THE FREEDOM-BASED BUSINESS METHOD: Reset, Systemize, and Realign Your Business to Live a Life of Harmony

Review

SECTION ONE Natalie Ellis wrote this book for the entrepreneur who has built a business that works on paper but has quietly colonized her life. The promise is not more productivity but less captivity: a method for designing a business around the owner's actual priorities — time, income, creative energy — rather than retrofitting life around whatever the business demands. Ellis, co-founder of the women's business network Boss Babe, draws on her own experience of scaling a company that became a source of exhaustion rather than freedom, and the method she offers is meant to solve that specific problem. The reader this book is written for is a self-employed professional or small-business owner, probably a woman, who already has clients and revenue but suspects the architecture of her business is working against her. The core argument is structural: freedom is not a mindset to be adopted but a system to be built, and Ellis provides a sequence for auditing and redesigning that system from the ground up. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Ellis's premise that the entrepreneur's time, attention, and creative capacity have genuine worth — and should not simply be sold off to whoever bids first — reflects the CCMMP's affirmation of the dignity of the person as a rational agent. Aquinas's account of prudence as the virtue that orders action toward a genuinely chosen end, rather than toward whatever external pressure is loudest, gives theological weight to what Ellis frames in practical-business terms. - **Fallen**: The problem Ellis diagnoses — a business that has grown in ways its owner never intended, now generating anxiety, overwork, and a loss of original purpose — is a recognizable pattern of disordered desire. The entrepreneur wanted freedom and built, through accumulated reactive decisions, a more sophisticated kind of bondage. This is concupiscence operating in the economic domain: the tendency toward short-term relief (saying yes to every client, every revenue stream) at the cost of long-term ordered flourishing. - **Redeemed**: The book's method of deliberate redesign — stopping, auditing, choosing — functions as a form of practical conversion: returning disordered business activity to the governance of reason and will. It does not invoke grace, but the structure it proposes (examined intention, ordered action, habituated discipline) is the natural-order analogue of what the CCMMP calls reintegration of the person toward their proper end. - **Prudence (foresight)**: The book trains the reader to reason from desired future states backward to present decisions, which is precisely the movement of prudential foresight. Ellis asks the reader to specify, in concrete terms, what the business should look like in three years — and then to examine whether today's commitments are ordered toward or against that end. - **Prudence (good counsel)**: Ellis positions herself as a guide who has made the mistakes, not as an authority who has always known the answers. This posture of earned counsel — specific, tested, offered with appropriate humility — is a practical instance of the virtue of good counsel: helping another person arrive at their own prudent judgment rather than substituting one's own. SECTION THREE Steven Hayes[^1], identifies psychological rigidity — doing the same thing because the same anxious logic keeps generating it — as the primary obstacle to valued living. Hayes's formulation that being "open, aware, actively engaged" empowers a person anywhere in life[^1] maps directly onto what Ellis is attempting at the business-structure level: interrupting the automatic, fear-driven patterns of the overcommitted entrepreneur and replacing them with values-clarified intention. Where Hayes works at the level of cognitive defusion from anxious thought, Ellis works at the level of structural defusion from anxiety-driven business decisions; the mechanisms are different but the anthropological problem is the same. David Allen's[^2] concept of the "mind like water" — a state of relaxed, present-focused engagement that emerges from a trustworthy external system — complements Ellis's method at the operational level: both authors argue that cognitive freedom is downstream of structural clarity, not upstream of it.[^2] ## References [^1]: Hayes, S. C. (n.d.). *ACT and RFT videos* [DMU video lecture]. "open aware actively engaged is just empowering to human beings anywhere in your life." [^2]: Allen, D. (2001). *Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity*. Viking. Conclusion: "the freedom of a 'mind like water' and the release of your creative energies."

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book addresses the legitimate human desire for ordered freedom in work, which resonates with the CCMMP premise that the person is a rational agent whose practical wisdom (prudence) is meant to govern external activity, not merely respond to market pressures.
• ✓By centering business design around the entrepreneur's own values and life priorities, Ellis implicitly affirms the unity of the person — the idea that professional conduct and interior life cannot be cleanly separated without cost to both.
• ✓The method's emphasis on intentional structure over reactive busyness aligns with prudence's integral part of foresight: ordering present decisions toward genuinely chosen ends rather than drifting under cultural or financial pressure.
• ✓Ellis's framing of success as self-defined rather than socially imposed creates space for the reader to interrogate what they actually value — a step that, from a Catholic anthropological standpoint, can open the door to deeper questions about vocation and the common good.
• ✓The practical, step-by-step structure of the method trains the kind of habituated practical reasoning that Aquinas identifies as the work of prudence: repeated good judgment becoming second nature over time.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's anthropology is implicitly autonomist: freedom is defined primarily as independence from external constraint (clients, schedules, market demands) rather than as freedom-for a telos beyond the self. The CCMMP, following Aquinas, distinguishes freedom from coercion from the deeper freedom-for-flourishing that requires ordered desire — a distinction Ellis does not appear to make.
• ⚠Without a theological or even a robust philosophical account of the common good, the method risks training a form of prudence that is technically proficient but ordered exclusively toward the individual entrepreneur's preferences. Maritain's person-versus-individual distinction is the relevant pressure point here.
• ⚠The Hay House imprint signals a New Age-adjacent publishing context. Readers should expect a therapeutic-spirituality background assumption (authenticity, abundance mindset, self-actualization) that is not hostile to Catholic life but is anthropologically thinner than it may appear.