Hey, welcome to Lessons from a Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams. Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I wanna talk to you about kind of a piggyback on the topic that we talked about last week. So last week the podcast was all about mini decisions, how making these micro decisions in your life, one after another after another is how you get to your dream life. It's never big sweeping changes. You don't have to, you know, burn the boats and storm the castle.

You don't have to burn everything down and start over and move to a new city. You can change your life with small incremental changes. And in fact, it's the best way to do it because it relieves a lot of the stress that big changes cause and it allows you the time that you need to catch up. It allows you to not need to know the entire path. If you haven't checked out that episode, you can check out the last podcast episode 'cause that goes more in depth into that topic. And I will say if you're tuning into this right when it comes out, today is the last day to join the Quitter Club, my membership, where we take these concepts and we implement them in your life. So I help you make those micro decisions. I help you figure out what is the next step.
And I am opening doors. This enrollment period is the last time you can ever enroll in the Quitter Club. So if you are hearing this after May 20th, I apologize there is no more entry into the club. I will be spending the rest of this year 2025, delivering the content in the club and making sure that we are getting the transformations for the people in the club. But if you do happen to catch this when it comes out on the 20th, I want you to know that today is the last day. So if you want to make sure that the rest of your 2025 is different, if you want to start making those changes, if you want to create a life that you actually love and apply these concepts and get coached by me every single week, join us. You can go to twitter club.com/enroll and that the topic last week and what we do in the Twitter club kind of ties into what I wanna talk to you about today.
And part of that is how to make your dreams doable for your life. Okay? How to look at your dreams in a different way than what we have sort of been taught or you know, maybe not even taught, but just sort of have approached most of our goals and how I see people do it in a way that handicaps them from reaching the thing that they wanna reach. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about why I am going to Banff Canada for about a month in June with my family and how that came about and how it's part of my dream life and how it's kind of this mini step towards the life that I want. So I sort of wanna approach this concept of like, how do you figure out what your dreams are and how do you actually make them a reality through these baby steps?
So I'm gonna tell you how this happened for me so I can sort of explain this concept in an easier way to understand. Me and my husband a couple of years ago sat down and really thought about what is our dream life like, if we could have anything, if we could do anything, what are the things we would do? And this is a really important step for a lot of people. You put limits on what you are loved to dream about based on what you think is possible right now in your current reality. What can I do right now? And so as soon as you start to think about something your brain jumps to, well you can't really do that. Okay? That's crazy. People like us don't get to have that. Or I have too many responsibilities, I can't do that now. And this is a problem that I see a lot of people suffer with even when they're thinking about their career.
And I always try to encourage people like when you're brainstorming, don't limit it. Okay? No one's saying you have to go after it. But I think a lot of times we think we're protecting ourselves because like we don't wanna be disappointed about the fact that we can't have our dreams or we think we can't have our dreams. But what we do is we end up suppressing that desire. We end up suppressing what we want, right? To be quote unquote more realistic. We think that we're like protecting ourselves from disappointment and negative emotion, but then we create so much disappointment and a negative emotion because we don't even let ourselves dream, right? So many of you, I want you to really ask yourselves, when was the last time you dreamt of your ideal life? When was the last time that you allowed yourself to like really think about all of the things that could be possible?
And I'm not even gonna go into this thing of like, you can do anything you want. I do believe you can. I do believe that there is a way to make a lot of things work. But even if you can't, even if let's say it's not in the cards for you, okay? When you allow yourself to at least have the desire, like this is something I would love to experience, even if I can't ever experience it. Let's say it allows you to access parts of why you are desiring that. So you can get more to the bottom of like, what is the thing that I'm actually craving, which is what I'm gonna explain with mine, right? You can't ever really get to underlying what is it that I'm actually craving? If you don't let yourself crave things, right? If you don't allow that to come up, if you try to keep it buried in order to protect yourself, then you never really get an understanding of like, what is important to me?
What are my values? What are the things that I find important? What are the things that I get joy from? What are the things that make my life really exciting? And a lot of us end up in these ruts where we're just doing the same thing day to day. And I talk to so many people where they feel burned out, not because they're working an extraordinary amount of hours, but because they really have no more joy in their life. There's no hobbies, there's no pastimes, there's no rest, there's no dreaming, there's nothing to really strive for. It's kind of the rat race doing everything you're supposed to do, taking a week or two off a year if that, to see family do obligatory, you know, Christmas trip or whatnot to see family, never the stuff that you actually wanna do. And so I, I wanna stress the importance of creating time to just dream.
