She Sold Her House, Left Her Job, and Traveled 23 Countries With Her Family. This Is What She Found.

When we lean in and we trust, we're like, it's like the universe 10X's us in every way. And if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. You can chase all the outcomes in the world, but I don't want to sit on my deathbed or sit in a hospital bed, have regrets of.

Mm-hmm.

I don't want to have double regret I don't want to have regret to today for the things I want to do I don't want to have regret on my deathbed of I wish I'd done it. So I'm really leaning into this naturally trusting and what's coming up every day

Mm.

what happens when you finally stop chasing outcomes and you start trusting yourself instead? In this episode, I sit down with Reed German to explore what it means to rebuild your life from the inside out. Reed's story begins in India, travels across Canada, and finally lands in Oahu, the corporate world, Reet sold her house, left her job, and set out with her husband and young daughter to travel across 23 countries in the span of a year. What started off as an escape became a spiritual homecoming. Along the way, she reconnected with her mother after 23 years, made peace with her past, and redefined what health, success, and freedom truly means. This conversation is about trust, healing, and the courage to listen to your soul when it says it's time to move on. About listening to your intuition, following your heart, and trusting that even if the path isn't clear, it's still leading you somewhere true. So let me ask you this. If you stopped planning your life and started living it, what would you change first? This is my conversation with Reet German Let's get it.

Welcome to Life Between Titles. I'm your host, Savan. Today, I've got my friend, Reet German with me. Reet, how are you?

I'm doing fantastic. I'm really, thank you for having me on and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

I am too, Rhee. It's amazing to me how fast these things come together. We were introduced by a mutual friend and we had a fantastic initial conversation about your life and your journey. And I'm really excited to dive into that. ⁓ For those that don't know, tell us a little bit about

Absolutely. Yeah, my name is Reet German. I'm actually known my full name is Reet Winder German. That would be my East Indian ⁓ name birth name and I was born in India. I immigrated to just outside of Toronto, Canada in 1987. So at just the shy age of almost eight years old, I moved and I lived there most of my life almost 38 years. 2020, my husband and I decided to make a huge life change at the beginning of the pandemic. We sold our home, sold everything, and bought a house virtually online. We downsized and we bought a townhouse in Maple Ridge, BC, just about 45 minutes outside of Vancouver. And we drove across the country in the middle of a pandemic. And it was just an incredible experience of really embracing the unknown, embracing uncertainty and not knowing. We called it our plan without a plan because nobody understood what we were doing, why we were doing this in a time where everybody's like fear, so much fear and uncertainty. Here we are like leaning into something like outrageous for, I would say the average person because most people want to do the nine to five to have the checklist life. And I was most people. I was that most people, my husband and I, had our, you know, our garage, we had our two cars, we both had corporate jobs. And at the time I had already left my corporate job. So I was already on this discovering and going, coming back home to myself. And we just leaned in, we moved out to BC. It was the best decision we ever made because as you know, during 2020, I think a lot of people started questioning.

Mm-hmm.

their life, their priorities, their values, ⁓ who were they living for and why were they doing the things they were doing? At least I think 50 % of the population, maybe less, ⁓ started to do that. There was other people that were just really kind of frozen and got afraid. And I vowed to myself during, the beginning of the pandemic that I said, I remember saying this to a friend, I said, I am going to be better off after this journey when we move through this and I'm not gonna be broken. I just leaned in, I hired a coach, both my husband and I, we both worked together with a life coach on our mindset. We were a bit stuck. Let's say we'd been together almost 14 years at the time, and we'd done all the things that we were supposed to do that our parents and society thought was success and wealth, except for that our nervous systems were destroyed.

Yeah. Yeah.

Our marriage was kind of on the rocks. We had this new, beautiful, at the time, two-year-old. And we just, I felt like we were checked out. We were checked out and we didn't know our why. Our compass was just like, it needed to be calibrated. So that's exactly what we did. We moved this time of the COVID pandemic, the lockdown, instead of looking outwards, we just went in.

Mm-hmm.

We got quiet, we started to live for ourselves. ⁓ We started to really get clear on what were our values as individuals. And then we came together as a couple and said, now what is our values gonna be as a family to raise this little human that we brought into the world? And that was, I think, the real part of our journey that began. We started to break the molds that we were in.

Mm-hmm.

We started to stop living to other people's expectations and even challenging our own expectations of what, why did we have limits? Why did we operate the way we operated? Why did we think the way we thought? And we started to challenge and question those. So we landed in BC. We went and lived there just shy of two years. And I had this brilliant idea that I pitched to my husband as like, we knew one thing we agreed on. were like, we love BC, but I think right now for now, this is the transitional move. ⁓ We didn't know what, we didn't know how, but we both knew this was a transition to something else. We didn't know. We just, I just felt it in my gut. So, and there it was. I got this ping in my heart and my, in my intuition saying, you need to make a move. You need to go travel. And I pitched this idea to my husband. I was like, hey, babe, what do you think if we either either we rent out our house or we sell it, see what makes sense, talk to our realtor and we go travel for a year. ⁓ Now we were it's twenty twenty two. We were just coming out of the pandemic. Things were opening up and my daughter was going to enter kindergarten. And I was not feeling great about that as a parent coming out of covid the school systems in Canada.

Yep.

And I think North America in general, were really burnt off. Like the teachers were burnt out. ⁓ There was this hybrid learning and they weren't sure what was gonna, the impact was gonna be on kids. I'm grateful that when we moved to BC, that we got my daughter into a forest school, a little preschool that she didn't miss a beat. Like she was outside with other kids, ⁓ no masks because they were able to do that. ⁓ And so she was able to still socialize. She didn't have that COVID ⁓ experience as much as other kids did. So I was like, my number one priority is to keep my child's mental health, and her priority and her love for learning ignited. Like, I don't want anything to impact her love for learning. And this first year of kindergarten is gonna make it or break it. I feel like that's the foundation, either you're gonna have burnt out teachers that may not have the capacity. It's not their fault. They just don't have the capacity because now they've thrown into this environment and they were dealing with parents online and never done before. So I said, I'm not making my kid an experiment. If anybody's gonna do an experiment on my kid, it's gonna be me. So I pitched this idea to my husband. said, let's go for a year. Let's take her kindergarten year. She's not gonna miss anything great.

huh.

