Life begins at the end of your comfort zone
We’ve become masters of unpacking and packing our lives as we’ve trekked around the world with only backpacks to call our own. It’s actually been pretty exhausting to be living out of a bag but we can’t complain given the opportunity to experience the world this …
Deciding what would be necessary to take on a one year backpacking trip around the world was a struggle for us. Every item needed to have more than one purpose. A dress needed to serve as a long shirt to cover the butt in conservative …
American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, once said
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
And on a podcast of ‘I Love Marketing,’ with Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach, Dan said
“Who you are today is a function of the books you read and the people you hang out with.”
Around the globe, many of the successful and motivational speakers would agree that you’re environmental conditions can greatly influence your present and future being, and research has proved the same. The people you surround yourself with – your family, friends, spouse, mentors, coaches – need to challenge you and inspire you to be the best version of yourself. You need to pick the good ones to surround yourself with so you can bring up your own average.
So there’s that question that we hear over and over again asking, who are the five people you spend the most time with? Those are the ones you will be most like because ‘birds of a feather flock together.’
But have you ever asked yourself who are the five couples you spend the most time with and will your relationship be the average of those five couples?
Do you think that those relationships around you affect you and your spouse’s energy? Do you have great things to say about those relationships? Maybe they say loving words – “they’re so supportive,” “she’s his biggest cheerleader,” “he gives her the time she needs to be alone” – there are so many qualities in relationships that you could admire!
But if you don’t admire those couples and you walk away thinking – “man they’re messed,” “too much drama,” “my liver hurts” or “I wouldn’t trust him one bit.” Do you think that’s a good couple to be around? Do you think they’re vibes and actions may even rub off on you and your partner if you spend a lot of time with them?
The answer is YES! That couple that is your favorite drinking buddies may always be your favorite drinking buddies, but the only thing you will be improving in yourself is length of your hangovers. The couple who’s always fighting in front of you and attracting drama will only be improving (if they’re lucky) their chances to get on reality TV. That couple that’s always keeping up with the Jones’ and making you feel like you’re always one step behind will always be running in the same rat race.
It’s OKAY to have friends and couples who have their faults or who you don’t necessarily aspire to be like because no relationship is flawless. It’s OKAY to have ups and downs in relationships, good times and bad, but just be wary of how much time you spend with the people who have more bads than goods – more negative things to bring to the table than positive. It’s also OKAY to take a step back and look at the environment you’ve put yourself in and if it’s conducive to the type of relationship you want.
So we ask you to reflect, if the couples you surround yourself with aren’t first class or even economy seating but they’re the ones boarding the plane closest to the toilet with no leg space, no reclining chair and complaining the whole way. They’re the ones who happen to be sitting in the shittiest spot on the plane and you’ve found yourself sitting in the seat ahead of them. Is it okay to move? To maybe separate yourself so you don’t have to listen to the complaining and feel the negativity for the whole ride. We’d like to think yes!
In certain places in the world, people are so protective of their properties and put high fences up so nobody can even come close to their “home”. It’s only the ones who are accepted that can come in and be on your lawn or in your house. People will actual defend their right and exercise it by threatening another to leave immediately; a sense of intolerance. This same kind of fence does not exist in most of our lives when it comes to the people we allow in to our personal worlds. We keep bad friendships because of guilt, hang around others we feel bring us down, and find ourselves in the same loop over and over again. A way to apply having the right people in your life is to put up your fence, be protective of your home. You are the king of your castle so why put up with unwelcome visitors. Remove the bad poison’s, be stern on who you want in your life. Because in a few years you will be the reflection of the company you keep.
Thank you to some of the awesome couples we’ve surrounded ourselves with before our big gap year and during our gap year. The old, wise-beyond-their-years ones and the young, still discovering couples. You’re pretty darn awesome and thanks for bringing up our average.
Cheers to a few of our favorite and newly married couples we’ve met on our gap year:
On a closing note, since we talked about the five people and five couples you surround yourself with, we’d like to recommend a book we really enjoyed on the Five Love Languages. If you follow the link you can do a quick test to determine what your love languages are and have your spouse, friends, and family do it too. These love languages can help you in your various relationships to show others how you love and to understand how others want to be loved. So what are your love languages: acts of service, quality time, physical touch, words of affirmation or receiving gifts? Find out here:
If you’ve enjoyed this post, please share it! Until next time love birds.
As many of you know, we’re trying to find our voice by articulating in words what some of our thoughts are and putting them in this blog. It’s the first time either of us have put ourselves out there for the public to read about …
What goes on in a mushroom farm? And of all the possibilities, how the hell do you decide to get into this field? Like most things we’ve found in our travels, is that people are figuring things out as they go. For the most part, …
Japan was the first country on our hit list as we departed North America. What honestly drew us there was snowboarding and sushi. But we knew there was much more than just that to Japan, there’s temples, samurais, dragons, Japanese tea, geishas, cherry blossoms, little people, high energy cities, and a lot of history.
