It’s a pleasure to meet you! I am Marissa Nehlsen and if there’s anything I’ve learned about life it’s simply this: a dream life doesn’t just drop into our lap –– a dream life is something that has to be designed.

True fulfillment doesn’t come just because we get a handle on our finances (which, as the CEO of a 7-figure financial firm, I know something about) and it doesn’t come just from building a great career. A dream life is built with intention and requires we overcome our fears, rewrite our old programming, and take permission to get our swag back.

Wherever you are in life, my hope is that you will be fiercely intentional about designing your dream life. I coach, speak, and teach because I believe every person should live as if single day matters.

When people ask me where I’m from, they’re usually surprised when I answer, “Minot, North Dakota.” Then they look at what I do as a speaker, coach, and CEO of 7-figure financial firm and are even more surprised that there’s even enough money in that part of the country for someone like me to manage.

Sometimes we look at where people come from and just assume they’ll turn out a certain way, but how many times do we do that to ourselves? Maybe you’ve reached a certain level of success, but do you ever feel there’s still a limit to who you’re “allowed” to be? I can tell you who’s doing the talking at that moment: the enemy of your soul.

The enemy of your soul tells you, “You can’t do it. You’re not smart enough. You don’t have enough fill-in-the-blank.” Then we feed that negativity every single day to the point that it’s become an epidemic of lost hope all over the world. Too many people are living hopeless lives. Someone needs to do something about this, and it might as well be me and you.

I grew up in the trailer courts where you could literally smell the poverty. We had such little money that we had to nail blankets over our doors and windows to keep the heat in from our rickety kerosene lantern during the winter. Someone say “fire hazard”?

When I was 14, I had a conversation with my mom while she was laying down on this nasty brown couch we fished out of a dumpster. I looked around at the blankets draped over our windows and said, “Mom … we’re really poor, aren’t we? We’re not just kinda poor, we’re like … the poor people that they talk about in the world, right?”

Mom said something that day that I’ll never forget. It was the only time I’ve ever heard her say it, but when she said it something snapped in me. She goes, “Yeah we’re poor –– but you can be a victim, or you can be victorious. What are you gonna do?”

Yeah, we had no money. Yeah, our home insulation was made up of dirty blankets covering the windows of a trailer in the North Dakota winter. But that day I learned that financial poverty wasn’t the only kind of poverty in the world. My mom, brown couch and all, showed me a way out –– and she showed me that my mindset was the first place of abundance.

By the way, my mom is a badass. The way we ended up in that trailer park was when my father blew a hole in the ceiling with a shotgun a few months earlier. She said, “No more” and marched us kids right out of there and raised us herself.

I’ve never met someone so resilient. She made $700 a month the whole time I was growing up and every Sunday she’d give 10% to her church and say, “Marissa, someone else needs this more than we do.” Maybe there was another family that didn’t even have blankets for their windows. Well, I’ll be damned.

There are four forms of poverty, and the reality is that we focus too much on just one of them.

• Financial
• Relational
• Spiritual
• Emotional

You can put these in any order of importance you want but the truth is you’ll never have a dream life if you don’t build on all four.

As the years passed, I founded Freedom Financial Group where I worked with some of the highest performers you’d ever meet. If they’ve taught me anything, it’s that the number of zeros on the end of your paycheck don’t determine the amount of fulfillment you’ll have in life. Money doesn’t hurt, but it’s not everything.

I speak, coach, and teach because I want to help you shut down the enemy of your soul. Whether you’re struggling to provide for your family (I’ve been there), looking to level up your career or finances, or you’ve climbed the mountain and are looking to leave a legacy, I’m here to equip you with a blueprint for your dream life.