Even if it's not possible, know that you can be disappointed if you don't have it and be okay. But what can come from that brainstorming is often so beautiful and so many other things that you didn't even realize you wanted until you let it come up. So my rule is always like there's no limit to brainstorming, right? Try to make it as limitless as possible. Like in an ideal world, what is like the thing that I would love to do? And so when me and my husband were doing this, one of the things that I have always loved or longed for is to, oh, I love travel. I love going to other countries and I really have always wanted to live in another country or live in other places. I really like seeing how other people live. I like being immersed in cultures. I really like slow travel.
Like even when I travel, I'm not the person that's going to go to 14 cities in two weeks. You know? Like I'm gonna pick one city for two weeks and we're just gonna like stay there because I really enjoy doing it in a non frantic way. Like the point for me isn't ever to see all the touristy sites. Like it's always just a sort of get a feel for what the city feels like and where local people eat and what people do and and whatnot. So I love that with traveling. And I've always desired living other places. I did study abroad for college, I did that for six months in Spain and it was the best experience of my life. And even then at the time I did it, my last six months I graduated, I came back to graduate and then I was going to law school.
And at the time I didn't have these tools. I wish I did because I had decided like, okay, that was that I don't have time to do that again. And I kept thinking, I wish I had studied abroad earlier in college. 'cause I would've for sure gone to another program in another country and tried it somewhere else as well. And I had created this thought that like, that's it. That's all I get. There's no way I could do it again. Now I look back and I realize how ridiculous that was and how there was probably so many other opportunities for me to be able to study abroad, but I just created this rule for myself or this thought of like, okay, now we gotta get serious. We gotta go to law school and I'm gonna get married. And then I was gonna have kids and there was this whole plan.
I deferred that dream and I decided it was not possible That happened in my twenties. And then I didn't think about it. I really just decided like, well this isn't something that I'm gonna be able to do. And I sort of pushed it aside until, you know, fast forward almost 15 years, 10 years later, 12 years when we, me and my husband were doing this exercise, one of the things that came up for me in my dream life, like if I could do anything, if I wasn't limited by money or kids or family or anything else, what would I do? And I had said like, I would love to live in other places, not permanently. I know that like a lot of my roots for me is not the place but the people I'm with. And so I would always wanna kind of come back to where most of my family is and that community, but I really would love to live in other countries and kind of, you know, maybe for a year or two or three or whatnot and get kind of that experience.
And as we kind of went through this exercise and we were looking back at these things, of course my brain immediately went to, okay, but that's not possible. 'cause now you have young children and they're in school and listen, I could for sure move to another country with them. Of course it is possible. It's not that I believed that that is not a possibility. Lots of people do it. Clearly if you go on social media, you see how many people kind of move abroad and do that stuff. But I knew that for me, that's not something I was willing to do. Like the trade off, yes, it was my dream, but I knew I would have to give up a lot of things in order to have that dream. It's always that way. And so oftentimes you have to look at like, is it worth what I'm gonna give up?
Right? And for me, it is something that I think could be really beneficial for my children as well. But I wasn't really willing, I'm not willing at this point to take them outta school and put 'em in other schools to take them away from their cousins and kind of that community of you know, their grandparents and aunts and uncles to live somewhere else. And so my husband's job is in where, you know, orange County, where we live. And so we sort of realized like, okay, for the next like three to five years at least, likely longer until our kids are like in college, that's not a possibility. Now it might be a possibility when they leave, maybe when they go to college is gonna be easier for us to be like, you know what? We're gonna move to France for a year and then they can come visit us.
Who knows lots of possibilities in the future, but for right now, that's not a possibility. Now a lot of times people just stop there. It's like, I want this but I can't have it because X, Y, and z. Or I'm choosing not to have it because X, Y, and Z. And so that's it. And what I really want this episode for you to take away is that it never has to be all or nothing. It never has to be like, well I can't have this specific dream. So that's it. Pack it up, dream deferred. Let's move on to something else, right? The reason it's so important to kind of let yourself dream is because when you understand like, okay, this is my dream, I got to kind of dig deeper and ask myself why? Why do I want this? What is underlying this dream? Like what do I think I'm going to get by moving somewhere else, right?
What is it that I'm craving? And usually it's a feeling. What feeling am I chasing? What feeling do I think I'm gonna have? What are the kind of side effect that we're gonna end up gaining by living somewhere else? And a lot of it was like this sense of adventure kind of changing out of the normal. Like I think so many of us kind of end up when you live in the same place, like you're on autopilot, it becomes a rut. And if you notice, even when you travel somewhere, like your brain is firing on on all cylinders because there's so much new information to take in. So that level of kind of heightened awareness actually really enjoy that. Obviously learning about other people's cultures, I really love learning languages. I love seeing how other people live. I love learning new customs. And so those experiences are really important to me.
