All right, well, we're back. Have you missed me? 'Cause I've missed you guys. And whoa, do we got a lot to catch up on? So let's get into it. Today's episode is just a little catch up of the past seven months of where I've been kind of the story of my sabbatical rather than just like tips, tricks, lessons learned and like very logistically of how it made happen. I guess let's just get you guys up to date. (upbeat music) Hello, hello and welcome to the Made For More podcast. I'm your host Amanda Colby, a seven figure entrepreneur and founder of my company, Laptop Lifestyle Co. This podcast is full of raw perspective challenging conversations about the whole picture of entrepreneurship. You didn't start a business just to learn Instagram hacks and tech tips. You started a business to build a life full of freedom and limitless potential because you knew and your gut you were made for more. I believe you can do anything you put your mind to. I believe your success is inevitable and I want you to learn how to tap into your own power to achieve the unthinkable in your life and business. On the podcast every week, we wanna help you unlock and craft your made for more life through actionable business strategies, powerful mindset insights and raw, honest conversations that really pull back the curtain on entrepreneurship both from myself and amazing industry leading experts. You are a powerhouse and it's time we stop holding ourselves back, unlock our potential and fearlessly chase after our desires. This Friends is the Made for More podcast. (upbeat music) - If you're new here or if you are catching up and you're kind of like, wait, what are you even talking about like what's going on here, sabbatical what? Let me give you the five second recap and then also there is episode 140 which will be linked below in the show notes that you can go listen to that actually explains like why I took sabbatical a lot more of like how I actually like prepped for my team, et cetera, but that's where we last left off. So basically for Quicks and Offices, I built a seven figure business coaching and like course business, but due to a lot of things in my personal life that kind of like crumbled over three years and then all exploded at once. It all just became too much. And so I ultimately decided to take a sabbatical mostly just for like my mental and physical well-being. So I have been on sabbatical from January of 2024. I was like, what year is it? January of 2024 until now where I'm recording this which is at the end of July. So at the end of December, I pretty much like shut down everything. I'm gonna get into a lot more details of this in episode coming later this week that's all about your sabbatical Q&As. Like y'all submitted so many great ones and I wanna answer all of them. But that's not the point of today's episode but basically just to give you a recap, I did end up just like shutting everything down, no clients, no marketing, no nothing. And here we are seven months later coming back on the other side. So this is obviously an extremely brief version, but like I said, go listen to episode 140 if you wanna hear that full recap and let's get into it. So where did we leave off? Basically I described why, let's you guys in on some personal stuff. I talked about how I was setting things up. A lot of you guys were curious as far as what were the signs that told me I needed to take a break and then also like what were the signs I was ready to come back. And I'm gonna answer those fully in the next episode not to detract from just me giving you the story of like what I've been doing, what I've been working on. But I did wanna say a few quick things here because I didn't mention them in like the last episode where we left off and I think they're relevant for what you're about to hear in the episode. So I obviously had dealt with a lot of like personal stuff that was the main reason, that's the main theme here. But whether part of it was from the personal stuff or just from the business, from my own inner stuff, I also along this business journey really lost sight of myself. I like lost who I was and like what I actually wanted throughout all of this just in chasing the achievement, you know, the money, the milestones, et cetera. And I feel like a lot of us can relate to that feeling, you know, various degrees of what that looks like or when you kind of catch it and maybe pivot from it. But we also grew really, really fast. So I'll talk about that more next as well and like how that kind of influenced things. But pretty much I got to this point where I just started questioning everything, right? Like what is this for? Like what am I doing? What do I want? Like I feel like I was trying to like prove so much and a lot of these types of thoughts are really hard to admit to yourself to at first. So it took a while. I also talk about like in episode 140, how like I have been in cycles of addiction to my life entered into like an actual cycle of addiction with like workaholic. But I also know a lot of people resonate with that of like getting swept away in it. My whole life was work. Like my whole identity, all my self-worth was placed in that. And again, any of us who feel that way, there's inner work there, right? Like