And although we knew there was many famous sights to see and things to do in Japan, we want to mention a few of the more unusual but noteworthy things you can do in this tiny but packed country. Since we are more of an experiential couple (do-ers more than see-ers) sometimes hopping around from one sightseeing point to the next tourist attraction gets quite boring to us. We revel in the simple moments, the hilarious ones, and the unbelievable unusual ones. Here are our memoirs of Japan plus the top 40 budget-friendly and atypical things to do.
Enjoy a Sapporo Brewery beer tasting. Only about a $3 CAD per beer.
Get hit by 50 km/h or so winds while at Niseko Hirafu Mountain Resort.(Non-budget friendly but the mountain and powder is worth checking out!)
Get pummeled in 60cm of fresh snow over two nights.
Shop for hours upon hours at a chopstick store. Only to see that you can’t pick because there is WAY too many. 
Passion grows in the pants, whoops, we mean plants … Imagine being up in the clouds, away from civilization with no form of communication, following a nutty little man, smiling ear to ear snipping away here and there at this plant and that one, yelling “Aaaiiiiiight.” …
Rich Woman: A Book on Investing for Women by Kim Kiyosaki Reader: Paulina Method of Reading: Audiobook Rating: 5 out of 5 Golden Nugget: Just do it! Half the battle when it comes to investing is just starting. Why a book for specifically women? Kim says, and …
We want to see if we can write blogs in random places. Now it’s no problem to find random places seeing that we are often in random houses, cities, parks, camping in the middle of nowhere, and finding little gems of a spot while exploring. You would think we’d have all the time in the world to sit down and write a bit but not having a routine, nor clear direction of what we want to do with the day, our time flies by. Our life flies by. We’re starting to realize that planning only a year in advanced isn’t far enough. Being near our 30’s we’ve opened our perspective to a 5-10 year look ahead. What do we really want?
We know writing a to-do lists for the day or week can be daunting sometimes and fun other days. When the list is written out, you have your mission. You can prioritize, get focused and start to pick away at each task until it’s all done. You may not enjoy it, perhaps because it was too much of a panic or you didn’t get everything done in that day, so you feel disappointed. But you should still feel satisfied knowing what you did today were steps that are taking you closer towards your 1 or 5-10 year goals. The hardest part of the whole process is to write the plan, to really figure out your priorities and aspirations, to extract the floating idea cloud out of your head and put them on paper. Once that is done, you’ll either get at it right away or you won’t. The difference between the action and inaction comes to what you really want.
A story from Zen Buddhism Stories:
A man goes to a hermit he sees meditating by a river and says “I want to be your disciple.” The hermit asks “Why?” and the man responds “Because I want to find God.” So the hermit takes him to the river and holds his head underwater until the man is struggling. When he resurfaces, the hermit asks the man what he wanted when he was under the water, to which the man responds “I wanted air!” The hermit says, “Come back to me when you want to find God as much as you wanted air.”
I have heard various versions of this story but the idea holds true that once you really, truly want something, only then will you find or manifest what you were striving for.
Other times you may have somehow lost the to-do/goals paper and found it later on only to realize “Holy crap!” I’ve accomplished everything on the list. Hmm, I think there is something to this idea cloud capturing. It’s like walking a dog. You can have the little guy off-leash, untrained, and running all over the place with no idea where he is and when he is coming back home. Or you can put a leash on him, harness and train him to walk nicely, and return home after a long walk with both parties satisfied. Sometimes a harness to the untrained mind to help it focus is just what one needs to achieve their goals.
To get back to the 5-10 year thing, we are trying this experiment where we write out our floating idea cloud daily to see if we can walk our visions in that direction. This is not a to-do list but a mere capture of the invisible to make it real and visible. I swear this is what wizards did back in the day before people really knew the capacity of the mind. Wizards would think of something, write it out and POOF! it would happen. MAGIC! Then they would be able to purchase all the wands and white beard creams to become Hollywood famous. We think these wizards still exist today but in a more diluted, modern form.
We actually met a wizard in Thailand named Marvin. He was leading the ONE-GET team with a vision to creative an autarktic community, living in harmony with nature so that we, ourselves, could also live in peace. He kept telling us how he wizarded his friend and wizarded another man in Thailand he wanted to work on his project with him. We were enticed by his use of the word wizarding and how many people he had already wizarded, until we realized the whole time he was pronouncing “visited” in his strong German accent. Visiting or wizarding, either way, the vision that Marvin and his team had started from an idea cloud, a possibility of change, a new way of thinking, is now magically and intently manifesting itself into a reality through the steps they are taking each day.
Maybe the secrets to wizarding were never told and people organically found the powers they possessed within themselves. These days the power of capturing idea clouds and writing them down makes all of us wizards of the future. We can use our magic within to manifest the vision we want for our future.
