My guest today, Natalie Sisson, is an investor, triathlete, lover of handstands, and an entrepreneur who truly believes you can get paid to be yourself, and she’s living proof that this is true.
In 2009, she left her corporate job and started a blog called The Suitcase Entrepreneur, which became a full-time business and enabled her to travel the world for 7 years. She was a digital nomad before being a digital nomad was a thing.
Today, she has settled down on a homestead in New Zealand and has refocused her attention on showing others how to build businesses around their unique skillsets.
Now, let’s hack…
Natalie Sisson.
Highlights from the interview
- [07:41]: Natalie discusses how the current pandemic has changed people’s attitudes toward working at home. When she first started working online as a digital nomad, it was an uncommon lifestyle. Despite the technological capacity for doing so having been around for at least a decade at this point, it still hadn’t quite become mainstream. The COVID-19 pandemic is quickly changing all of that, out of necessity. People have suddenly had to work from home, and companies had no choice but to put processes in place to enable that.
- [10:21]: Natalie explains her pivot into more of a personal brand for herself. Originally, she was using the Suitcase Entrepreneur brand, rather than her name and her own identity. She eventually came to feel that this was holding her back. She felt she’d begun, as a person and professional, to move away from being limited to Suitcase Entrepreneur. She felt like there was more to her skills, experience, and potential.
- [16:58]: Natalie talks about what it was like to finally reach her goal, after several years. A lot of it ended up coming down to mindset issues. She needed to get her content out there without overwhelming herself or overworking herself to the point of burnout. She also has a long history of issues with negative internal voices and impostor syndrome.
- [26:40]: Natalie discusses overcoming writer’s block. She launched something called “Write Your Damn Book,” where she and other authors go through the process together of writing every week. She overcomes the fear, in part, by focusing on people.
Resources and links from the episode
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