whether you have trauma or not, whether you have this or that, like something inside of you is unsettled and not at peace and not your best self when we're in so much doubt and being controlled by so many external factors, right? Rather than really confidently, truly standing in who we are and what we want. I think entrepreneurship is like the biggest personal development journey you'll ever go on, whether you intended to or not, because it's gonna bring up the shit. It's gonna bring up the skeletons in the closet. It's gonna make you face all your fears, just expand constantly. I think that's part of the point of it. I think that's part of the beauty of it, because one takeaway I'll share in more detail, like at the end of this episode is, yo, this shit sucked, right? Like these last couple of months have not been fun. Entrepreneurship in some ways sucks, it's hard, right? But it's better than waking up at 60, 70, whatever it is and realizing you spent your whole life being comfortable. Realizing you spent your whole life letting fear money, the drive to just want to be approved in validation, whatever it is, like letting those things control you, control how you operate the decisions you make all of this, right? And so probably the greatest gift of all in life in crumbling's in your life crumbling. And I hope that most of you don't have to go through some extremes that I've gone through, but I think that's kind of the theme of a lot of this. So yeah, I'll get more into kind of like the mental states and like the signs just to be able to help you guys and relate to some of you guys, but I just wanted to give a little bit of that background. So before I get into the actual sabbatical, the other part where we left off was like what my business looks like. I, unlike most people, so not everyone who takes a sabbatical or a break, which can be a month, can be a year, like it can look so many different ways, but not everyone A goes through any kind of near experience. Like I am labeling and talking about my sabbatical while simultaneously almost more so talking about my own healing journey and awakening. And so I do want to preface that the one and the two are not necessarily correlated or the same. If you're thinking about taking a break for yourself, like this is not exactly what's going to happen, right? But because of all that for me and my business, like I did nothing, right? I had no clients while I was on this whole sabbatical 'cause I'm not really gonna talk about that much moving forward, but I had like no clients, no marketing, no anything. And that was intentional. A lot of people that I've talked to that have taken breaks, maternity leaves, sabbaticals, different things like that, a lot of them will like pre-batch marketing or still have some clients in the background, but not be selling. So just wanted to clarify that 'cause a lot of y'all were like, what the hell were you doing for six months, which I would be curious about as well. I did keep my two core team members and I had them work on a couple projects, but their workload was like super, super minimal and just worked on that relationship with them just because they've been with me for so long. And I know from so many hiring mistakes and journeys that when you find good people, you keep them. So that's just kind of like quick nitty gritty where we left off, but now let's get into the sabbatical, the story of where I have been. So I'm laughing because I was so misguided on what I thought this would be. All the joys of like looking back in hindsight, right? But I didn't know I needed to heal. I knew that was the point of the sabbatical for me. I needed to heal a lot of trauma, deep stuff that had come up. I needed to heal like a lot of just mental health stuff, physical health stuff, right? So like that was my goal. That was very, very clear. But we hear those phrases a lot online of like healing, healing journey, even mental health. Like they're kind of elusive and vague. And I felt that so strongly because when I went into this, like I could tell that was my priority, but I had no clue what that meant. I had no clue how to do that in a way. Like, and I'd been in therapy like on this healing journey for two years at this point when I started my sabbatical, right? So like none of this was new to me therapy, becoming aware of your stuff, you know, working on yourself. I mean, every day for the two years leading up to this sabbatical when I was trying to figure all this out, I had done labs for my health problems. I was trying to find things out, which that's been a whole, you know, journey in of itself. But like I was listening to podcasts every day on health, nutrition, spirituality, personal development, like that was my focus, not business for the two years leading up to this. And I say that just because like I didn't go into this lost because it was like out of the blue, I think going on a break a sabbatical or just some intentional period to try and heal yourself. It's so hard because I get why there's not a roadmap because everyone is so different. But man, had I wish that I could have had more of a direction, which I'll probably talk more about later. But I did prep all my logistics and business stuff. So when it