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Wandering barefoot across golden beaches in Thailand and eating authentic, delicious Pad Thai (that costs just over 80p a dish) one month…Swanking it up surrounded by super-yachts in the Marina and eating Michelin-starred meals in Dubai the next…Diving with great whites and sampling world class wines in South Africa the month after that…

The Myths

It is easy to believe that location independent living is a lifestyle for the rich, famous or those with large trust funds only.

It’s easy to believe that a location independent life is only for those who are *extremely* fortunate and you’re not one of them.

It is easy to believe that you’ll never create the location independent lifestyle for yourself if you’re just starting out and you’ve got multiple hurdles to leap over.

It is easy to believe that once you start your location independent life, all your worries and troubles will be over and you’ll live the life I described above, trotting about the globe without a care in the world.

It is easy to believe that you’ll find the *perfect* place you can call home and that once you’ve found it, everything will feel alright.

The Traps

It is easy to become addicted to the excitement and adrenalin rush of visiting exotic new destinations every few months.

It is easy to look forward to the next destination so much that you sometimes forget to enjoy the here and now of where you are currently.

It is easy to compare one place favourably or otherwise to another and not take it on its own merits.

It is easy to let the time zones get the better of you.

It is easy to get distracted by your new surroundings, take too much time off and forget to focus on your business or means of income.

Some of you know me already, some of you might not.

The lifestyle I’ve described at the beginning of this post is mine…a 30 year old ‘normal’ person, who grew up in Nottingham (the gun capital of Europe, if you really want to know), who doesn’t have a huge trust fund but does consider herself *extremely* fortunate.

Jonathan, my husband, and I have disproved all of the above myths and fallen into all of the above traps. If we can do it, so you can you…enjoy the ride.

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I often get asked to mention, promote, advertise or feature things and sometimes I want to but I’m aware that people don’t always like to be advertised to, especially in a place where they usually don’t find too much of it…so if you’re one of those people, skip this post and wait for our next article on Monday

However, if you don’t mind being exposed to some things that are actually very useful for creating your Location Independent life, then read on…

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Carol Burnett, the award-winning American actress once said “When you have a dream you’ve got to grab it and never let go.”

Our LIP dreams, hopes and aspirations can be fragile, don’t you think? They need to be carefully protected against “attacks” from various people, including friends and family who only have your best intentions at heart.

In fact some of the most unhelpful, confidence-sapping comments come from those closest to you. Having been on the receiving end of some of these myself over the past year, two questions have been nagging me recently.

The first, is “Why?”

Why is there this need to burst my location independent bubble? It’s not as if I have this wild and desperate dream to build a teleporting device with three satsumas and a string of liquorice.

Secondly, “What can I do to protect myself emotionally from these comments?”

The answer to my first question came to me when I worked out that as I described my dreams and plans of becoming location independent to my friends and family, they were imagining themselves to be doing the same and then projecting their own fears onto me, the most common of which include the following:

• Fear that my job or career prospects will evaporate.
• Fear for my safety.
• Fear that I will run out of money and I will need bailing out.
• Fear of the unknown.
• Fear that my nomadic lifestyle will have serious repercussions from which I will struggle to recover.
• Fear that I don’t have the skills or contacts to survive outside a corporate environment.
• Fear that they will miss you and feel alone.
• Fear that they won’t be able to cope if things don’t turn out the way they want.

What emanates from these fears is a need for them to gain control and create some certainty. They do this either by trying to create doubt in your mind - in the hope that you’ll think twice about your decision; or they pester you endlessly for information to help cure their fear of the unknown.

Either way it can become very frustrating and tiring unless you know how to protect your location independent dreams. Here are a few tips to do that….

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Photo by flattop341

As someone who comes from a corporate background of management consulting, one of the things I found the most thrilling about our journey to becoming location independent was the “skilling up” required… I love learning new stuff.

In consulting, it was the constant need to learn something new, to assume the status of an expert amongst far more experienced people and in all honesty, to be able to blag with the best of them which created the love/hate relationship I had with consulting.

One day I’d be cramming my brain with everything I could find out about credit management for a global bank, the next it could be refreshing my knowledge on the client journey to talk to the Customer Relations director of a global cellphone company; but the fear that I would some day be “found out” nagged at me in the background and overshadowed the challenge and thrill of all that learning.

These days, running my own business and writing my own blogs, presentations and marketing materials, I only write about and sell what I know - the things I’ve got experience in and what I’ve actually done successfully myself.

I live safe in the knowledge that my skills are usually good enough, that the depth of knowledge is sound and that I can basically deliver what I promise to deliver. That can’t be said of everyone sadly.

But this isn’t another rant about how some bloggers blag with the best of them and advise others on things they’ve never done (which irks me something chronic too), it is a post about the essential skills I believe you need if you’re aiming to become location independent by running a business of some sort…and how you can skill up if you find yourself lacking.

Here they are…

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