But the opportunity that we will do in world schooling her will give her more of a love for learning in a broader spectrum that you can learn more than one way. I wanted her to have a, I'm an interracial marriage. My husband is, ⁓ his ancestors are German, but he was born in the U.S. and grew up most of his life in Canada. So I wanted her to know different cultures, languages.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

how the world operates and what, I don't want her to read in a book. I wanted her to know in different countries, see and smell and use her senses and remember for herself that we really as humans are not so different. I think COVID put a lot of people against each other and it's like either, know, vaxxers, non-vaxxers, quarantiners. And it was very divisive and ⁓ I'm not that type of person. I think doing the inner work slowly throughout my whole life and then really diving in, I said, we have to do something different with our child. She's the next generation and we have to heal ourselves and then have to help her have a fighting chance in this world of that. It doesn't have to go on a script. You don't have to follow somebody else's programming. And that's exactly what we did. So Savan we sold our house.

Mm-hmm.

The timing when I say trust your gut and lean in no matter what, three weeks before the market crashed, like the first of eight interest rate hikes, we sold our house, three weeks before we closed it and we were able to cash out, which gave us a little more comfort and more opportunity to be like, we can do this now on our terms. My husband,

That's amazing.

My husband resigned his job and he was a mechanical engineer. worked for one of the largest bakeries in Canada at the time. And it was scary for him because, you know, engineers, they operate on a different mindset, right? Like they have a different analytic. It has to make sense. We have spreadsheets. This doesn't make sense. And I'm very much, let's lean in, let's jump.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I was listening to a podcast. And one of the one of the hot takes that I've been thinking about was this lady said, I wish people would blow up their lives more. And I initially it gave me a little bit of pause, right? I was like, what does that mean? And she said, there's a lot of good that can come from people just saying,

Woof. Yeah.

You know what? I'm fed up with where I am and it's either going to make or break me, but I'm going to make drastic changes. And that could be like, you're maybe in a bad marriage. You're in the wrong job. You have maybe toxic friends. You need to move. And I always thought that was interesting because it takes so much, I think, courage, more courage and less planning because you don't ever plan to blow up your life. But

No.

that the idea of that for a person who likes things in an orderly way just strikes a ton of fear in my heart. But we are at a place where we're talking about transitions. That's what this entire podcast is about is people in transitions. And so, you know, for you, this journey of essentially blowing up your life and doing the things that your guts telling you what was sort of the bra that said, I'm going to go and do this. Were there a series of things or one day you just woke up and you were just inspired and you just wanted to do it? Like, what did that look like?

That's a great question. So I'm going to back it up to when we were still in, just living in Ontario, just outside of Toronto. It already started, there was already writing on the wall, the cracks were there. So I had my daughter at the age of 37 and I had her through in vitro fertilization. So after almost a decade of trying and we had gone through this process and it was, it was challenging.

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It was hard mentally, physically. I was, I was already very used to, think as an immigrant, you're already used to the hard. It's in you. Right. And then, so, so what happened when my daughter turned one, my, went for a regular checkup at my doctor's office and they were like, they gave me this diagnosis of premature ovarian failure at the age of 38. And that basically means my body was already hitting metapause.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed.

And seeing numbers of doctors, they just didn't know what to do with me. They didn't have answers. was like, the answers I got was, your guess is as good as mine. And I said, let's not guess. I know you're not God, I know, but you do go to school, you have some ⁓ knowledge and you're supposed to be the expert and we're supposed to work together. So that was the catalyst because I had already felt, Savan, I felt after having my daughter, It was the most beautiful time. then shortly after a year into it, felt like I was going crazy. Like ⁓ all of these symptoms that were unexplained, it makes sense now looking back eight years, I was in this, people call it a midlife crisis and I've learned to call it a midlife awakening. So the awakening was happening. I was so not. and I was ignoring the signs, I had been ignoring the signs of change must happen, Reet. ⁓ You need to go back inwards, you need to do more inner work, but I didn't know what that meant. You don't know what you don't know. So ⁓ that diagnosis really kind of tipped me. I actually, it got worse before it got better. I swear I declared like a war on my body. And that wasn't, the mindset was, it wasn't, It wasn't great. was, how could you do this to me again? Like, first it was a challenge to get pregnant. Now I'm, I couldn't accept the diagnosis. was, know, life is about acceptance and I was like resistant and I dug my like nails in and I was resisting accepting this and what this new life would look like. And I got frustrated and it put a toll on me, my relationships, my marriage, ⁓ every part of my life.

Mm-hmm.

I even had a hard time and I'm a very honest person. I was even having a hard time accepting motherhood, being like, why? Why? Like something I wanted so bad, but I was like, why did I do this? I was questioning everything. And I think sometimes when you hit that kind of rock bottom and it's your health related, it gives you the shake and the awakening that you need to be like, I don't know what, but we need to make changes. And at the same time, my husband was starting, ⁓ he got burnt out. He got burnt out from commuting for like two and a half, three hours a day. And coming home, it felt like we were just shells of human. We were just shells. The soul was somewhere, but we weren't living for ourselves. And that was the catalyst where my husband's like, we're sitting on a couch one day and he's like, do you want to move out west? And I literally looked at him and I think I told you, was like, don't fuck with me. Like, don't, I'm a woman. I'm a woman in like basically now in menopause. was like, I don't know what I'm capable of. But I said, don't mess with my emotions. And he's like, I'm not messing around. I'm serious. I think this could be what, I think this is what we need. basically we said, he said, I want, this was June. He's like, I want to be in,

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah, right. Right.

BC by fall and I was like, done. I called the realtor the next day. We got the ball rolling. like you said, this, just like this podcast came together so quickly, the household so quickly, like everything just like when you make that certainty and decision and go all in on yourself, despite the fear, despite the, and just have that little bit of courage and jump in. I think the universe or whatever you want to. the creator and you align you you tap in you plug yourself in and things happen you just couldn't imagine and how fast time doesn't even exist.