comes to what I thought would happen with my business during this time period, I don't think anything surprised me because nothing really happened. I did make more passive sales than I thought I'd make. I don't know, but I also thought going into this, I was like, I'm gonna take two to three months off. That felt terrifying, right? And eventually I got into it. It was very clear two to three months was not going to be enough. But also once I got somewhat used to getting out of kind of the frantic, the hamster wheel, the whatever it was, I was like, oh, this isn't so bad. Like what I was doing and working on was painful and stressful and all this stuff. But the fact of not working, it felt so terrifying. And I'm just prefacing some of the things I thought it would be like, and it wasn't. It wasn't maybe because I was so preoccupied and distracted by everything I'm about to tell you. But yeah, I also just say that as like, if you feel absolutely terrified at the thought of like not working for even a month, yeah, for the first time in my life, I was like, oh, maybe I don't want to work for forever or work full time for forever. Whereas before, I was like, who would enjoy, I don't know, never working or being a stay-at-home mom, which that's not an attack on stay-at-home moms. I was just saying like, from me, from my perspective. And then I stopped working, I was like, yeah, wow, not so bad. So anyways, let's get into what actually happened during the sabbatical. I couldn't figure out how to tell you guys this. So I'm kind of going to go in a timeline because it is a story with a lot as cliche as a sounds, like so many plot twists, which sound nice when you're repeating it back and when you're in the moment, you feel insane. So I was in Bali when December hit and my business and everything shut down. I had a trip planned for New Year's holidays with friends, et cetera. And so we decided to go to Thailand for the month of January to start my sabbatical, our thought press. Again, you have to remember we don't have a home base, don't have a home or digital nomads. I was taking a huge income dip, if not almost completely no income, basically, during this time period. And so we were also like, well, we love Thailand, we love Southeast Asia, like let's save some money, right? So I kind of was picturing this Thai island that we were going to and going to the beach every day, getting cheap Thai massages, doing yoga every day, right? Like, that's what I thought it was just going to be like. And the first thing that was really scary for me throughout this was that I was letting go of all my income pretty much because without getting too into it, that's a huge, huge edge for me. I've always been the breadwinner and that was a promise I made to myself since the little girl that I would never rely on anyone else for money. So the fact that I was relying on my partner for the income during the time was like really huge for me, really, really scary. But I was like, you know what? Two, three months, like that's not that long, we can get through that, right? So when I started this in Thailand, you know, all of a sudden after the holiday break with friends, like it was just like a whole week clear. I had no calls, no anything on my schedule. And this was one of the hardest parts of it in many ways of going from 100 miles an hour to zero miles an hour. It sounds nice to take a break, but when you are so used to going, going, going, when like, I mean, I've had jobs since I was 15, 16 years old, normally multiple jobs, like I think most of us to varying degrees can relate to the fact that we're always busy, right? There's always stuff happening. So it wasn't nice and I actually wouldn't recommend going from 100 miles an hour to zero miles an hour without supporting more of a game plan because I thought that's what I needed was just like all of this space and then I would kind of figure it out. And it actually made things 10 times worse because I had grown accustomed to safety being busy, right? Like that was part of, for lack of better term, a coping mechanism. And that's all I've ever known, that's all I was ever used to. So all of a sudden you're thrown into nothingness, like no structure, no goals, no anything. And I cannot describe it any other way than a complete and utter shock to your system, like being thrown into Antarctica water and saying, you know, good luck, go swim. And I'll talk more about like lessons learned and tips for you guys. Again, in some of the coming episodes, I'm not gonna get too into the weeds to try and keep this focused here. But I understood what was happening because I have been learning about the nervous system, trauma, somatics, like a ton of this stuff for over two years now. Since I started the healing journey, I haven't talked a ton about it, but this stuff was like very knowledgeable and ingrained in me at this time. So like I understood that essentially what was happening is I was starting to come out of like a freeze state or survival node, but I didn't understand the depth of it. And I didn't have the support to really figure out like how to handle that. I also pretty much like cut off communication with almost all friends and all people just because I needed to focus