There is something that really enriches my life. And so I was really like thinking about like these are the things that I want. Okay, now obviously one way to get that is to live somewhere for a longer period of time. But I kept thinking like, well if that's not a possibility for let's say the next 10 years of my life, what is a possibility? How can I get some of the things that I want from these experiences in other ways? And one of the things that me and my husband came up with one such way, like there was other things that we talked about just in the way that we wanted to travel and whatnot. But one of the things was I kept thinking like, okay, well my kids have a summer vacation for now. I don't know if they get involved in sports and stuff later in when they're a little bit older.
I think that also changes a little bit. But for now they usually have between two and a half, almost three months off in the summer. And so we started thinking like, what if instead of taking like a one week or two week vacation and going somewhere and taking the time off and going and exploring the city, what if we rent an Airbnb somewhere or find some kind of housing where we can stay for a month or two months or three months, right? The goal is to kind of work it up to as long as we have in their summer vacations and sort of do a, you know, hybrid live vacation play kind of situation. And so the goal would be to work from that new locale, maybe work a little bit, kind of shorter hours so we can explore more and we can kind of visit that place and yeah, we're not gonna become like actual locals, but you can get a better understanding for what it's like to live there.
Or you can kind of immerse yourself in that culture for a longer period of time than you would if you just went for a week. And so it started becoming our goal. Like what if we try to do this and we can do it every summer, we can do it in somewhere new. So every summer we get to have a different experience with not only how other people live, but exposing our children to maybe new things that they may not experience as much where we live. And so that sort of became the plan was like, yeah, why not start doing it this way? Now as a caveat, it is a very privileged position to be in. I understand that both me and my husband are able to work remotely, which makes doing this kind of stuff much easier or more doable. Obviously we're also very privileged to have the money to be able to afford like getting an Airbnb or somewhere else or or renting a place or doing kind of house swaps and things like that.
So I absolutely understand that it's not possible for everybody, but it is possible for us. And so I think part of the point of this is that oftentimes we do have the ability to do things, we just don't do them because it's not exactly the way we'd envisioned it or it's not exactly the same thing as the dream that we originally had or we think it's too hard. And I think that for both of us as we talked about this, like yes, of course it's not the same thing as moving somewhere. Like I, I am not delusional to think that we're doing the same exact, but I was like, what is good enough? Right? Maybe I can't have the exact dream I want right now, but can I have something that is on the path to that, right? Can I have something that gives me a taste of that?
Can I have part of that dream? That's also very exciting for me? And this was something that was like, okay, this seems doable to me. This is something that doesn't disrupt with their school, isn't as big of a change for us in our lives right now is one step, but does give me a lot of the things that I wanted from moving somewhere, right? It does allow me to kind of explore that place in a slower way. And so we started this experiment two years ago. We went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and we were lucky enough to be able to find a home that we could rent for like three weeks. I think we were there for three weeks and it was the best experience. We started there because we wanted to be kind of in America, we wanted to be close to the time zones where we were working.
We wanted to kind of test drive this and see like, is it even possible to work with these kids now like in the house without summer schools and all this stuff like camps. And it ended up being a fantastic experience. We had the best time. We got to explore the Teton Mountains, we got to go to Yellowstone, we got to really kind of be immersed in Jackson Hole, which is like a very small town, which is like, you know, something we're not used to. It was so cool to kind of find the local coffee shop that you go to and our kids became friends with all the neighbor kids there. And so we started figuring out like where the locals go hiking and where they go. We got invited to some parties at the lake and it was just such a cool experience. It was something that was like we came out of our life and popped ourselves down somewhere else and met people and got to do things like me and my husband are not the most outdoorsy.
And one of the reasons we wanted to do it somewhere, you know, where it is a lot of outdoor activity was because again, we wanted to force ourselves to kind of try new things and discover, I don't know, new ways to live for us in a small micro way. Um, and Jackson Hole was an incredible, incredible experience for us. And that sort of got us kind of wheels turning on like, okay, where's next? And so this year we decided to do it in Banff in Canada. You know, it's still kind of similar time zones, it's still close enough, like the flight is like a three hour flight from where we are. It's again another place that's very outdoorsy. We have lots of plans to go to the Banff National Forest and Lake Louis and all those places that look incredible. We actually are staying in a city that's like 15 minutes from Banff.
It's not an actual Banff, it's another small town. And so we're super excited to kind of just be in that town and learn about what it's like to live in that town and to meet people and to meet our neighbors and to make friends and work from there and do all the things. And so we are planning on doing that for most of June and to kind of into the beginning of July. And I can't wait. And even this is still like a little bit too much of a baby step for me. Like I was sort of pushing us to be a little bit more adventurous this year, but it didn't work out. 'cause we had some prior engagements that we had to be back for in July. But the goal is to then create this dream, you know, the next summer and the next summer in more like places where it pushes us a little more, maybe where the language is in English, where it's a little bit further from us, maybe when it's in different time zones, definitely different countries.