Yep, agreed.

And that's exactly what happened.

Agreed. I love this idea that you have been talking about. I don't know if it's something you've intentionally done, but it's it's this idea of moving with purpose, but without a general direction, right? You sort of understand where you want to go, but you don't really know the path at which you're going to take. And I absolutely love that because I think more times than not, we get stifled by these arbitrary things like, hey, if I worked six more months, I'm going to be a senior director or senior manager and or, you know, my daughter needs to be getting 3.5 in high school so that she can go to a college. And next thing you know, you're sort of stuck in this rut of a five year plan that really, you know, you don't understand what the outcome of that's going to be. And I'll admit, I get into that same mode, too.

you

For you, when you guys were coming up with your purpose or coming up with your drivers, when you made this move you sold your house and you said, I'm going to travel the world. What were some of the big things that really inspired you at the time? Was it just about seeing the world or maybe it was something bigger than that?

I think initially. One of our highest values is our health. And my husband and I, both. And we didn't feel very healthy mentally, physically, emotionally. I knew in my, I'm grateful to have such an amazing partner who does trust me and leans into my wildest intuition and my ideas. And he just like, thinks about it, he questions me, but then generally he says yes, because he's like,

Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Mm-hmm.

we've been together 17 years, he's like, you never steer us wrong. When we lean in and we trust, it's like the universe 10X's us in every way. And if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. You can chase all the outcomes in the world, but I don't want to sit on my deathbed or sit in a hospital bed, have regrets of.

Mm-hmm.

What ifs and lately something that downloaded was like I don't want to have double regret I don't want to have regret to today for the things I want to do and I don't want to have regret on my deathbed of I wish I'd done it. So I'm really leaning into this naturally trusting and what's coming up every day because the world is changing so fast and I'm I learned I learned through like I'm getting coached and

Mm.

that chasing outcomes is you're just spinning your tail. Because you really have no control of the how. All you have to do is keep finding that courage. Keep finding that courage in every step of the way to trust. And you know what that builds? That builds self-confidence. That builds that self-trust and that relationship with yourself. Going back to answer your question, I think that was missing for my husband and I the most. That connection and the relationship with ourselves, not like as a married couple, but just as human beings and being like, what is even that look like? We've been doing all of this for, and it's not good or bad, but our parents gave us the American dream by migrating and giving us what they could.

Yeah.

And then we were placed with a mission on our own hearts. We came here, we chose to come here and do a purpose. And my purpose was to keep evolving. And in every way, whatever that means, I'm just figuring it out as I go. All I know is if I don't evolve, I'm gonna become extinct. And that's what happens. Like if you look at history, when people don't evolve, they become extinct in like, I'm using that as a metaphor as in like, you know, the, the boomers thought, oh, the internet's going to not last. We don't have to jump on. Well, you know, it's like next generation, the AI is just going to know it's, we do have to learn. have to be discerning. We have to question things and not just be a yes person and take the everything at face value of what people are telling us and believe it and being like, yeah, okay. I'll drink the Kool-Aid and

Mm-hmm.

I think that was what woke up in me. When my health diagnosis, that was the awakening I needed because I don't think it would have woke me up if you hit me any other way, lost a job, lost something, know, no material. It had to be like really severe.

Yep. Yeah, I believe that. ⁓ For people that are listening to this right now, that are maybe at the same crossroads in their life, what were some practical things you did that they can take away from if they're thinking about selling their house, maybe moving to a different country? how did you approach that period of time in your life? Because I would imagine that was probably a very stressful time, You probably had to like, do a bunch of planning and have a lot of conversations. How did you approach that? And then maybe a follow up question to that would be, how did your community react to that? Your friends, your family, what did they say?

⁓ I think I'll answer the second part first because I think it'll help me answer this first one. So that was probably one of the hardest parts. ⁓ Family was, we really made some of our family very angry ⁓ and we didn't, I did not know why they were angry. it's something I was like, how are you angry at me for living my life? And

Okay, alright. Okay. Okay.

At the time I couldn't put myself in their shoes. But as I've learned, I had to take my shoes off and then put myself in their shoes and say, how would you feel? ⁓ And I said, you know, I understand. I don't have to agree with it. And I had to just find a place of acceptance and understanding that they're hurting because they're thinking of the eye. They're thinking of themselves, how it impacts them. And I was thinking,

Uh-huh.

more of my family collectively and the future. And I think you have to, when you make such a large decision like this, it's going to rock your world because your friends won't understand and they'll have a lot of emotion and charge around this. Your family will have a lot of charge around it, which is gonna, that's where the work begins because it's gonna make your compass like not trust yourself and make you question yourself and being like, that fear comes up and I'm letting people down. The people pleaser in you feels disappointed. There's this power struggle happening of should I change my mind? Like I wanna be accepted. I just wanna make my parents and my in-laws proud and I'm pissing them off. And what I had to, I think...

Mm-hmm.

At the time for me, there became like, there was a little bit of sacred rage, sacred anger, I called it, because it was my driving force. I know why I needed to, that moved me forward. I don't necessarily advise everybody to get angry, but that was me ⁓ to be like, hey guys, we all have one life. And as much as I would love your acceptance,

Yeah.

I would love your approval and wish us well. I don't need it. And I'm not gonna wait for it. Because if we wait, again, you will be on your deathbed. You will face yourself. It will never happen. so that was the work. That was the hardest part. The process to making, to me, felt easy. We created it, literally, my husband and I.

Right. Right. Yeah, it'll never happen.