on me. I didn't have the capacity either to respond to a message. But while my partner was working every day, I was kind of like stuck on this Thai island and I tried to do the journaling, the yoga, the meditation, all this stuff. But I was basically in like complete isolation, lost, aimless. And so I spiraled with my depression, anxiety, getting even worse and I knew I needed help. I felt like I had been asking for help for months prior, but I nor anyone else knew exactly what I needed. And I was also just in this weird head space. My dad had, you know, died a couple months prior, which is a whole thing. But all of this happening at once, like just asking a lot of these like really big questions, like, what's the fucking point of life? Like, you know, so we knew we needed to leave the island. We were like, maybe we go west, but we had friends in Bangkok where like, you know what? Maybe we need a city, some liveliness. So we like booked this apartment in Bangkok for the next month. That was our plan, but as things move forward and progress throughout January, I got in a really bad scooter accident. I'll actually share some photos on Instagram. So I got in a really bad scooter accident. That really shook me because you have to write a scooter everywhere in Thailand and the island we were on. Thankfully, I was okay. There was no like head trauma, anything like that. But I was like, scraped up everywhere, had to go to the hospital that day. So at that point, Zach and I had been talking a lot about settling down because we knew long-term, like at this point, we really needed stability and we needed like healthcare and mental health support and just like all of these things. And so we'd been talking for a while about Spain and doing the digital nomad visa in Spain. But what I wanted to do with my sabbatical was like, this kind of sexy deep healing of sorts. I wanted to go to this month-long yoga retreat in India, which I know it's like so cliche, eat, pray, love style. But I thought that that was gonna be it. And the worst things got for me that month in Thailand, the more and more that became clear that for many people, going to India to this big yoga retreat thing, the spiritual healing for a month, like that would be life-changing. That would be out of your comfort zone, kind of shaking you away, getting to you. But for me, for lack of better term, it was a Tuesday. And I knew in my gut that the thing I needed that was the scariest thing to me was to settle down because I wasn't ready. I wasn't like I was done traveling, but I had to be because I couldn't handle it anymore. It wasn't fun anymore. Even though we knew that and we decided, okay, we're gonna go ahead and move to Spain sometime soon and get the visa. I also had to kind of go through this like morning process and identity loss, realizing that my time traveling full time was over. And it was morning, not just because of changing seasons, but because I haven't enjoyed any of it the last few years because my personal life has been so all-consuming and I hadn't been well and me and it fucking sucked. And I think so many people can relate to seasons of life-changing before you're ready. And I don't think we talk about having to grieve the end of a season and the beginning of a new one, even when it's exciting and you know it's what needs to happen. So we thought we were going to Bangkok. As soon as we got to Bangkok, I kept getting worse and I was like, I need help. We'd paid for this apartment in Bangkok. We just paid for anyways. Like this was how like bad and kind of drastic things were. And we went to Spain. We went to Spain for two reasons. We were like, you know what? We thought we're gonna apply in a couple months. We gotta apply now. And I needed some intervention. And I found ketamine therapy. So I had looked into psychedelics, but like I've tried everything under the sun in terms of like mental health healing. And I was like, I think this is what I need. Like I've gotta go try it. And this was kind of the beginning of what I'm going to probably be talking about quite a lot called like the void. And I don't know if that's like an official term or whatnot, but what I mean by the void is kind of when you're going through this big personal evolution, awakening sometimes even for me it was. Oftentimes what happens is you have to shed all the other parts of yourself, all the other parts of your life. And you exist in a void for a while until the new parts of you become clear and become created. So I'm gonna talk a lot more about that, but that is kind of what all of this felt like. It all felt unknown every day. I had no clue what was going on. And I had this mantra on the back of my phone that has just been amazing for me. And it's still actually there. It says you're not lost. 