And so that's the goal. My goal is to work it up to at least two months, hopefully like the entire summer, two and a half months. And part of the cool thing is that we also get to like invite our friends and family to come visit us. And so some of the, you know, our, the grandparents and aunts and uncles can come out for a couple of days wherever we are and see us and also get that experience. So that's just like a fun little add-on. But the point of all this, the point of my rant about how we got to this is because it never has to be an all or nothing situation. Like your dreams never have to be that. If I can't have exactly what it is the way that I want it, then it doesn't work. I want you to just put your brain to work with this one question, how can I do this?
How can I have this? Our brain is we already have a negativity bias and we've just trained it for so long to so quickly go to what is not possible that you have to sort of retrain to put your brain to work, right? It's like a computer. It's like chat everyone's into ai, it's like chat GBT, right? If you ask it a question, it's going to answer that question. So if the questions you're asking yourself are constantly like, why is my life like this? Why is life so unfair? You know, it's going to keep giving you answers, answering that question, right? Here's why your life is so unfair. Here's why it sucks to be you or why not? When you start asking different questions, your brain goes to work finding those answers. You would be amazed at how much stuff your brain could come up with when you ask like, how can I do this?
How can this be possible for me? Right? And when you really dig deeper as to like, why do I even want this dream? What am I gonna get out of this? What is it that I think I'm gaining right? And what are other ways that I can gain this? And it doesn't even have to be similar. Let's say like you have a dream to, I don't know, like maybe you want to build a community, you wanna build a business that's like a big community and you wanna really like dig into like why is this my dream, right? To have this community? And it might just be because like I wanna feel more connection. I feel really isolated where I am. I don't have a lot of people that are like-minded and I wanna feel more connection. Okay, what can I do to feel connection now?
Right? Maybe it's not gonna be within a big community, maybe it's one person. Maybe it's that I take more time to have actual like lunches and coffees with my friends or whatever it might be, right? Like you can look at like the feeling that I'm trying to get is this from this dream. And like, is there another way for me to get that while I work on that big dream? Again, for me, it's not to say that I'll never live in another country. There's tons of time. I have 30 years, 40 years left, 50 years left in my life, right? Who knows what's gonna happen? And I can guarantee you that if I do this where I'm staying places like every summer, I'm more likely like I'm sort of building that muscle, right? I'm teaching myself how to find housing in other places and figure out if I need a visa and do all this stuff in small increments so that when I'm ready to move, it becomes easier because I've taken these micro steps, I've taken all of these other steps.
I'm sort of like in these communities where I'm listening to people like how people end up living abroad and whatnot. And so it becomes more likely, rather than me not doing anything for the next 10 years because I can't have exactly what I want. And then just expecting one day to be like, oh, now I'm gonna get up and move to this other country. And so I want you to really think about like what is like one micro step? What is one micro thing I can do to get closer to my dream? And that's gonna require you to know what your dream is, right? It's gonna require you to kind of dig deep and not limit yourself and figure out what it is that you want. Like if your dream is to speak on stages and be a Ted, you know, speaker, you wanna kind of think about, you know, what is it that I'm gonna get from that dream?
And like what can I do now? Maybe I can't get on the TEDx stage right now, but can I, you know, spread this message that maybe means a lot to me in smaller groups or whatnot? Like whatever it might be for you. And so that is my advice to you right now is just do these three steps. We'll say three steps. One, allow yourself to brainstorm without any inhibition, without limitation. What is it that I want in this life? What would be my ultimate dreams list? All of 'em. It doesn't have to be one list tons of dreams that you have and then pick one and think like, why do I want this? What am I gonna get from this? What am I seeking from this? You know, what are the feelings I'm gonna get at step two? And step three is like, what is one small step?
What is one way that I can have that feeling or I can attain that thing that may not need me to go all the way to Z, but can have me start, you know, and go a couple of steps, go to C, go to D, go to E, right? You get the point. It's amazing how much easy your, your dreams become. How much easier getting to your dreams becomes when you take it outta this all or nothing thing. And you really look at what is possible, how can I make this work? It makes life so much more fun. It makes your dreams so much more fun. It allows you to actually dream bigger, which will open up so many possibilities to you instead of being in this kind of scared scarcity. Like it's not possible. So I'm not even allowed to do it. And I think one of the best things that we can all do is tap into that desire. So take some time, figure out what you want, figure out what's a mini step to get there. And if you want help and you want me to help you kind of figure out what those mini steps are with you, you can join the Twitter club today. You can go to twitter club.com/enroll and join me. I would love to help you get to your dreams.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessons from ac quitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.