The $100 Wrong Turn on the Road to Success

What an incredible soul’s journey this trip has been providing for us. For the last 2 months, Spencer and I have been on a huge mindset expansion journey – and let’s just say it has not always been easy. As I reflect back on the first two months of starting the next chapter of our life, I wanted to give a glimpse into the deeper level experience we’ve been having behind the beautiful pictures and amazing places we’ve been.

And it all became evident with a $100 wrong turn in Italy.

When you actively choose to throw yourself into a new lifestyle that is in every possible way different from the normalcy of your past life, your mind and ego takes a while to catch up.

• First, you have to release the fears of having this new lifestyle
• Then comes preparing your real life for the transition – saving the money, selling the furniture / house/ car, and saying goodbye to your social network
• Then you have to take the leap of faith and get on the plane
• Then comes experiencing the new reality and embracing everything that you’ve created
• Then after a few weeks, you realize you’re not vacationing anymore, and you transition into embracing the fact that you are now living abroad as a digital nomad – with no home, no comforts of your routine, and to our dismay (no gym to actively exercise!)
• Then comes the fears and doubts of how to actually sustain this new lifestyle that you’ve been actively creating (which was scarier than I thought)
• Then you slowly add up a few stressful close encounters, frustrating moments with language barriers, navigating highways, & longggg car drives and your positivity and optimistic mindset starts to wane and it’s harder to see the magic of traveling like it had been in the early days

Then, like the straw that breaks the camel’s back – we’re hit with $100 toll fine for accidentally driving in the wrong entry lane – and we broke down and let the deep darkness of despair wash over.

It was in this moment that we had to choose how we wanted to move forward. Our ego was telling us to just give up and go home. “It’s too hard – it’s too foreign – this isn’t vacation anymore”… But we knew this is an indicator of something deeper. This was the lesson that we’d been waiting for.

We had to come to the resolution that we were going to be stronger than this. We were going to lean on each other and get through this. This was life telling us that we needed to up level.

We realized in this moment, as we sat in a park in northern Italy batting away beggars trying to sell us trinkets, that in order to get to where we want to go, we can’t continue to be the people we were. We have to let go of our old habits, mindsets, and identities, and double down on self discipline in order to continue forward into the vision we have for our life.

I realized that in order to have the feelings of confidence, success, attractiveness, joy and ease, I have to actively create those feelings through my self care and connection to self. It can be so easy to lose your identity when you have been out of your element for so long – and the only way to come back to the joy is to come back to the true self – underneath the job titles and past routines.

As we double down on recreating a morning routine (even without the comforts of our home or gym) I can already see the huge difference it’s making on our mindset, outlook and confidence for how we move forward.

I was listening to Abraham Hicks – one of my inspiring mentors – this morning and she said something really profound. She said:

So often, we want our biggest desires to manifest immediately, that we don’t stop to enjoy the process of how it all unfolds. If achieving our biggest goals was really that instantaneous, then we’d never really be fulfilled and we’d never grow and evolve in our souls. Moving forward toward a desire and watching it manifest is like giving birth to a child and wanting it to grow up over night – just by pass through the tough stages and get to adulthood already! But if you do that, you miss out on all of the incredible beauty of the growth journey.

That is where we’re at – the toddler stage of the new desire’s growth journey. And although the teething has been painful, we’re starting to find our legs and I have faith that we’ll soon begin to walk.