We were both project managers. We sat down and say, we reverse engineered our thing. So we want to get here. We want to move to BC from Toronto. What do we have to do? Okay. We need what date? We set the date and we gave ourselves a hard deadline. and obviously that shifts a little bit based on the closing date of a house or depending on rental agreements or whatever you have, but give yourself a deadline to commit. It's like anything, right? And be open that image shift week or two. Don't try to control that outcome too much, but give yourself a deadline. And we gave ourselves the deadline. And from there, we worked backwards. said, okay, we contacted the realtor, the house went up for sale. We said, we wanted to downsize. We made decisions as we went, we got more clarity. We said, we don't need this large house. We want to downsize. So we downsized and which allowed for us to have more money in the bank. gave us more a bit of a like room to play wiggle room and say, okay, this gives us a confidence. And there was a lot of leaping of faith, I call it, because my husband did not tell his employer at the time that we were moving. And, and I was, I was staying at home with my daughter because it's COVID and I had to leave my job. I was doing sales and daycare were closed. So I wasn't working. We were relying on his income and we did it anyways.

Yeah.

So he told his employer the day our house closed and his employer was like, I wish you had given me more notice, but he's like, let me check. And he transferred him. When you have that much courage to just go all in and not even see the whole picture, not know all the steps, but you know you have to do this when you trust yourself. You also remind yourself that you've made it through every battle you've ever faced. you start, when you're in that, when you're already like made that decision to go in all in, you have to lean into that and you have to, the mindset matters and say, Hey, no matter what, everything I ever done in life wasn't easy. I am 100 for 100. I'm sitting here when I bet on myself. It was hard to have our daughter.

Yep.

but I went all in and we have a beautiful daughter. And it wasn't easy to be an immigrant and learn English, but here I am, have built my own life on the best terms and leveled up, so to say, based on what my parents were capable of doing. So I had to lean into and remind yourself and I would implore every person to sit down during that time and make a list of everything you've ever done.

Yes sir.

and been successful at. It may seem silly, but nothing is too small because all of that prepared you for today. That decision you're about to make that feels scary, that you don't have a plan. And like my husband and I said, it was a plan without a plan. And we just said, we didn't have to know the whole future. We knew three months ahead that we wanted in three months to be on that other side of the country. And we just focused our intention on that. We didn't want to know what we had to, we didn't focus on what a year looked like, five years looked like until we got to Vancouver. Then we were able to give ourselves space to integrate and slow down and think about what the bigger plan looks like or what we, what we wanted and dream bigger. But for that interim while doing it get very like micro and one by one, like we were selling stuff on marketplace. we were. donating, to the dump, and you really start questioning all your material goods.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. You probably have seen more of the world than most people on this planet with your travels, I would imagine. What do you think was some of your big takeaways from just experiencing other cultures and other people? What did that how did that impact sort of how you are now?

So it started off with an amazing piece of advice from somebody dear in my life before we left for our year around the world, which we went to 23 countries in that year. This beautiful woman told me, she said, Rhee, 95 % of the world and the people you will meet are good and will help you. And it's only like maybe a 5 % in the whole world. So don't let that stir you. Don't let your fear of differences or what... like appearances and culture, differences of languages and culture, lean in and trust people and trust yourself. And I think traveling around the world, and that's really truly what happened. We would rent Airbnbs, the owner, we were in Egypt. The owner of the Airbnb opened their homes and invited us to their, like in the smaller village to their parents' house. And we showed up. We went and had dinner and

huh. Wow. Wow.

And it wasn't like they had lots. But because they opened their heart, we opened our hearts and we said yes. And my daughter went and played with the kids in the village and they couldn't speak English. But I said, there's a common language. You can sign, can communicate when you want to is what we learned.

Right?

believing in the good in people will get you a lot further in life than painting people with a brush and all of people with the same brush and or despite their differences. I don't want to know them. I always say lean in with an open heart. Just go in, lower your guard, lower your expectations.

I

because it's our own expectations that get in the way of what life is supposed to look like, what people are supposed to do and not do for us. And that's been some of the greatest lessons. I said, every time I'm disappointed, it's not because somebody else let me down. I had an expectation on another person of what they were supposed to do and not do. And that's none of my business. Like mine is to be open and to accept that our differences

Yes.

that we can still respect each other and even be friends despite our beliefs may be a little bit different. But if there's core values that if you look underneath, they're very similar. want love for our family. We want good health. We want to provide for our families. And if you can lean in on that, that's what we will bring the world together and build really nourishing relationships in cross cultures, cross languages.

Mm-hmm.

That was one of the biggest, biggest things traveling around the world. We went in open, not knowing all the languages, not, and, also being able to apologize when maybe we did offend somebody because we didn't know we were ignorant of a certain, ⁓ something in their culture that you don't do or not do. And we, we, we would be humbled and be honest and saying, can, can you teach us?

Great. I think that's amazing.

Travel, traveling is all about learning. And if you can just open yourself up and say, can you please teach me? And just listen instead of thinking you know it all, just go and be open to learning new methods and it will enrich your life so beautifully.

huh. Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I think you're you are a exceptionally brave mother. I know when I've traveled with Sammy just over two states, my youngest daughter, I was exhausted. ⁓ How did you how did you manage 23 countries with an entire family? Like, what did that look like? How big were your bags?

Oh, wow, that was learning. That was learning. I'm not a light packer. we had like three really giant, we researched and we were like, I don't know, are we gonna have, go where it's like cobblestone? And so we had got these like Osprey crossbread where they had wheels, we can pull them. But if we needed to, they had straps, we can put them on our backs. So we had three of those and a couple little ones over packed.

Yeah.

I think going in at the beginning, you don't know. And what I learned very quickly is you can get anything and everything everywhere in the world. There's a 7-Eleven in every corner around the world. And a few times we shipped stuff back and we got rid of a lot as we would donate a lot. And we made this rule. Actually, my husband did. He's like, read, if you put one thing in our suitcase, you're putting two thing out. So one in, two out. One in, two out.

Yeah, right. Right. Yeah.

And because you get little souvenirs and you see these amazing artisans and you want to support the local businesses. I took it as that. wanted to, I went, we would land in a country and it was like a new language, new currency, new time zone. And we're like with a small child and we have one child. I think it was a... A little bit, a little bit easier. think two against one, two with one child, was a little bit easier. But like I made it very clear to a lot of friends, was like, no shape or form was this a vacation. This was a full-time 24 seven job. in, you know, we pivoted a lot, we learned a lot, a lot happened during this trip that emotionally, mentally challenged us. and grew us and we were adapting on the fly constantly. You want to think you want to talk about constant change. It's like you we would the only thing we put in place was we would book our flights out maybe two to three months out and that's it. We didn't have thing our our our Airbnbs or any places booked maybe sometimes a week or two we would before we'd be like hey babe let's sit down. We fly out to the next country in two weeks.