'Cause of course I felt so lost in life. But you finally have a chance to explore yourself without being tied to a specific outcome. I latched onto that this entire time. Trusting like I'm not lost. Like this is an opportunity. This is a chance and I couldn't see it at the time, but I knew enough to trust it and that I knew this is what I had to do, right? So we go to Spain. We're in Barcelona, which was where the ketamine therapy was. And then I also signed up for this healing trauma retreat that I found randomly one day and it just felt right. So I had this lined up and I was ready to get help. So ketamine therapy, I won't get too into the weeds too right now, but it was very transformative. It is not for everyone. Please consult doctors, physicians, et cetera, to figure out if that's for you. For me personally, it was massive. Psychedelics have actually become so transformative along my journey these past couple of years, which again is not something I've talked about online, but probably will more. And so anyways, that was really nice for a few weeks. I basically went to ketamine therapy sessions two to three times a week. They're multiple hours long and it kind of consumes you. Like that's basically all I did. And I really got into the root of certain things. And I think it really laid the groundwork, opened me up and started like connecting dots. And then immediately after that, I went to this week long healing trauma retreat. It was a little bit vague, very elusive. Like I just knew it was right for me. And this is something I'll talk more about as well, but this specific retreat in terms of the modalities and the way that they do things, because I had heard of somatics. I'd heard of breathwork, like I'd done all these things before to an extent, but the way and the intensity that they do this saved my life. It was crazy. Like it is one of those things that from the outside looking in, you may have thought that we were all in a cult and you really have to be open to this work. But as someone who has been doing mental health work and been through a lot of trauma since I was very, very young, I've tried everything I've been on, every medication, everything under the sun. And I can't say it any other way without getting to in the weeds other than it completely saved my life. I didn't even realize how much I had been holding in, holding on to how much my past and so many people and things of my past had power over me in every facet of my life. Like in every way that I operated, thought and viewed the world, how blocked I was, like I knew but I didn't until I did like the coming therapy and this retreat. And I was at a point too, which I think is a really beautiful but terrible point to be at where I was desperate, completely desperate for help. And because I was so desperate, I was willing to go all in and do anything and everything. I think that's why I got so much out of all of this because I didn't let anything hold me back. I was willing to try it all. And I admitted so much about myself and my past and my feelings and all of this stuff that I had never admitted before, that I had trivialized or rather oversimplified, like, oh, that's, you know, it's kind of normal. Like this thing was bad, but it wasn't that bad, right? And so anyways, I released so much. It was the first time in my life to my memory that I have felt peace and that I felt joy and that I felt okay. And I know not everyone will understand what that means, but it was absolutely like transformative. I thought I had experienced joy like, haha, you know, before I had never experienced real joy, real peace or a true belief that I was okay and going to be okay until this. So you'd think coming back from this retreat that, oh, it goes up from here. Huh, no, that is where the universe was like, mmm, bitch, we are clearing all the shit out. So I literally got back from this retreat immediately. Like that evening told my partner, you have to go. You have to go to this thing. It's going to change your life. I'm not telling you anything about it. You've got to go. And very aligned, there happened to be another retreat the next week. So he left a few days later, but this is where things started to spiral. So at this point, we went from Barcelona to Madrid because we knew we wanted to live in Madrid. I had done the ketamine therapy and so we were ready to like settle down in Madrid. But right when I got back, I got from the treat to Madrid and then my partner left, that is when like the roller coaster really started. So quick pause. If you're enjoying this episode, I know this is like a different one, a personal one, but I would really appreciate you sharing this episode. We have so much coming. This is my main platform where I am sharing everything and I am sharing so much because I know people need to hear it. And so if you can share this in, it even changes one person's life or it gives them hope or message or whatever it is, I know that it will be worth it. And so anyone that you can share it to privately in a DM, a friend, a family member on your stories, definitely tag me and I would so appreciate it. That is all I can ask for on this podcast. So let's get back into it. Okay, so like I said, my partner left and I had just gotten back from the treat and all of a sudden now it was go time. We'd been waiting to get to Madrid to start like apartment hunting. Everyone told us like the market was crazy. We'd been waiting on documents back from our visa and we were very misillusioned, if that's the right word, to think like, oh, as soon as like these papers get back, you know, we're gonna be able to apply and long story short, this visa process has been a nightmare. But because