Photo by Paco CT

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 Genista.

Buenos Aires or Barcelona? Caracas or Crete? Florianopolis or Florence? Given the choice which South American or European city would you live in?

As a location independent professional - someone who can work from anywhere - choosing which country to live and work in, whether it’s your first port of call or the next step on your journey, can prove to be a tricky decision to make. There are numerous factors to take into consideration including:

• Language
• Cost
• Culture
• Infrastructure
• Family/Friends
• Safety
• The nature of your business

Having spent most of my life living on mainland Europe and now married to a South American, my wife and I are continually torn between the beautiful and efficiently run Zurich and the raw energetic exoticism of Rio de Janeiro.

Neither city is by any means completely representative of each continent but from our point of view both offer us the most in terms of lifestyle, family and friends, culture and weather that we’re looking for.

If we had to choose between South America and Europe today I know where we would book our tickets to and here’s why…

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Price Pritchett, an internationally-recognised expert on change, once said “Change always comes bearing gifts.” I believe this to be true although the gifts may not always turn out to be what you expect.

My decision to leave the rat race over a year ago was not an easy one. Despite growing tired of the office politics, the actual work and the long commute I had a lot of good reasons to stay in my job:

• I earned plenty of money
• I had great career prospects ( I still do!)
• My social life thrived
• I lived in a nice part of town

But I found that there was a price to pay for all these good reasons - I became institutionalised. My daily working life was run by someone else. Decisions that shaped my future were not made by me and I was deluding myself that I was in control…

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Photo by Claudecf

Eating my favourite meal wraps me up in a warm blanket of emotional comfort, especially during the cold European winters.

As Claudia and I have just arrived in the Swiss Alps with plans to go to Brazil in October, I’ve been thinking of my favourite recipes to take with us and wonder whether they’d taste quite the same in different parts of the world.

When you make new friends on your travels and are invited for dinner or to a party a friendly gesture, which is always appreciated, is to bring a dish of some kind. I find it helps to break the ice.

Here are three recipes which, unless you’re headed to the Sahara or deepest Siberia, you can find ingredients for almost anywhere in the world…

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