We will fill you in over the next few months and hope you too become a Rambo-wizard, idea cloud capturing, cowboy. Hurry, Father Time waits for no one!
Succulent Wild Woman by Sark Reader: Paulina Method of reading: hardcopy Rating: 2 out of 5 Golden nugget: There are no mistakes, there are only miss-steps. I respect Sark’s openness and ability to dare greatly. She is vulnerable and yet assertive, respecting her boundaries and …
For our traveling leisure we decided to crunch down and make the most of our time and start having conversation with great authors on a wide range of subjects. The Leader Who Had No Title by Robin Sharma Reader: William Method of Reading: Hardcopy Rating: …
Paulina hates being video taped. PERIOD! Here is a little compilation Will put together of her trying to avoid the camera in the streets of Bangkok. Let’s say she’s starting from the bottom and hopefully by the end of the trip she’ll be a little more comfortable making videos.
As a kid we had something in our lives that made it easier to venture out or even come back to for refueling. Something like a blanket, a parent or that shirt that was worn way too much. As we’ve gotten older, it comes out …
Writing out loud is what we do with our mouths but words are invisible and lost in the wind. Your words are like clothing to your thoughts … What shall I wear today? But I better choose quickly because I’m on the spot! It’s almost as …
Like a miner’s attitude of grabbing one piece of gold out of a week of mining, I feel like picking only one nugget after putting in the time and effort to stay still for that long wasn’t really worth it….at a glimpse.
That was the thought before I started, what I actually felt as the book was explored, was more then just checking off something on a to-do list. It was really spending some time with someone else’s thoughts and getting their viewpoint of the world in a certain topic. You can be inspired, humbled, get perspective understand people more plus at the same time have the internal conversation with yourself to see if you want to adopt the ideas or learn more on their view point.
The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level
by Gay Hendricks
Reader: Will
Method of reading: Hardcopy
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Golden nugget: Our upper-limit behaviours can sabotage our success. To stop our worrying, we need to ask ourselves if there is any action I can take right now to make a positive difference?
It was interesting that the main point I took away this time was something he calls the upper-limit behaviors. It’s a behavior we do when everything is going great in our relationships, career, health, etc. and then we sabotage ourselves and it turns negatively, affecting our lives by spilling into one part or another.
This is how it works. When thing are going well for us, our upper limit mechanism kicks in and we start to worry about things going wrong in someway. We start to justify those worry-thoughts with more worry-thoughts, and soon we are busily manufacturing scenarios of things falling apart, coming unglued, and spiralling down toward imminent doom.
So if you come across this, observe it carefully for a couple of days. You’ll find something that may surprise you, almost none of your negative thoughts have anything to do with reality.
One way Hendricks put it was in a coffee example. You put on the kettle before work and you may have forgotten to turn it off as you drive to work. The thought pops in your head “Crap! Did I turn it off?” This is reality-based worry, it’s worth being worried about and secondly you can do something about it.
Here’s the one lesson I took away and downloaded into my brain after reading this book. A good way to know if a worry-thought is something you should pay attention to is to ask yourself this question, “Is there any action I can take right now to make a positive difference?” In the case of the kettle, the answer would be yes.
So when thing are going particularly well or when you are feeling really good, people tend to still manufacture a stream of worry-thoughts. Then, once in the worry ring, you’ll infect others with your worry-thoughts, like a contagious virus. You may be able to relate to this when you’ve listened to a friend complain about their spouse, possible infidelities, breakups, etc. You could be personally feeling great about your own relationship but listening to your friends worries, you naturally fall into the stream of their negativity and question your own relationship. You are rolling around in one worry or another until you’ve fabricated this false story in your head.
A personal example would be that I am now unemployed and traveling. There’s no money coming in and expenses coming out. I want to start a completely new career when I get back home and I don’t know if I’ll find work without have the require training. If something drastic pops up, can I afford it on my new salary? Will I be any good at what it is I want to do? What will people think? I’m rolling around with thoughts that are out of my control and I’ve acknowledged that. I can be proactive right now with self-education, researching the market I’m interest in, and be happy with the prospective change in career I’ve been waiting to have for a long time. Or I can imagine and create misery of the not-so-real but this would be limiting myself to the upper limit.
The solution is to notice the behaviour and not succumb to it. Once you catch yourself in the negativity or the worry ring, you have the choice to change so you don’t sabotage your success.
I will keep this book on my shelf for many years and have more time spent with my paper friend Gay Hendricks to fully digest the great insights of The Big Leap. I will revisit and perhaps find another golden nugget that we are ready to take in, in that point of time in our lives. It’s cool to sit down, spend some time learning something new and having that new become part of your life’s toolbelt. ‘Til next time, keep digging and pay attention to your worried brain.
