5 Life lessons learned as a full-time traveling entrepreneur in 2022
This year was an adventure.
I started 2022 dancing in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. We spent the winter venturing through Italy–Trieste, Venice, Florence, and Rome. We went on to meet great friends in Porto, Portugal in February.
Took a trip to the US to visit family (and a short detour in Mexico) over the spring. Hopped back across the pond to spend the summer in Madeira, Portugal with said friends from Porto.
For the fall season, we checked out of the Schengen Zone and to Croatia where we visited Dubrovnik, Hvar, and Zagreb.
Now I’m writing this from Greece where we’ll be celebrating Christmas, and ringing in the first two months of 2023 in Cyprus.
This year I will have traveled to 11 countries, and I would say lived in (trips longer than a week) 5 countries.
All while running a successful online coaching business.
After taking a moment to pause and reflect on 2022, here are my life lessons learned this year. (In no particular order).
As well as how I’ll take each lesson ahead into the new year with me to continue growing and thriving.
Life lessons learned in 2022
This is the third time I’m doing a yearly recap, which means I’m approaching 3 years as a holistic time management coach this upcoming January! Woohoo!
As someone whose main passion in life is to just be more of herself, it’s really cool to be able to go back and read past life lessons. It’s amazing to see my healing and progress and say, “Yep! I’m still living and now teaching these lessons I learned two years ago.”
<<Read my life lessons learned in 2021 and 2020>>
Here’s to all of us becoming more of ourselves! 🥂✨
Life Lesson One: Get comfy with uncertainty.
As a digital nomad, I have no idea where I’ll live two months from now. As a business owner, I have no guarantee of a paycheck. When I first started traveling full-time back in July 2020, the uncertainty was absolutely terrifying. To the point of losing hair, tears, and many sleepless nights.
I wanted to be in as much control of my life as I feel like I could be. I wanted to feel at home within myself, no matter where in the world I was. Most importantly, I wanted to get out of my box and see the world. And all of those desires continued to outweigh my anxiety and worry, so I kept on.
It took about 2 years of traveling full-time to get to the place where I landed this summer: Comfortable with uncertainty. At one point, I had no idea where I was going to live the next week. I’ve learned how to be okay with not knowing where I’ll live or where my next client comes from.
I trust that no matter what, I can and will figure it out.
This is a huge, massive, ginormous life lesson that’s taken a lot to learn. However, the amount of peace that I live with is totally worth the effort. So with this, I plan to continue to travel in 2023, let the places I want to live call to me, run my business, and see what happens.
Though, if you’re like, “Yo, you went to an extreme for this life lesson…” you’re right. This leads me to lesson number two.
Life Lesson Two. Find the gray zone.
Black-or-white thinking sucks.
For example, hustle culture and anti-hustle culture. Hustle culture tells us we are worthy if we work all the time, feel exhausted, disregard needing breaks, and neglect our health. Anti-hustle culture says if we’re working hard, we’re doing it wrong. Success in business is somewhere in the messy middle.
Another example, oppressive society and culture tell us we have no agency over our time. Spiritual gurus gaslight us and tell us we have complete agency over our time. The agency we have is somewhere in the messy middle.
Want another? Rigidity versus openness. We’ve been taught time management, structure, and schedules need to be super rigid. Due to anti-hustle culture, many of us have tossed out all structure in the seek for freedom. Structure that truly benefits us is somewhere in the messy middle.
Everything we do and are as humans are in the messy middle ground. The balance between masculine and feminine or yin and yang. As I approach the new year, I want to use this life lesson learned to be even more creative with solutions to any frustration, new ideas, places to travel, and just life in general.
Life Lesson Three. I create my own time paradigm.
As I travel across time zones and cultures, I realize more than ever how deep the societal construct of time runs within us. From what time we should wake up, eat meals, work, and go to bed… it’s all made up. And vaguely changes depending on what country you’re in.
You could make your new year tomorrow if you wanted. Literally.
Of course, with a “normal” job and external constraints, the more you’ll live in society’s construct of time. However, over the last 2.5 years, I have been reclaiming more and more agency over my time (see lesson 2) by choosing how much I want to subscribe to society’s time construct.
The more I define and live within my own time construct, the more manageable my life feels.
So as of now, I’m taking this lesson learned by fully stepping into cyclical planning with my astrological chart. No more going back and forth between the moons and the gregorian calendar.
What this looks like is: I’ll be essentially letting go of months in the traditional sense and planning completely aligned with each new moon. My “new year” will be celebrated on July 23rd, the Leo (my ascendant) new moon.
I’m allowing things on a day-to-day level, and a macro level to take as much time as they want to take. I’m learning more about mother earth and indigenous wisdom.
