Have you given up on your dreams, no longer thinking about your ideal lifestyle? I’m a work from home mum now, thanks to the shock of waking up to the fact that my life needed to change.

Have your dreams become buried so deeply they seem irretrievable? Does your mindset and conditioning prevent you from bringing them to the surface and you just exist thinking you have to accept the way your life is?

Conditioning takes away your creative thinking in such a way that you become desensitised to your dreams and aspirations.

I’m alluding to what happened to me.

After I was made redundant from my job last year, I was asked this very question and I couldn’t come up with the answer and that shocked me.

Somehow I had to bring those dreams back to life and that was the hardest part. It didn’t happen overnight but I gradually unlocked my dreams.

Apart from the obvious, like nice country house, new car, great holidays and other tangibles, what I found more disturbing, was the realisation that for the many years I’d diligently gone off to work to earn money to help support my family, our quality family time had been heavily eroded unnecessarily and was gone forever.

It had never occurred to me that life could be different. I didn’t question it. I just assumed that ordinary people like me just had to live by the rules in a life with very little flexibility or freedom.

By freedom, I’m talking about the kind of freedom to be with my family when they need me. Put simply, to be able to take my daughter to school. To be able to stand in the playground and chat to other mums and dads. To be able to go into class and read with the children. To be able to take my daughter to the doctor or dentist when necessary without the worry of how I’d get the time off work. What a luxury that would have been for me. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I wasn’t happy about this but it was beyond my control. If the boss says you have to start your day at 8.30am then how can you take your kids to school? How can you argue with that if you need your job? So with pressures like this, mornings in our household were fraught from the start and we’d all go off in different directions feeling stressed and rushed and usually, for me, with the added problem of trying to dodge a speeding fine.

There are many more ways family life was compromised by my job but I think you get the picture. Now that I’m running my own top home based business, all that has changed. My family come first and I just wished I’d taken the plunge sooner.

These days, my dreams are my reality, made possible by being a work at home mum. There’s no way I’ll ever consider going back to a traditional 9 – 5 job working for someone else again. My dreams have been set free and I’m living the life I choose.

Want to find out more about the best new online business, that work from home mum Lindsey Rowe uses to write her own paycheck and live the life she chooses? Jay Kubassek will explain the system that has given Lindsey her life back