It’s the new year and I’m sure you’re working on a new you. I find it bizarre that everyone waits until the first day of the year to make changes. It’s something to do all the time.
However, if you’re embracing it for the new year, I’m with you. There is a different sort of energy that comes with believing the close of the previous year gives you a clean slate for the upcoming one.
As a 20 year nomad, I do love a clean slate!
I want to help you in your journey to becoming the best version of yourself and living that travel life that rocks your socks!
Over the next week, I’ll going to share my story with you through a series of posts along with insights as to how I made it happen. The HOW part is what will help you.
While my life has been fraught with challenges, and far too many dips than I care to remember, it has still been a life that has mostly been lived on my terms.
Part of that life was lived quite unconsciously, and part very conscious – which one do you think worked more in my favor?
The Power of Patterns
I’m a passionate believer in the power of connecting dots. (And this is why this time of the year is good for change as we can use the end of one year to connect the dots and the start of the new year to make changes based on those dots.)
Patterns are very powerful. If you analyse your life, or anything in life, you’ll see there are clear patterns at work for creation – we go through it four times a year with the changing of the seasons.
We are creatures of habit that are controlled by our patterns. However, we do have the power to change those patterns IF we know and understand them.
That’s how I’ve been able to drastically change my life over the past ten years from someone who was scrambling for every penny to travel like an ultra-budget backpacker to someone who know travels in a style I love, anywhere in the world I want to be, with complete control every aspect of my day. (Well maybe not so much when the girls are throwing a tantrum and won’t go to bed. I don’t feel I have much control then.)
But, my point is, I’ve been able to do this, not because of wealth or privilege (well you know we all have some of that in some form) but by bringing AWARENESS to the patterns and learning to master them.
The period of endless travel
We’ll start my story today during the period of my twenties, when I had no idea about conscious creation, yet travel never seemed to stop for me.
It was only later (when everything fell apart and scrambled to dig myself out of a depressive hole and make things better), that those patterns helped me understand how I managed to create a life of travel.
My travels began in 1997, three days after I graduated from University as a teacher. I didn’t have much money saved, but I knew I had to experience what this travel was about.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was applying a very important possibility principle instead of a limitation one. It wasn’t a
“I don’t have the money for the dream” but a “How can I create the money for the dream?”
I wasn’t consciously aware of my power then, I just knew I had a teaching degree, saw some advertising for teaching jobs in London and said, “I can do this!.”
After three months backpacking in Indonesia, I arrived in London with no money and all alone in the biggest city I’d ever been in. I was terrified. I knew that was not going to help me so I got to taking action – find a job and some friends.
It wasn’t long before I sorted both of those things out and I stayed in London for over two years, enjoying travel experiences in Europe at the same time. I was not rich, but I knew if I worked hard, and become a master backpacking scrooge, I could make the travel work.
I worked two jobs, paid off my loan (that I got so I could leave Australia in the first place – oops) and had just enough to travel.
Dramas struck my life, as they so often did back then, and I relocated to Dublin. Again with no money and no friends. Rinse. Repeat.
In two days I had a day job and a night job and began making friends. Again, I didn’t have the skills or mojo back then to manifest oodles of free flowing money to me, but I took a lot of ACTION to make stuff happen.
I remember walking out of the restaurant I worked in the tourist area of Dublin one night and commenting to a friend that my purse seemed to continually fill itself up.
I didn’t think much about money; it was something I just took a lot of action to get via work. I wasn’t rolling in it, but I had enough to satisfy my heart’s desires even if it meant I was living in a house with 15 people and surviving off two minute noodles and jacket potatoes and baked beans.
My travels brought me much joy and wonder, gratitude and happiness. I didn’t feel like life was worth living unless I was experiencing the joy of travel. I wasn’t rich but it never entered my head that I couldn’t travel because I had no money, I just focused on the travel and made it happen.
Every day was an experience in newness and learning lessons that empowered me. Challenges and negative emotions weren’t absent, but mostly my days were filled with fun adventures and many good feelings.
I was doing what I felt I was born to do and I could not imagine any other possible life for me.
It was also through this period that I met Craig and we invested in property together. Again, I never thought about it. I wasn’t financially savvy and had no idea about the strategies behind making your money work for you. We bought two properties at the right time and our net worth rose considerably.
This is how I bought both properties. I literally walked in, got a deep feeling within my gut that this was the house and simply said, “Yep. This is the one I want.”
Craig, the more cautious and analytical one of the two of us, looked at me a little strangely and suggested we perhaps look around and think about it more. “Nope. This is the one.”
Bang. A simple decision that came from a knowingness deep within me.
That knowingness is an important instinct that many of us ignore, or have forgotten how to recognize. The only times my life has completely messed up has been when I’ve ignored that inner voice! Boom.
Those properties, along wth our working holiday strategy, helped us to continue our travels around the world for five years: living in Dublin, traveling across the UK, backpacking through Africa and South East Asia, pearl farming in Western Australia and living and road tripping across the US.
And again, even though we weren’t rich, we worked hard for the money that helped us sustain our soul’s yearning, and the dream came to us.
That’s the period of my life when travel never stopped for me.
In the next post, I’ll share what happened when the travel stopped and life turned sour. I only understood how I managed to create this never ending chapter of travel because of the sour part.
It lead me to connect the dots to work out just how I managed to have so much travel and then make my life turn to shit. Talk about being powerful.
Because it is NEVER just bad luck.
Could you tell what four very important principles were for creation in this story? Let me know!