Life Lesson Four. This shit really works.
As I enter my fourth year of developing holistic time management and coaching people, I am still astounded every time one of my clients creates literal magic.
From starting podcasts, writing books, making tons of money, starting businesses, traveling the world, managing teams more effectively, healing deep wounds, and creating trust and safety within. I’ve witnessed so many amazing humans accomplish deeply meaningful goals and finally be the person they want to be all because they teamed up with time.
Absolutely magical. ✨
Not to brag or anything, but on a personal note, I feel like everyone right about now (late Nov/early Dec) is t.i.r.e.d. where I’m feeling really energized and good. I’ve taken lots of breaks, short and long, throughout the year. I’ve imperfectly stayed balanced while focused on and aligned with my priorities.
I knew this before, but this year I feel like I finally understand it on a deeper, more holistic level with each day and with each person I get to work with.
With this life lesson, I plan to continue healing my own time misunderstandings and doing this deeply meaningful and important work of holistic time coaching.
Life Lesson Five. My home is inside of me.
In November this year, as I traveled on a Bus from Croatia to Bosnia, it finally hit me. There are buses, trees, roads, dogs, construction, and clouds everywhere on this planet.
The only thing that stays constant throughout is me. My heart. My mind. My body.
This life lesson may seem obvious, but it wasn't to me as someone who sought her worthiness and fulfillment through productivity and achievements. My happiness and peace were dependent on my external success and the approval of others.
If this year has taught me anything, what keeps me healthy and makes me successful is listening to myself, my joy, and my gut. Period.
I can leave places and situations that suck. I can speak up for myself. I can do what I need to do to feel safe.
It’s my job to build a strong home for myself, and protect it at all costs.
This is what holistic time management is all about, and I’m excited to see what the next 6 months bring as I now celebrate the new year in July!
What lessons did you learn in 2022?
I’d love to hear in the comments below or send me a DM on Instagram.
Is 2023 the year you get more intentional around your time?
Click here to learn how time coaching can help you thrive in the coming year.
Want to know what I learned this year? My 5 Biggest lessons from 2021
If I had to say one main truth about being on this planet, it’s this:
Life is about learning.
It’s the reason we go to school as kids. In fact, now that I say that… life IS a school.
This makes me giggle now as an adult because ever since I can remember, I loved school. I loved the scent of fresh new books, organizing my planner, and the energy of possibilities.
But just because I loved school, doesn’t mean it was easy.
Just like life, it takes desire, effort, time, dedication, and repetition to learn and more importantly, integrate what we learn.
That’s why I do these year recap blog posts.
One so I can share and connect with you. Two so I can go back, recognize my own progress next year, and continue integrating lessons. Wanna see what I learned in 2020? Click here.
Here’s to us learning, integrating, and living together. 🌱
What I learned this year
(In no particular order)
1) Good rest is the cure
Rest is one of those things that everyone should do more. Especially nowadays with the great resignation and antiwork movements. We’re all preaching rest, rest, rest.
Since burning out in 2013, I’ve been learning and teaching others how to slow down, rest, and heal internalized hustle. I am a rest preacher and truly believe deep down that pausing, resting, taking care of ourselves is the cure to every modern problem we face.
However this year, I integrated this lesson into my bones. In may I was playing tennis with my little brothers while I was home (I never play tennis), and I fell while running after a ball. I thought I rolled my ankle.
My husband told me to try walking on it. I tried, but my body said absolutely not. I went to urgent care and found out, sadly, I broke a bone in my foot.
For the next 4 weeks, I didn’t put a single ounce of weight on my foot. I truly rested it. Then the following 4, I slowly reintegrated weight without trying to push myself.
When it comes to resting most of us rest a little, then feel a lot better and rush back to our to-do lists. We rarely get past that point and experience deep, good, true rest. At least I didn’t prior to 2021.
This year and particular experience taught me about the kind of rest that feels uncomfortable. That feels like our skin is kind of crawling. The rest that makes you feel all the feelings always bubbling beneath the surface, ready and waiting to surface.
And yet, when you get past those initial feelings and get to the good rest…the healing, the renewal, and the peace that comes forth is everything you’ve been looking for.
2) Clear communication is key to business + life
This year I spend quite a lot of time and money learning how to communicate better.
I got so much clarity on my messaging in my business with the help of Lindsay, from Forza Collective. And I graduated from the best holistic coaching certification program ever (in my opinion of course), and am currently in the process of becoming an ICF-certified coach.
I learned just how important communication is for a successful business, relationship, and pretty much…life.
My communication is still a work in progress, as I believe it will always be. But this year I learned how to communicate with so much more clarity, confidence, and ease.
