Podcast: How To Live a Life of Passion and Purpose as an Entrepreneur

Announcer: Hello and welcome to The Business Growth Agency podcast, where we bring you short, highly actionable guides that help you and your business to grow. Today, we’re speaking to Louis de Rohan. Louis is a coaching client of ours. He built an extremely successful business in the PR industry, but we’re here to ask Louis about something else that he did. Something that I think will make lots of business owners out there very jealous.

Louis structured his business so that it could run entirely without him being there. Then he took a nine month sabbatical to travel the world and pursue his passions. In this interview, we’re going to dive into topics like happiness, values, and perhaps the biggest question of all. How should we live our lives if we want to live them to their very fullest?

Margarida: Hello, Louis. Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey so far.

Louis: I’m 47. Three years ago I began the journey of taking my sabbatical out of my business, which at the time was an 11 year old business. Yes, lots of decisions and developments have happened since then, very exciting. I have always made a very clear and strong commitment to pursuing my passions which include travel.

Margarida: Did you feel unhappy or unfulfilled before your sabbatical?

Louis: Extremely frustrated, unfulfilled, and yes unhappy on occasions. When the business was going well, I was very happy and excited, but there was always something that was left unsatisfied. There’s a talker on social media. I think it’s Jay Shetty. He calls it the golden handcuffs as do many other people. Committing to a job, and a salary, or a business that essentially takes up all of your time, and for me, there were always many other things I wanted to do. I’m a travel writer and photographer as well. I wanted to do more travel and have a better balance between my work life and my free time.

Margarida: Why do you think business owners get stressed and feel unhappy even when they are financially successful?

Louis: It’s a very simple answer. Money is not everything. Just as we’re now at the start of a new year where we’re at there’s endless streams of coaching and content in the digital space, reminding us that possessions and money do not fulfill us. Individually and respectively, we all have a life purpose. That is what needs fulfilling, and that’s why we need to invest our time and our energy. Unfortunately, the culture we live in, in the West, makes us believe we should be investing a lot of our time and energy into the acquiring of possessions and the acquiring of wealth, but that is only one part of the jigsaw.

Margarida: What do you think a good life or a life well lived means?

Louis: A life well lived, for me, is a life of purpose and a life that is an authentic reflection of who you are. Fear blocks a lot of what should be our natural flow state. Fear stops us from fulfilling our dreams, from fulfilling our potential, and from fulfilling our purpose. It’s a very powerful thing, fear. To overcome it, we need to educate ourselves. We need to inform ourselves. We need to tap into what inspires us. That, eventually, from those who come from a traditional education, will give us access and strength to overcome the fears and to jump into the things that make us excited and fulfilled.

Margarida: What made you start thinking about value, passion, and purpose in the first place?

Louis: What a great question. I’ve always been very grounded. I grew up by the sea for 25 years. I’m very into nature. I regard myself as a very conscious human being. I’m self-aware. I’m also aware of what makes me happy. People have often coveted my life and that of my twin brother because we have traveled so much and done amazing things around the world, even before the advent of the internet.

I guess we always had this sense of fulfilling our purpose and our passions. It was always there. Yes, the challenge comes when you have to commit to a full-time job, or setting up your own business, and making sure that the demands of a business or a job don’t start to drain your energy and take you to a place where you’re unfulfilled and unhappy.

Margarida: How were you able to leave your business for a year and have it continue running without you being there?

Louis:My number two at the time, my deputy, who I had trained up for six or seven years, she always said to me a very important piece of advice. She said Louis, there’s never going to be the perfect time for you to go. I selected a date, and we had done at least two years or three years of coaching and preparation in advance. There was never a perfect time, but what I did was we committed with discipline to the methodology of the coaching program. We found it extremely valuable and empowering.

For me, I’m a creative by nature. For me, discipline is a very hard thing to embrace, but I committed to it and with the help of my business partner, who is more left brain dominant, that is strategic thinker, linear thinker. I’m more right brain, more emotion, more flow, more intuition, and more vision. Those two parts coming together was an important part of me being able to separate myself from the business. At the end of the day, it was about systemizing the business and the tools that we received from the coaching program, and the education was extremely valuable. I wouldn’t have been able to do it, otherwise

Margarida: Tell us about your sabbatical and everything you did.

Louis: I tapped into, let say, a creative dimension that I had always longed for. Part of me wishes I had gone to art school. I never had the opportunity. Also, that was based on a fear that I think many people who are creatives are told at the early stages in life, that if you become an artist or if you pursue something creative, will you be able to make a living from that? Should you be turning your passion into your job? I never had the fortune of pursuing creative education, so I used a sabbatical as an opportunity to go expose myself.

Two things really that resonate with me: one is creativity, that is through connection, through communication, through travel. I’m a linguist so I enjoy using my language to talk to new cultures. It also allowed me to tap into conservation, which is a huge passion of mine. I used to be a conservation reporter and correspondent for a newspaper. Essentially, the sabbatical which took me from the orangutans of Sumatra in the rainforest, which is rapidly disappearing, working with small groups of volunteers who are trying to save or replant primary rainforest and educate the world, and business, and governments as to why and how we are contributing to the demise of the rainforest. That was incredibly inspiring.

Yes, I meet characters and people along the way, which I find super exciting because their journeys are where they are following their passion. They’re paid a lot of money, but they are fulfilling a life purpose. I then went and spent time with my twin brother, who is my soulmate, in Australia. We surfed. We had amazing experiences for a month.

Then I went to the place that really resonates and is the most important, probably, region in the world for me as a Hispanofile, and that was to Latin America. I spent then over six months traveling from Costa Rica, down through Central America, which I know well anyway, but I revisited places that I had been to before. I visited places I had never been to before. I had amazing experiences such as crossing the series of sand dunes in the northernmost part of Brazil, which are by the sea and one can cross the sand dunes on barefoot. I think it’s one of the only barefoot trecks in the world. Those kinds of experiences were ones that I will take with me for the rest of my life.

Margarida: How are you going to continue to honor your purpose?

Louis: Oh, another great question. For me, I have a number of strategies in place that will allow me to do that. Most importantly, it’s about dedicating time. That comes from planning, but it’s about allocating time to pursuing those things that inspire you. For me, it was part of a new year. This weekend I will be working out with my wall planner exactly when I’ll be traveling, but also when I’ll be committing time to incrementally investing in my creative work. That includes art. It includes photography. It includes film making. It will include guitar playing as well.

Margarida: Do you have any type of routines to help you follow your dreams?

Louis: I would love to say yes because people like Branson and other entrepreneurs who are successful around the world all have rituals and routines. I would say I do work well with structure. I’d love to say I meditate in the mornings. I don’t yet, but what I do in the work time is I have a very clear program, which is built around a weekly planner that’s in Excel. Every morning and every week, I will be looking at what I am committing my time to at work, and that allows me to leave the office at the end of the week or the end of the day knowing that I have used my time wisely and that I can enjoy my leisure time afterwards.

Margarida: Thank you very much, Louis.

Louis: You’re welcome.

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