Mm-hmm.

⁓ Let's sit down for a night and we would spend maybe three, four hours organizing, like researching and then we'd be like, hey, we want to agree on this Airbnb. Let's do it. Book it. just have an idea of like a couple of things that we would want to see. We tried not to be touristy, but of course you want to see certain milestones, but we would really step into that country. We go shopped at the local markets. We cooked a lot of our own food and then integrated some ⁓ of we would want to try the local foods too, right? We're such foodies. But when you're traveling for a year and if you eat out every day, your digestive system will be destroyed. Yeah, health being one of our like highest values, we would shop locally, lots of produce and local and ⁓ being of East Indian descent, I was connecting with more of my culture and I started to make my own ghee, which is clarified butter. So I would source out ⁓

Yeah, right. Absolutely. Mmm. Yeah, yeah, I love it.

I would source out like, not pasteurized, but like organic or as natural butter as I could. And we would make that and cook with that. And it also was very healing and it provided that consistency. ⁓ We started to implement things being like, okay, limit the amount of airplane food we eat. We bring our own food on the plane ⁓ because it's a lot on the nervous system. And then Everything is connected in our, it's this beautiful ecosystem. And when you start traveling at this kind of scale, you start realizing if I don't get tuned in with my body and keep all of that in check and that as much as possible, keep it regulated, you're not gonna be able to sustain it. You'd have to fly back home for medical care because you don't have the energy and the stamina. So we constantly evolved. ⁓ We really definitely enjoyed ourselves when it came to food, we put processes in place where it helped us.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think like you just traveling in general is a shock to your body. Not just from a physical perspective, but just from a mental and even spiritual perspective, where you go into a different place and all of a sudden you're sort of thrust into this new universe. And you're trying to acclimate as fast as possible without getting sick. Like if you're drinking water, that's not purified. you know, anytime somebody goes to Cambodia, we always tell them you know, just make sure, you're not you your body's not used to it. So make sure you're getting either filtered water or bottled water. For for for you guys, as you're going from place to place, and essentially getting a new experience every single time, what types of things did you do to make sure you were in the best position to fully experience those different countries without?

Yeah.

getting overwhelmed or getting sick or anything like that.

So we we did buy a water filtration system like a small thing that you can essentially take out of the tap and a lot of times when people go to Africa and places to do work ⁓ we researched it we bought a system that in the beginning we had we would literally carry bottles of water when we were in South America because we knew we couldn't drink the water so we would go shop like every other day we're going through water And partway through the trip, invested, I think we were in Australia, we invested in this system because we knew we still had another like six, seven months to go. And that helped. From an energetic perspective, because I'm a very, we all are energetic beings, depending on what we believe, what people believe, but we started, we had a coach that we still worked with and we leaned into some Buddhist practices because my husband and I are not religious. but we loved the principles of Buddhism. to just, so we can take care of our daughter, we had to take care of ourselves. We both started doing a lot more meditation. ⁓ We incorporated a bit of a family prayer every morning just to kind of center us no matter where we are in the world, what religion, what culture, and some places are big energy forces and things are coming at you. And if you're not kind of protecting your sacred energy, you can very easily just feel depleted very quickly and overwhelmed. So every day we would, at the time our daughter was five, we would just take three minutes in the morning and just meditate. And it was a single pointed meditation. would just teach our daughter, find something to look at and just try to focus on that one spot. And no matter what comes, all the thoughts are gonna come. We're not trying to fight the thoughts or not prevent the thoughts. All we wanna do is, Don't attach to one thought. Each thought comes like, you're thinking about lunch. Okay, let it go and float away like a cloud. you're thinking about the candy or the ice cream you want. know, make it at her level. And then I would also do the same thing for myself and my husband. And then we did our prayers together to kind of ground us to be like, no matter what, we are here to be kind humans. ⁓ We are not going to, no matter what comes to us, what happens, we don't have to sway from our values. We don't have to engage, because there's going to be tests. You're going to be tested in life. so we really, that anchored us fundamentally as a family. Everything else was built on that and it made it easier. Just no matter where we were in the world, every morning we'd get up, we'd do a meditation, we'd do our breakfast. We made our own schedule. So when you realize that, you start to realize I'm in control, I have the power, not the corporations. There's something that starts shifting when you're something so wild like this to the normal person, average person that wouldn't do something like this, you start realizing, wow, I have a lot more power than I always thought I did. I was just giving it away and I thought it was outside of myself. a lot less started focusing on the material things and it just started to kind of calibrate and give us a compass and being like, no matter what, as long as we stay true to our values and keep going, keep moving, moving 1%, one step and whatever that looks like in that country. And one thing I always recommend is don't overbook yourself. never...

Mm-hmm.

⁓ We would pick one or two things and in between Say we wanted to see a really large say we went to the pyramids one day the next day We are we're not doing anything. We are resting we are Calibrating because it involves a lot of energy There's gonna be thousands of people of there and you what we don't realize is energy in and energy out you're interacting constantly and and you can easily be depleted and we were very mindful that we would spread out, if there were monuments and things that we really wanted to see in those countries, which there were, we would spread them out throughout our stay. And we tried really hard to, some places we stayed a month, maybe in the different parts of the country would be a week here, a week in different, just because they're so diverse. Even within one country, certain parts are so very different. And we did not want to, we weren't backpackers going from, ⁓

Mm-hmm.

every one day, two day with a child. We were very mindful of protecting our health, making sure that we weren't overextending her and because she is a child and she's being exposed to so much. And we just wanted to make sure that there was ⁓ still time for her creativity and play and at the beach and several times in several countries, we would put her just to get her socialized and also learn about the culture. There were different international schools that we researched. We would put her for two weeks in Bali, ⁓ two weeks in Vietnam. She'd do a code camp in Australia and halfway through the trip in India, where I'm born, and I'd never been back in 38 years since I left. So it wasn't an ordinary experience like I'm going to India. This was a spiritual life altering. experience because I had no idea, ⁓ what was about, what I was about to open. I had, ⁓

Yeah, I think that's amazing that the journey of self discovery through this year long trip around the world is something that fascinates me immensely just because one, I don't think I have the courage right now to do it myself. ⁓ But two, and I say that meaning both from a physical perspective, also think just like spiritually to be able to look at yourself and a place that's foreign in places that are foreign is very hard to do. As you were going and traveling through like the jungles and airport terminals in the desert, how much of yourself did you come to realize or how much of yourself did you discover that wasn't there initially like with this with this journey and then Maybe that to cap it off, like talk about your time in India going back home and what that looked like.