I wasn't working, had pretty much taken on almost a full-time job of handling our life, moving to the new country, setting everything up, figuring everything out, figuring out all the appointments. I was handling the whole visa process. So other than those first few weeks in January and Thailand, like I basically had a full-time job like handling our life and like doing all of this stuff. However, the day after my partner left, I had started having like foot pain from the day that I had gotten back from the treat. All I can say is it was a very active retreat. And for those of you that don't know, I played sports my entire life, competitive volleyball. And so I had a complete ankle reconstructive surgery about 10 years ago. It's never given me problems. I'm super active since, but I guess we just did enough that it kind of slowly started having problems until it was very fast. And all of a sudden I couldn't walk at all. And I ended up going to all these Spanish doctors in Spanish, which I can speak some Spanish, but like not that well. And I ended up finding out that I fractured my foot. So I was all alone in a foreign country, all by myself, don't really speak the language very well. I now had a boot crutches. I could barely walk from the couch to the bathroom. I was in a European apartment on the fifth floor, no elevator. So I couldn't go get groceries. I had to bribe all of the Uber delivery people for every single meal to like bring it up all those flights of stairs for me. It was bad. And isolation was what was so hard. I don't have a lot of friends. I have one family member that I speak to and have a relationship, which is my mom. My partner was unreachable at this amazing retreat that I had sent him to. And in the meantime, I was viewing all these different apartments and like trying to hobble around on crutches on cobblestone in Europe. I mean, I'm smiling about it now. It was really, really dark. And it felt like, come on, man, like one thing after another. So we got this apartment and the visa process took a turn. It was being really, really complicated without getting all into it. I started trying to like set up our apartment and like order all this furniture. Again, living in another country, like living, not like a digital nomad, it's everything takes extra effort, right? To walk outside and speak to someone takes extra effort to figure out how to set up Wi-Fi. I had to call people, they don't speak any English, speak to them in my limited Spanish, figure out how to set up Wi-Fi, right? So like all these things are something you bargain for when you move to another country, but when you have the capacity, rather when you don't have the capacity. So I went from this high from the healing retreat to just like the lowest of lows. Also, this was when we started to realize that if we weren't gonna be able to apply, like have all our paperwork back in the next two weeks, we were gonna have to leave the country probably for a couple of months. And this felt just awful because we didn't wanna go back to Southeast Asia because we love Southeast Asia, but it's crazy, right? It's not exactly where you need to be when you have zero capacity. And the last place I wanted to go was to my mom's house because with all the events that have transpired over the past couple of years, it's felt like we keep getting slapped in the face and having to go back there. And it's just the last place I want to be. But once again, much like I thought, I wanted to go to India on this Eat Pray Love healing journey and yet knew what I actually need to do was settle down and go to Spain. At this point, I wanted to go to somewhere I knew Asia, whatever it was, and I knew in my gut it wasn't right. And I knew that for better or worse, this was happening to progress this healing journey and that part of that meant I needed to go to the one place I didn't want to go to heal my relationship with it because me going back to where my mom lives and where I lived in high school for a couple of years, it's really toxic for me. I mean, like everywhere I look, I'm reminded of so much pain. And so the thing though, is long as you have to avoid something like that, it holds power over you. And that's what I realized. I had to go back to heal my relationship with the place that had given me so much pain so that it didn't hold power over me anymore. So we decided to go back, we left our apartment, we'd already signed the lease. And also when my partner got back from his retreat, I think if you've ever grown or changed or if you've ever had yourself or a partner, like especially with like a lot of trauma as your healing stuff, it brings it all up. And you start to have to figure it out and change your values and what you want and like test this out. And so while it was great that we were both healing, we also had a lot of relationship issues that had been existing, but that got amplified because of the prolonged stress, because of this, right? And so like it, again, was just every bucket of my life, my health, et cetera, felt like it was, you know, tested, depleted, et cetera. So going back to my mom's house was not easy either. She had just had her entire house flood. They were redoing it, she had no furniture, she was in an