3) Self-expression is my true goal (and vulnerable AF)
When starting a business or embarking on any goal in life, knowing what you really want is something I learned this year.
As humans, we can easily create external measures of success that aren’t actually success to us. For example, as business owners, it’s easy to set a goal (financial or otherwise) because we see others setting similar goals. I’m looking at you… “The American Dream.”
What often happens is we spend a ton of time, energy, money, and precious life working towards that goal to later realize we still aren’t content.
Wouldn’t it be much easier to figure out what success really looked like, instead of waiting until that really de-stabilizing and sorta, depressing point? That’s what I’ve been learning in 2021.
While yes, I need money to pay my bills and take care of myself… when money comes in, I can still feel empty. What I’ve realized success actually looks like is being able to fully express myself (aka communicate), be creative and feel free, and be seen and heard by loved ones and people in my community.
True self-expression is another story, and something I’m focusing on now and in the next year!
4) How to validate myself
Prior to 2021, I was using social media and others to validate myself. That need for validation was a rocky and toxic relationship that I was desperate to get out of.
That’s one of the reasons why I made my word for 2021 was held.
I wanted to learn how to be with myself when difficult situations and emotions arose. I knew holding myself would be the key to letting go of past hurts, doing hard things with more ease, and expressing myself more authentically.
Validating and holding myself has been a work in progress for years but this year was a year of embodying this. I’m also extremely grateful to have Susan Pitler, an amazing somatic therapist, and other groups to support me in this journey.
This year, I’ve learned what it’s like to validate and deeply care for the tender part in my heart. And I learned what it’s like when I forget to validate myself and how much I’m not interested in living a life of shame, guilt, and shoulds.
I’m so grateful for the ability to validate myself in order to express myself and communicate even more in 2022.
5) Trusting me and the universe is a process
We’ve all been on a journey of reckoning with uncertainty over the last 2 years, and I’m no different. When life is uncertain, our tendency is to control as much as possible.
For the business owners I work with and myself that attempt at control looks like rushing around, pushing towards our goals, and scarcity thinking.
The antidote? Trust.
Trusting ourselves, and if you’re spiritual, trusting the universe/higher power/source/your God.
I’ve known this for quite some time, but this year I learned more about the process of trust, what it looks like, and red flags for when I’m lacking in trust.
Anytime I remember and relax into trust, everything feels so much easier.
How can you make your life easier?
To summarize, 2021 has been a year about making my life easier through deeply caring for myself–whether that looks like communicating better, resting, validating myself, or trusting the universe.
Have you reflected on your year and figured out what you’ve learned yet? If not, I have a blog post of self-reflection questions for an end-of-the-year review session. Click here to find out your 2021 lessons now.
Want to feel confident, in control, and at peace with your time in the new year? Click here to get free + supportive resources!
Why toxic productivity is actually getting in the way of your success
Why toxic productivity is actually getting in the way of your success
Today's post is a bit vulnerable and scary because as a time management coach I'm sharing with you my biggest time management mistake.
I’m sharing it with you because hopefully, you resonate with me. By the end of this post, you will also know how it is costing you so much time + energy in your life and business.
So when lockdown started I got at least 10 emails from a bunch of different companies offering free art classes, finance classes, knitting classes, and all these different things that I could do.
Now that I “had the time” guess what I did? I signed up for all of them.
Deep down I felt that I needed to make the most of this time now that we were stuck inside of our homes.
If you felt this way too, comment below just to tell me “Yes, I feel you Becca.” Tell me I'm not alone in this!
This is a super small example of a bigger picture issue that we have as humans in our society today. On a normal basis, pre-pandemic pre-COVID, we are bombarded with productivity hacks, tips, tricks, and tools to make every moment productive as possible. If you google productivity, you will get around 500 million results.
When we are students in school, as children, we are rewarded for getting the most done, the quickest possible, the best output. We're impressed by people who can pull all-nighters. In our industry, entrepreneurs boast about working 80 hours a week and never sleeping or having time for themselves.
Rarely do we celebrate people who have a healthy work balance, who get a good night's sleep, who take care of themselves and have tons of time off to rest and to do whatever they want.
So when the pandemic hit globally, in the United States, many of us didn't have our commutes to our nine to fives anymore. We didn't have plans to go out with friends or spend time with family that didn’t live with us. We had “nothing else to do”, so we could finally get to all of the house projects, courses, books, starting the business, and growing exponentially.
—> A statistic that just backs up what I'm saying is Home Depot increase its revenue by 20% from February 2020 to January 2021. They made 132 billion dollars in revenue.
