The Founders
We started with one honest question: what the f*ck do you actually want out of life?
Daniel Halenko and Richard Flanagan met in 2018. Through the 2020 lockdown they ran free calls to help people make sense of the chaos, and that became Sovereign Soul: a deliberately small community, never more than about 150 people, that helps capable people unblock across money, time, decisions, environment, relationships, focus and purpose. What follows is the real story, not a tidy one.
Daniel Halenko
Co-founder
British-Ukrainian, forty-one. Daniel did not speak a real word until he was five, and stuttered for years after. Today he hosts rooms of ten thousand, has spoken on the TEDx stage (Embrace The Chaos, Fulwood UK, 7 May 2019), and has logged over six hundred hours of live group facilitation. A contributor to "You Are a Genius" (his chapter, Listen to the Whispers, written with his partner Kristina), HeartMath-trained, and part of the medicine and ayahuasca community for over ten years. He sold a thirty-eight-year-old family business, went location-independent in 2020, and has lived across roughly fifteen countries in six years.
Watch the TEDx talk →
Richard Flanagan
Co-founder
A serial entrepreneur since eighteen, running his own fund since 2011, with roots in real estate and crypto (in Bitcoin since 2016). Built and sold his own startup, moved through twenty-three countries with his wife and two children before settling in Bali, and named Sovereign Soul. The strategist of the deep change beneath the surface one. (Fuller story coming.)
How we met
China, Japan, and a shared reverence for perspective.
We met in 2018 inside a global entrepreneurs community, on what was called the I Ching Adventure: sixty entrepreneurs, three weeks, two countries, town after town, built to stretch how you see the world. Until then we had only met as mentees on Zoom, inside our mentor's mastermind. On that trip we found we thought the same way about the one thing we both hold in the highest regard: the ability to see a situation from more than one angle. We really found our rhythm in the tiny sake bars of Shinjuku's Golden Gai.
Shinjuku's Golden Gai, Tokyo, where we really bonded.
Speaking together on the adventure.
“Those who can see the most given perspectives in any situation will yield the best outcome.”
DANIEL, FOR OVER A DECADE
2020 · The first calls
Sensemaking, when nobody knew what to do.
In the first lockdown of summer 2020, when everyone was confused, we started running calls to help people make sense of it. We called it sensemaking, a word Daniel Schmachtenberger's “War on Sensemaking” handed us for a thing we were already doing. The calls moved from what is happening to what do we do about it, and a lot of that became helping people into crypto, self-custody and Web3, the practical spine of financial sovereignty.
I still remember calling Richard the first time I had to use MetaMask, asking him to watch my screen so a second pair of eyes could catch what I couldn't. It was new, and it was scary. But we knew self-custody was a key part of sovereignty.
An early Future Leaders Today call, back when it was free.
Day of the Dead in Mexico, with our partners.
Future Leaders Today · 2022
Eighty free calls, a member willing to pay, and a naked pitch on a beach.
We ran about eighty of those calls, every week, for free, under a name we threw together in Canva: Future Leaders Today. By then we were both tired. We had each built and sold companies, Richard a startup he founded, Daniel a 38-year-old family business, and neither had really been us. But the calls had depth. People showed up, did the work, asked the questions. Then a member, Marissa, Canadian, living in Panama after leaving Canada over how its government treated its people, said she wanted more, and she was willing to pay. It was the first time we had considered taking money.
I was on Nevis at an investment club when she said it. I called Richard: what if we make this a business? We gave ourselves two weeks. I took the pitch call walking up and down a beach in Zipolite, Mexico, completely nude, because it happened to be a nudist beach, having the biggest business conversation of my life. We landed on about ten facets of what Sovereign Soul could be, and started with the easiest four. Richard already had the name. He had been sitting on it for a year, the brand, the crow, the whole pack. He sent it over. I read what the crow meant and said: it is perfect.
Zipolite, Mexico · 2022
Postcards from where it began.
This scrappy stretch of Mexican coast is where the whole thing took shape. Ten facets of Sovereign Soul, mapped between sunsets, hammocks, and the odd naked stranger.
The three waves
We keep seeing the wave before it breaks.
Looking back, Sovereign Soul has moved in waves. The conversations changed, but the pattern did not: we spotted each shift early, and helped people ride it.
Wave one
Crypto and self-custody
Richard was in Bitcoin from 2016, Daniel from 2017, because we saw where it was going. It became a tenet of our belief: you should be able to hold your own. We are not financial advisors, but for people who wanted in and needed support, we gave it.
Wave two
The Great Relocation
COVID, then wars, pushed people out of their countries or made them choose to leave. We became a collection point for that move. Daniel and his partner Kristina left England for Mexico, roughly fifteen countries in six years; Richard moved through twenty-three with his family before Bali. Our black book fast-tracked the hard parts: banks, visas, residencies, schooling, and where you actually buy red quinoa.
Wave three
Economic sovereignty
Before AI exploded, we saw the next one: the future of income is your ability to earn your own way. We call it economic output, everything except a job. For as long as you have a job, you depend on a company's survival you barely influence. Safe jobs are gone. AI only proved it, letting businesses replace whole teams, not just roles.
The ground we have covered
We do not just teach the relocation. We have lived it.
What we actually do
Two questions, and a model called survive, strive, thrive.
In this third wave we stopped and asked: why did people join us, and why do they stay? The answer was in the two questions we had asked everyone from day one. What the f*ck do you want out of life? And, do you know your numbers? People thought we were about investments. Investments only ever came from sovereignty. To live a life that is great by your own definition, you need a handle on your money and the ability to earn it, not hand it to a pension provider and hope.
We use a simple model: survive, strive, thrive. The trap at strive is accumulating wealth for its own sake. The difference between strive and thrive is not money, it is mindset. At thrive you know why you are making it, and you are already using it to build the life you want. If money were the answer, every millionaire would be happy. They are not. Some of our members at thrive do not have multi-millions, but they are living a life they designed.
Hundreds of hours of coaching later, the real thing we do became obvious. We help people unblock. Find where you are, point at where you actually want to go, and walk it with you. For some it is money, for some it is decisions, for some it is something bigger. That is what became the seven axes of the diagnostic.
The FinSov Pathway
From survive, to strive, to thrive.
Our original map of financial sovereignty: nine stages across three tiers. It is where survive, strive and thrive came from, and it still underpins the community.
What we believe
Community, sovereignty, and the soul that keeps it honest.
We came together because of community, we loved what we had in Japan. I have always joked that I want to land in any airport in the world and find someone holding a sign with my name. That is the whole thing: feeling connected to something larger than wherever you happen to be.
Sovereignty is close to agency, we have never found a better word. Someone once asked me the difference between sovereignty and selfishness. It took me days. Selfishness is choosing something only for yourself. Sovereignty is a conscious choice too, but it holds the whole in view. You can still be a dick and be sovereign, which is exactly why the soul matters. That is where Sovereign Soul came from.
Why us
We are not certificate coaches. Daniel has been part of the medicine and ayahuasca community for over ten years; both of us have done deep men's work, and have sat in and facilitated hard, confrontational conversations to find a win for everyone in the room. People have come to us for years for perspective on the situations they could not see their way through. We can help because we have lived it, eaten it, breathed it, not because someone handed us a certificate.
// coming soon to this page