So, so I was strategic on where I placed India in the trip because I knew I had a charge around it. Emotionally, I had a charge around it. So I specifically put it halfway through my trip. It's being like, I don't want, I need time to prepare. So I think I felt like we did four months in South America and I needed time to prepare. And at the beginning of my trip, the first country we were a month in Costa Rica and I was still a bit of a for lack of a better word, felt a bit of a disaster because I was sitting in a lot of fear, being like, holy crap, what did we do? We had the life and now we're gonna go in a year and what are we gonna do after? And I had to really work on that and being like, hey, Reet, that's a lot of time away, one day at a time. You're gonna take this experience so you don't rob yourself of the experience and come to the end and being like, oh man, I missed. I missed actually doing it. And so I had to get really present and really intentional every single day and say, I'm going to focus on today. And that helped me. And the woman that started at the beginning of that trip was, I call her a recovering control freak and perfectionist. And how many times I got like literally

Okay.

brought to my knees and broken ⁓ emotionally more because I was facing myself in the mirror. Really, we think we're facing the world. It's you facing yourself and your higher self is looking back and saying, ⁓ child, you of little faith, like you already have everything inside of you. You were created beautifully whole. Your programming told you you needed healing and you were broken and you weren't enough. And all of these ideologies were constantly going through my head and I had to face them and repeat and rewire and retrain my thinking and saying, you are enough and you do belong. You can be this beautiful ⁓ eclectic person that's East meets West and you can be all of that. You don't have to split yourself and saying, I don't belong in the Indian culture. I'm not white. Where do I? And that spent a lot of my life feeling that. And this trip helped me bring all of it. It had to come up. And a big saying that I say, you gotta feel it to heal it. And feel it to heal it is in the sense that it's gotta come out.

Mmm.

you really have to face yourself and face your fears and find that within what that means for you. It's different for all of us. so the first six months led me to, you know, getting climatized with the change and letting my guard down, letting my expectations like just kind of like start to wash away a bit and being like, okay, we're going to go with the flow. And I actually changed the order of our

Right.

We were supposed to go, we were in Bali. We were supposed to go to Vietnam next. And this, we're talking February and we're looking at the time and we're like, we got to do India next. The heat is going to be so intense by April that we got to switch it. We got to go do India and then we'll go to Vietnam. And we just did that on the fly. We switched our flights and I was like, my God, am I ready for India? But I'm.

Yeah, were you preparing yourself for this, when you initially started the journey?

I was scared. Sivan, I was, I was.

Yeah, I could imagine. I could imagine.

A little bit of history, just to go back on my parents were arranged marriage in India. My father left when I was about six months old to come to Canada and I'd never met him until he came to India when I was seven years old and he took my brother and I and said, hey, I'm going to bring you to Canada now and I'll bring your mom later. But he didn't have an intention of bringing my mom later.

Mm-hmm.

So he took my brother and I, kidnapped us and he had already started a new life. He had a new wife who was West Indian from Guyana. He had my half brother, he had another newborn son when we arrived who was six months old. And it was like a bomb, but we're so young and you realize children are pretty resilient. Even in the face of trauma, we are resilient.

Mmm.

So we went to probably about seven, eight years without seeing our birth mom again. And we had this whole other life. We were dropped into a suburban white Caucasian neighborhood and told we got to speak English. We lost a lot of our language, as in the tongue. It was still up here, but we were so focused on like becoming uniform and blending in and not standing out that it was a... I disowned myself from my culture. My father never really associated with lot of Indians. He didn't teach us lot of cultural things. So we essentially just amalgamated and became Canadians. And whatever that meant for us was, for me at the time, I was like, I want nothing to do with India. I don't wanna, I gotta fit in. I gotta save myself to get. And I disowned myself from. a large part of myself and my culture. And this journey back to India was a coming home. And I was very scared because I was like, don't barely speak English. I don't barely speak Punjabi is my mother tongue. And how am I going to do this? I felt a huge level of they're going to judge me. What's going to happen? And I had to face all of that. And I did it anyways. We in India was the only country we hired a driver who drove us around because of the level of nerves that I had and because of it is a country that is so many people and you don't want to be driving in it. So we just hired somebody and we planned it, planned it accordingly. And I had planned where I was born is in Punjab in a town called Moga. And I said, Hey, I do want to spend a few days here just to kind of see what.

Yeah.

jogged my memory and we planned it around that. And when we were there, I was like, I know my grandparents village is nearby. I don't know, within 20 to 30 minutes, I was like, can we drive there? And he's like, okay. Like he's like, it's kind of kind of take away from our plan. I was like, we got to go there. I called it last minute. I was like, we're in the car. was like, no, I don't know why we got to go there now. And he's like, okay, no problem. We go to the village is about 20, 30 minutes. out of the city. I only knew the name. I don't remember anything. I knew the name. I told him, here it is. And he took us there. I said, I don't know anybody. I had never been in touch with any family. My dad had cut it all off. So we were driving around this small village. It's like farms and just like nothing really looks familiar. It's been 38 years. But I just had this feeling. There was something I trusted in my intuition and being like,

Okay.

