#101🕊️ The Unexpected Path to Happiness: Finding Freedom
Concluding the Finding Happiness Series
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I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
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Part 15 of the Finding Happiness Series
🦋The Takeaways
Belief: Happiness comes from personal growth and self-acceptance alone.
Reality: True happiness requires freedom from the constraints of survival anxiety.
Action: Define what freedom looks like for you and create measurable targets to achieve it.
⭐️Introduction
This issue marks the end of my Finding Happiness series. Typically, I'd summarize the key learnings from previous editions, highlighting patterns and insights we've discovered together.
But this time, I want to do something different. Instead of recapping, I want to share the most unexpected lesson I've learned throughout this journey: the critical role of freedom in finding happiness.
When I say freedom, I mean the ability to wake up and genuinely choose what you want to do that day. And living in America, I've found that freedom rests on two essential pillars: income and health insurance. For 99% of us, the way to fulfill those pillars is employment. What if we broke free of that paradigm, though?
😵💫The Belief - Happiness Is Purely Internal
When I started this newsletter, I focused on how to keep a job while managing neurodivergence. I believed happiness came primarily from personal growth—learning to accept myself, building better habits, and reframing negative thoughts. You know, that stuff you hear about from influencers about how to be happy.
I thought if I could just find contentment with who I am, happiness would naturally follow. If I could just perform better at work through better ADHD regulation, I'd find security and thus happiness.
The underlying assumption was that happiness was mostly an internal state—something I could achieve through mindset shifts and personal development. External factors were secondary, obstacles to overcome through better thinking and coping strategies.
I believed the path to happiness looked like this:
Accept yourself more fully
Manage your ADHD effectively
Perform better at work
Find contentment with what you have
As I read this, it sounds like I believed that everything would be OK if I just tried a little harder. It was naive, but it led me to find a path to happiness by leading me to a path to freedom.
🤝The Reality - Freedom Changes Everything
The biggest surprise in my happiness journey wasn't finding self-acceptance; it was discovering how profoundly my life changed when I secured backup plans for income and healthcare.
Through growing a coaching business, I reached a point where losing my day job wouldn't be catastrophic. I still need a job, but if I were to lose it, I would have an alternative option to scouring LinkedIn for hours a day, praying for a job.
I also found a tech startup offering quality health insurance at affordable rates that was tied to my company, not my employment. For those not familiar, health insurance in the US is tied to employment, including access to quality plans. Most private individuals, even if they could afford to pay for it, often do not have access to the best insurance plans.
What happened next surprised me: I started performing better at work. Not because I was trying harder, but because I was liberated from the constant anxiety of "what if I lose this job?"
I gained a profound sense of empowerment by seeing work as a choice rather than a survival necessity. When I'm not constrained by the stress and fear of losing health insurance or income, I can focus on what truly matters—helping my coworkers, contributing value, and learning while having fun.
In a country where basic needs like healthcare are tied to employment, true freedom requires addressing these external factors. Ironically, having that freedom makes you a better employee, not a worse one.
I can now go into each day focused on "How can I best contribute?" rather than "How can I avoid getting fired?" The difference has been transformative.
🛠️The Action - Define Your Freedom KPIs
My advice isn't simply "go find a side hustle" or "get independent health insurance." These were my solutions, but your path to freedom may look different.
Instead, I encourage you to:
1. Define what freedom means for you
What specific constraints cause you the most anxiety?
What would it take for you to feel secure enough to work from choice rather than fear?
What backup systems or skills would allow you to build a path to freedom?
2. Set clear, measurable targets
For our coaching business, we established specific KPIs for allowing a partner to leave their full-time job
Three consecutive months of revenue that could sustain one full-time person
Six months of that person's salary in the bank as a backup
These concrete metrics give us clarity on our progress towards self-employment instead of being just a dream
3. Notice how freedom transforms your work
Pay attention to how your performance changes as anxiety decreases
Observe how your relationships with colleagues improve
Track how your creativity and problem-solving abilities expand when you're not in survival mode
✨Conclusion
I didn't begin this happiness series expecting to focus on financial and healthcare freedom. I thought my journey would center on accepting myself and managing ADHD better. Those things matter, but they weren't the complete picture.
What I've unexpectedly learned is how much anxiety about basic survival needs has limited my capacity for happiness. It's sad to think how many brilliant innovations and businesses never materialize because potential founders can't risk losing healthcare for their families.
True freedom—and by extension, true happiness—requires addressing both internal and external constraints. When we're not consumed by survival anxiety, we can finally bring our whole selves to our work, our relationships, and our dreams.
It’s not a profound statement, but why is it so few allowed to live without the anxiety? I can’t change the system, but I have some ideas on how to make it better. More on that in my next series.
⏭️Next Week
I'll be taking next week off, but in two weeks I'll return with a brand new series on inclusive performance coaching. We'll explore how managers, HR leaders, and individual contributors can make effective coaching accessible to everyone, not just those with neurodivergence.