Airbnb, and also just when we're back in the States, we are lucky to sometimes, most of the time, but like have a car from my grandma. But otherwise we're like attached at the hip. It was also so expensive being back there. We were already like bleeding through my savings with, you know, getting this new apartment and buying all this furniture. I mean, we didn't own anything, right? So it was just such a test of not only healing that relationship, but saying, okay, you've learned a lot of these healing things, now it's time to put them to use. And every day, when you don't want to get up, when you don't want to do anything, when I was depressed, could barely get out of bed, had no energy from like health issues, all this stuff, it was doing the work. It was rewiring your habits, your brain, your way of thinking, and that's what I had to tell myself was, every day I'd walk around the block, and some days it was, well, that's a pretty flower. But putting all the things, you know, that I had in place, and every day we were just waiting desperately like, okay, yes, we're here, yes, we're healing, but like, how fast can we get out of here, right? And so we were just waiting every day for that email to come through, and it created such turmoil because we would get a notification about the visa, and then this thing would change, and so we thought we'd only be there like a few weeks, and then we were there a few months, and, you know, it's living on edge every single day. And I thought I had let go when I let go of the business, when I let go of making the income, you know, but being there, going through the visa, the healing, the all of it, I actually let go. I finally actually surrendered, because I thought I had to the point of stop trying to figure any of it out. Stop trying to figure any of it out, stop trying to map out at least the scenarios and control it, and I think that was a big lesson I actually had to learn and feel and embody. So things did start to improve, but not in this like happy like, wow, this is amazing way in the way where you realize you're changing slowly in the smallest, non-sexy ways. And a big improvement was we did get a temporary fix for my health. I mean, I literally couldn't get out of bed most of these days, and I finally had some energy. And then we got denied. We officially got denied for our visa, and so we had to fly back to Spain within 48 hours. So at this point, this is the beginning of July, we fly back to Spain, we only had five more days, we were allowed to be there, so we set up some furniture, reapply, yada, yada, yada. And then it was the decision of, well, where do we go next? Do we go back home? Do we go somewhere else? And in my gut, I knew I couldn't go back home, like to my mom's house. I knew I wasn't running from it anymore, but I also knew I just couldn't thrive there. I felt stuck. I couldn't think. I didn't have independence. I didn't have autonomy. It didn't make sense financially, but I was like, I need to go to Bali. I need to go somewhere that I know, right? That I don't have to refigure things out, but somewhere where I can prioritize my health, where I have actual independence in my life, and where I can go out into the world every day and just be a part of society, and where I can have a place to work every day and think. Like my mom's house still has no furniture in it, right? So I went to Bali. I booked the ticket, so did Zach. He ended up deciding to come as well. And I started to feel alive again when we got here and not in like this fake, exciting, wow, I'm traveling way, but like a genuine way, where I, it all started to click really fast. It all started to feel like things were sinking in. Like the lessons were fully coming to a close or being embodied, like being fully learned where I was seeing all the work I'd been doing, like become more natural in the way I thought and operated. And I knew I needed to trust myself. I knew it was what I needed, and I was so glad that I did, because I had never been able to trust myself before. I've never had intuition gut. It was just thinking before in my life, right? I started working on my business as soon as we got here. And within a few days, like all the work that I had kind of started brainstorming, but had to just leave and pause 'cause it was too overwhelming, I started to just be normal just for the first time and as long as I can remember, I just woke up and I went to the gym and I went to a place I knew I could work and I ate healthy food. And like y'all, I haven't had that in years, years, any ounce of normalcy. And it started to click. It started to click of what the business was, what I wanted, I felt better. Within three days of being here, I met someone and had an opportunity that I mean just mind-blowingly aligned and within a week of being in Bali, I got my visa approved. After all of that, and I know to the depths of my soul that the visa delays and the process and me having to go home and then Bali and then here and there and the way that things happened had to happen that way for the healing journey and so many synchronicities and lessons to sink in the way that they did and for me to face all the things that had power over me. And I'm still giving like such a high