At the same time, companies and many people felt like our focus, energy, and output would be the exact same or somehow even better during a really traumatic, huge shift in everyday life. So many people lost loved ones, got sick, and lost jobs. Yet we continue to expect ourselves to be productive at the expense of our humanness.
Since lockdown began, it became clear to so many people that toxic productivity is our biggest time management mistake as a society. And it was mine too, even being someone who knew how important resting and taking time off is. Even as a time management coach, I was still pressuring myself to be productive at the expense of the things that I thought I valued and cared about.
The mistake of toxic productivity
Why is toxic productivity a mistake?
A business owner I have worked with recently asked me why is it such a mistake or why is it a bad thing that I want to be productive and work. My answer was, “there is nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to grow the thing that you are passionate about, the business, the life that you are trying to create. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be productive, it's when it becomes toxic.”
When it becomes toxic, you only care about productivity, making every single moment productive and have an output or result you are chasing after something that is not really ever going to happen.
We believe this fallacy of productivity, that we'll finally get everything on our to-do list done one day. So we're always doing more, more, more, and more to try and get to that one day where we can rest, take time off, and make time for ourselves.
Productivity becomes toxic when all you do is try and get to that one day. That's what creates a hamster wheel because it never happens. Your to-do list will never end and when you believe you'll finally get to that one day, the things that you do get done never feel like enough.
All of that creates a lot of self-confidence issues, it causes unhealthy self-care habits, you start to put your worth into your productivity and the output that you create.
That has a lot of detrimental impacts on your business and your life.
In my personal experience, I was in the hospital with an intestine infection, never really having major health issues before. I developed a severe intestine infection and was in the hospital trying to meet a deadline! I had my computer with me in the hospital trying to work on an essay. At the time I was in college as an engineering student. I didn't really care about English at all (sorry to my teacher) and yet, I was unconsciously choosing to be productive over resting and caring about myself.
That's how bad it can get. Obviously, that is a pretty severe "rock bottom” in terms of burnout and productivity. It doesn't have to be severe at all it can just be you unable to sit on the couch and enjoy an evening with your family or even with yourself.
How to know if your productivity is toxic?
You have trouble sitting still and resting.
You continue to work when you know that you're tired, achy, and not in the mood to work.
You feel like being bored is a bad thing.
There's this just constant need for self-improvement, just more, more and more which leads to a lot of impacts on our mental and physical health like depression, anxiety, and strained relationships.
Choosing work over yourself and which leads to a lot of self-mistrust.
That's my experience and that is the experience of many of the clients that I work with.
How to reverse the impacts of toxic productivity
If you relate to any of the things that I just mentioned, I want to share with you two super simple things that I had to do and that I help the folks do in my coaching program. There are so many things that you can do to start reversing the impacts of toxic productivity and hustle culture.
1.The first thing that you can do is reframing what productive means to you.
A lot of times we think that just resting, relaxing, and spending time with family isn't productive and I would love to cut that out, it is 100% productive. Anything that is of value or importance to you is productive. Being alive, being a human, it's not just about work, it is not just creating results and output. Anything that means something to you is productive and I will say this over and over and over and over and over again.
Once you figure out what is of value or what is important to you then just remind yourself every time that you spend time on those things, you're being productive!
2. The second tip that I want to share with you is, the best lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle.
There are so many statistics and studies coming out around how being healthy is the best thing you can do for work, productivity, your business, for yourself, for your family.
When you are falling into the biggest time management mistake, aka toxic productivity, you put work over health, work over self. Putting your health number one is the most basic thing that you can do to step off the hamster wheel.
At the end of the day, we need to rest, we need to train ourselves to put ourselves first.
The next question that you are going to ask me is how, how do I reframe what's productive? How do I put myself first? How do I create a healthier work-life balance?
There is no one solution. I can't give you in this short post what the how is. The how comes from inside of you, it is unique to you.
This is beautiful because that means it's going to work, you just have to figure out what is inside of you and how to make that happen. So if you want to step off of the toxic productivity hamster wheel, if you want to be mentally and physically healthier and happier. If you want to be more compassionate with yourself. And if you want to feel like there is all of the time in the world for everything that you need to get done… the answers are inside of you. And I can support you in unearthing your answers in my 1:1 coaching program.
I know how hard it is to peel yourself away from your laptop, from work, from the business that you're building. I know how hard it is when you know how toxic a productivity mindset can be and yet still fall victim to it and not be able to rest, take time off and put yourself first. So if that's you, you are in good company here. Trust me when I say that I am here to help you break up with toxic productivity and step off that hamster wheel so you can start resting and start living life in the way that you want to.
If you resonated with my biggest time management mistake, let me know in the comments below.