This was where you came every weekend to visit your grandparents. Your family farm is on this land. Your dad was born here. I tell the driver, I'm like, pull over. I said, I need to just get my feet on the land. And I get out of the car, don't know what I'm doing. I'm just sitting, standing there looking, thinking like, maybe something's gonna happen. And there it is. I see a couple of butterflies literally, Savan. Like I follow the butterflies. I always look at them as a little sign of like, these are such powerful creatures and two butterflies right in front of me. I follow them and they lead me to this house. I can't make it up. They lead me to this house and I'm telling my, driver, I'm like, that house looks familiar. Like, I don't think it's our house, but I said something about the layout of it. reminds me of a childhood memory of my grandparents' house, the way that he's like, go in. He's like, go in. He's like, like,

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

He's like, great, you're like Bollywood. They just see a tourist coming in. He's like, they will welcome you here. And I was like, okay, so I just start walking in and into this house. And I tell my husband and daughter, I'm like, come with me. And get in the car, let's go. And there's this young, maybe in her 20s girls, she's just like, kind of was talking on the phone, but she gets off and she starts speaking Punjabi. And I was like, all of a sudden.

hahahaha

it downloads, I am speaking as fluently as an eight year old. And as I name drop, I'm like, do you know Chun Gil? My maiden name was Gil. And then a few people come from her family from the back of the house and some men. said, my grandfather lives in this village. He did live, do you know the Gills? And it's like the Smith, right?

Yeah.

But they're like, they sit down and they're like, yeah. They get one of my cousins on the phone. He's there in the house in five minutes and the rest just blew up. Within like the next hours, everything went like, they're calling my birth mom in Canada. ⁓ I see all my cousins now, I recognize them. We're all older, but I was like, my God, we be played together. They were just crying because they're like, your family's been looking for you because we had disconnected. My mother and I met in my teen years and I threw just challenges and not being able to get along and differences. We just went separate ways and next thing I knew 25 years had passed. And that day everything came together. I found that my mom was looking for me. I also found that my brother had been murdered 15 years earlier. it's, you wanna know.

Yeah.

like just ripping your heart open in the utmost pain and then the utmost like peace at the same time. And then there's my daughter who's five watching all of this and being like, mom, you lied to me. You never told me you spoke another language. What is this? what's coming? Like I'm having to explain to her, I mean like, hey sweetie, like I'm surprising myself right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're learning about it at the same time. You know?

Yeah, my husband's watching all of this go down from like, and they're just there holding space for me, being supportive. ⁓ I couldn't have done it without them. I feel like I just, it was the right timing. ⁓ So I changed the plan that day. We were supposed to go and drop, travel up North a couple hours. And I was like, my family's like, you're not leaving. So I said, okay, listen, we're going to spend the night here in the village. And we were up most of the night talking and they're just excited and I said, okay, I can mentally handle one night, but I need to process and integrate. And I think sometimes we forget, other people have expectations. They thought I was gonna drop everything and my mom's ready for me to fly back to Canada. And I was like, hey mom, I love you, thank you, I'm so grateful. That's not happening. Again, trusting myself and it's kind of devastating. to tell your mom that kind of was looking and has already lost a child. And I said, I will see you, but we have six more months of travel and we're doing it. And when we come back to Canada in six months, we will come and we will spend some time with you. And I said, now that we're connected, I need this time for you to get to know me. So we'll have phone calls, get to know my husband, get to know my life in the last 25 years. I am not that child that left you at seven.

Yeah. Was that the first time you talked to your mom in years or?

So I had to. 20, 25 years.

What was that like initially when you got on the phone?

The voice is like, it's like, you never forget. you're, never, you never, it's like, ⁓ I felt like a child again. And in many ways then I still was because when you don't heal that part of you where the trauma happened, that seven year old girl that's trapped inside of this 45 year old body. ⁓ So I had to really address, and I still do.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

It's not something that just is a one time or I did a 90, 30 day challenge and I'm off. It's a every day, every time I talk to my mom, ⁓ every time she triggers me, it's that she triggers an eight year old wound of a child that was felt unsafe, that didn't feel seen and that had gone through a lot of abuse. And I had to explain to her and... very challenging to explain to somebody that doesn't speak English and I'm trying to find the words in this complex situation. But I did, it got easier. It's been now two and a half years, almost three years ⁓ of being connected and it's taken a lot of work and boundaries and space and teaching her that these boundaries are for me to love you better and for me to take my time to open up and for what you want. I can't give it to you all right now. I ⁓ have to take care of me because I'm a mom now. And I know what that, I understand your wound. I can't feel like what you felt. But now, now that I'm a mom, I have more empathy and compassion for you. However, the empathy and compassion that I never had for my seven and eight year old self, I have to give her that now. I have to reparent. have to reparent her at the same time as I'm parenting my daughter. I'm reparenting myself and facing triggers and facing myself and trying to leave my heart open with space to love my mom. And it's been this beautiful, intricate journey of kind of reweaving this tapestry of our life, of what it's gonna look like, what it is now, teaching her I can't. We cannot live in the past, mom. And I did have to be very honest after this last two years, lot of repetition of this happened to me, this happened to me, this happened to me. ⁓ and I said, mom, this happened for us. This happened for us because we get to live the life we have now. every single thing did not happen the way it did, and it took me 45 years to get here, it's not like I...

Right, right.

I just saw that the victim in me needed to do all of the feeling and the healing and recognize that I'm not broken. ⁓ Situations happened out of my control and this was my destiny. In order to marry the man that I am married to, to have the daughter that I have now, I needed to love every part of my story, not the ones that were just great. I needed to love my dad for doing what happened, what he did, taking us away because I needed to understand

Mm-hmm.

in the greater scheme now as an adult, he gave me opportunities that otherwise wouldn't have happened. He gave me pain and challenge to give me the resilience and the depth and the love and the, this trust in myself, this, that despite what everybody else is saying, believe in yourself. anyways and go against the grain, even if it doesn't make sense and people question you think you're crazy, trust yourself. I, this year especially, I see a lot. My father passed away when I was 15, so he's been gone for a long time, but it's taken me so much time to be like, whoa. Like to see what happened as an opportunity, not ⁓ only like this heavy trauma that was going to just break me. It's taken me 45 years to be like, little by little being like, hey, if everything didn't happen, I couldn't be the person I am today. I couldn't have the courage and that challenge, that courage is built through challenges. It's not built when we're in our comfort zone. and we get we're entitled and we get everything handed to us. It's built when we are challenged and we're stretched and we have to face our edges and we have to be really uncomfortable and face the fear and do it anyway.