level view here, like not even talking about what all the internal shifts and the haas and healings and stuff are that are probably like the true magic, but otherwise this would be 50 million hours long. So two close things out, that's high level of what has happened the last six, seven months. And like I said, I wanna clarify, like this is not really a typical sabbatical, I would assume. It was, yeah, I've called it a sabbatical more of a healing journey. I mean, this was, I didn't understand what the term awakening was before. I didn't understand a lot of things before or I thought that I had healed or grown and this taught me, I had no idea. I had no idea what it meant. And this has been like the biggest awakening journey of my entire life. Like I am a different person to my core to every cellular level and I've had a lot of changes, shifts, evolutions in life, nothing, nothing like this. And this journey didn't start six months ago. So much of all the ahas were from things a year ago, two years ago from all the stuff that I went through, all the hell that I went through the past couple of years. And I'm not on the other side, I would say. Like literally the past few weeks is when things started to like look up literally, but it's happened very fast. And I know that like I'm still in progress, but I know that I'm ready to share. And I know that I'm ready to be here, which is why I'm here, no pressure, but I'm still figuring out who am I. I've been stripped of every single thing I thought I knew about myself. Everything I have built in this life or achieved or thought to be true about life in the world has been shattered, but it's in the void. And in the void, it's a very hard place to be. I'm gonna talk so much about that, but it's also if you can allow it to be probably the greatest gift that you will ever have in your entire life, because I'm truly at a point where I am not attached to any element of who I was, who I've been, and I'm open to being any version of myself that I want to become, it's a true blank slate. And I'm not forcing it, I'm not rushing it, I'm letting it unfold. And in the next episode titled part one of what's next for my business, I'll talk a little bit more about what's next. This is just a recap of the sabbatical, but I feel like I am experiencing the world in a whole new way. I cannot fully figure out how to put some of the stuff into words, but as someone who has lived in survival mode for 20 plus years, I've been completely shut off from my body, my emotions, like so many parts of myself. Like the best way I can describe it is I kind of feel like a robot who all of a sudden was given like hormones, emotions, sensitivity to the world. And it's very overwhelming, but it sounds dumb, but like the sky is bluer. So to close this out, ultimately two things I want to leave you with. One, I'm so excited to come back and connect with you guys. Like I love this, I do love creating content. I love business like at my core, right? And I'm excited to share some of the journey with you guys and kind of let you in a little bit more on where things are headed and whatnot. And secondly, every day more and more I can like feel and see how much work I've done. If any part of you can relate to any of this like, wow, I am so sad that I lived life like I did for so long, giving away my power, shut down, et cetera. I am so thankful that my life crumbled and that it crumbled this young because through all of these experiences and people I've met and talked to so many people don't do this work ever. But not even including those people, but so many people don't do this work until much later in life because things don't get bad enough to strip it all away and sit in the darkness and the depths of this for so long. And most people don't do this kind of work at this level until they're forced to, including me. I was forced here, but I'm so thankful that I lost everything. And I couldn't have said that a while ago while it's been the hardest three years plus of my life. And in many ways, I'm still in it. And in many ways, I have no idea what's next. Yeah, I can say I'm so grateful that my entire life crumbled and I have so much to share. And I'm so thankful if you're still here listening. Yeah, I'm so excited. So thank you, thank you for listening to where I've been. Check out the next episode of the first bit of what's next. And we've got a couple more special episodes over the next two weeks, just specifically about sabbatical stuff because there were just so many questions and stuff I want to answer. And then I'll be transitioning. I'm not going to be talking about the sabbatical for more than those two weeks. At least in depth that I wanted to really cover things. And beyond this episode where I of course was talking a little bit more about me and my experience, the next ones are going to be a lot more actionable, helpful and insightful for you guys to maybe figure some things out or plan for something in the future. Even things like you're taking them eternally, if a lot of this type of stuff can apply. And again, I just know you guys had so many questions. So anyways, thank you for tuning in and I will see you guys on the next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
