A few years ago, I left a stable, well paying corporate job to start something of my own with no safety net, no big brand name behind me, and no guarantee it would work.

Everyone around me assumed I’d feel free the day I walked out. Free of a boss, free of targets set by someone else, free of a system I didn’t fully believe in anymore.

But that’s not quite what happened. The freedom didn’t arrive with the resignation letter. It arrived much later, and from somewhere else entirely.

It made me realise something I hadn’t sat with before. That freedom, real freedom, has almost nothing to do with the big visible things we chase. It’s not the title. It’s not the funding round. It’s not even the exit from a job you didn’t like. It’s the quiet decision, made alone, to take full ownership of something and stop waiting for someone to hand you permission.

I think most of us get this idea of freedom wrong.

We think it’s external. A better job will free us. A bigger house will free us. Enough money in the bank will finally let us breathe. So we spend years chasing the outside version of freedom, and then one day we get it, and we still feel stuck. Because the thing that was actually holding us back was never out there.

My mother used to say something I only understood properly after she was gone. She said, “Nobody can cage a person who has already made peace inside.” At the time it sounded like one of those things elders say. It took me years, and a book, and building a company from scratch, to understand what she meant.

The truth is, in those early days I wasn’t free of fear at all. I had every reason to feel scared, wondering if clients would ever trust a boutique firm over the big search houses. On paper, I had less security than I did in a stable corporate job. But I felt freer than I ever had. Because for the first time, the outcome depended entirely on decisions I was making, not decisions being made for me in a boardroom I wasn’t even invited into.

That’s the part nobody tells you. Freedom often looks like more responsibility, not less. It looks like putting your own name on the line instead of hiding behind someone else’s.

I see this with the women coming into Recruit Her right now too. Most of them haven’t worked in years. Some have never had a paycheck in their own name. On the outside, it looks like we’re teaching them recruitment skills, Naukri, Zoho, LinkedIn, the practical tools of the trade. But what’s actually happening underneath is different. It’s a homemaker realising that she was never actually incapable, she was just unpractised. The skill was always something she could learn. What had to change first was what she believed about herself when nobody else was in the room.

That’s the inside job. Nobody can do it for you, and no external achievement can substitute for it either.

I’ve had people ask me why I write, why I speak on stages about parenting and entrepreneurship, why I started an NGO on the side of a demanding business. Honestly, it’s because every time I do one of these things, I’m reminding myself of the same lesson. That the version of me who feels trapped and the version of me who feels free are not living in two different circumstances. They’re living in two different relationships with the same circumstances.

So if you’re waiting for something outside to change before you let yourself feel free, an approval, a promotion, a certain number in your account, I’d gently push back on that. Start with the inside. Make peace with the part of you that’s scared. Take ownership of one thing today, even if nobody’s watching.

The outside will follow. It usually does.