and financial success were all quite different).

And we talk about why neither of us wanted to build another room built on polite niceness where the house rule is that ‘we don't talk about that here’.

There is also a clip from the call we ran yesterday, including a really moving moment from one of our clients that I have not stopped thinking about.

Watch the full replay from yesterday: https://www.nicolebegleyedu.com/rebellion

Apply for the Creative Freedom Rebellion: https://www.nicolebegleyedu.com/rebel

Nicole's podcast: https://www.freedomfocusformula.com/blog

If this one lands, we would love to hear from you. xx -Nic & Nicole

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