I think I think the times of adversity are the times where you will grow the most. And especially when it comes to things that are either adversities that you have personally or within your immediate family, the struggles with your family specifically are some of the hardest if not the hardest. I've I have the same struggles with my mom. She's a traditional Cambodian mom and dad, traditional Cambodian dad, there's a lot that that comes with that. But there's also a lot that's given with that to me that's that that I've learned throughout the years. And it's taken a long time to really accept a lot of the things they've been trying to teach me because I've been very closed off. Growing up like I also, you know, I didn't I didn't want to be

ready. Mm-hmm.

part of the Cambodian community as a kid, was just like, I'm trying to be as, just another kid playing basketball in America. And I don't, you know, I want to eat hamburgers and hot dogs. I don't want to eat traditional Cambodian meals. And the older I've gotten, the more sort of I've been open to, but also more welcome to what that looks like. And I think, think it's a beautiful thing for Reet for you with your daughter now. You've gone and done this massive journey. You've reconciled with your mom in many ways. How have you taken some of those lessons and then taught your daughter, you know, what that looks like?

that's a powerful one. I think our kids are our gifts. They're going to mirror the parts of us that are not healed. Like I say that loosely, like that we're not loving or accepting about ourselves. It's not necessarily healed, but it's just something that we don't want to open that door. And that was the day my daughter was born. It was like the most peaceful, most blissful and most chaotic and being like, now what? Now what do I do?

Right? Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

everything came up and feeling like that not belonging to a culture because I had just removed myself so much. And it was my way back. And now with my daughter, I want to give her every opportunity. And that comes with owning that she's 50 % East Indian and that, you know, we'd raised her very much Western in Canada, but meeting my mom kind of opened and allowed her to feel so much more love and allowed her to see that I have being an only child. She's like, I have all these cousins. Why didn't you tell me? Like she just being like she just saw that. And I was like, what a gift. What a gift for her to approach it like with that much fun and and playfulness. And and here I was worrying about it. And this kid is just overjoyed. She's not worried about the language at moments, but she's like, Mom.

you Yeah.

Like, I don't understand. was like, Mila, you are going to teach my, I call, she calls my mom Naniji. I said, you're going to teach Naniji things and she's going to teach you. And it's amazing how the elders and kids work together because there's such a deep connection and elders love children and children's love the elders. it's just organically, it comes together because children are more receptive and open.

Yes.

until we close them off. And elders have this beautiful like playfulness. They love their grandchildren even more than they love us, right? So there's more lightness and fun and what can I make you to eat and get that curiosity blooming. And that's what's kind of happened with my mom. I live in Hawaii now and I flew her in last December.

yeah, ⁓ 100%, 100%.

It was my first birthday spending with her since I was seven years old and my daughter got to spend two weeks here. She was in our home. She cooked different things and just also got to amalgamate in our life and got to see like who we are and what we do. And it was kind of a really beautiful experience. As nervous as I was to have my mom come and live with us for two weeks, because I was like, she doesn't speak English. She's not going to drive here. We're responsible.

Yeah.

She had two knee replacements, you know? So it was like, boy. But it was beautiful. Another challenge for me to let my guard down and say, hey, stop worrying about the how and the just say yes. And it was such a gift to see my daughter get closer to my mom. My mom was so, it was really. really good for her heart to see that I am doing well, I'm healthy with my family. She loves and accepts that, you know, she's like, she got why I married who I married. She understood, she understood why I, in her own way, she understood why I didn't want to do the traditional Indian way and why, and it gave her a little bit of insight. And I think it helped both of us connect and

Mm-hmm. Mmm.

It gave me more compassion for her because now with the time that we had, she was able to open up about her own story and being like, hey, Rit, I've taken care of my grandfather who was 98 passed away this summer. And my grandma, my mom has taken care of him my whole life. as long as I'm not, she's like Rit in that culture, she's like, I've had to ask permission for 45 years for whatever I wanted to do.

Wow.

And she's like, this is the first time in my life I don't have anybody to ask permission to. And in my mind was like, I can't even fathom being a woman and just because I've always felt like this control and power in myself, it opened up my heart even more to be like, wow, to have to ask permission for everything.

Yes, I that feeling.

It opened my heart for understanding.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, especially in that culture. That makes a lot of sense to me. You eventually landed in Hawaii and ⁓ one, how did you choose that as your landing spot for home, quote unquote home? And two, what are you doing there now? Like, how did you take all these experiences and learnings and apply it to where you are now in life?

So we take a year, 2022, 2023, we close out our year trip, 2023 in July, we land back in Canada. And we had a plan to go to Canada for a couple of weeks to visit our family. So we fly to two weeks in Toronto, meet my mom. like, essentially we had a few inklings of where we wanted to go, but we knew we weren't gonna go to like live in Canada again for.

Mm-hmm.

foreseeable future. We had that in agreement with my husband, but we just didn't know. So if we don't live in Canada, where do we live? ⁓ So we do our family meet and greet and for two weeks, we see them share. Then we lived in Vancouver, so we had to go back to Vancouver to close off some things. We had some stuff in storage and just deal with some things. We spent a couple of weeks in Vancouver. So during that month, We basically sat down and we started talking as a family like, hey guys, what are we gonna do? Where are we gonna live? Mila's gotta start, she's gonna go back to school. What does that look like? So we were like, we kind of wanted her to go to a private school, a ball door, going all sorts of things. so my husband and I couldn't decide and I was like, okay, we gotta let Mila's decide. Our daughter, my daughter Mila, and I was like, I'm like, hey Mila, if you can live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Mm-hmm.

And she goes, Disneyland, mom. And I was like, of course. I was like, well, we can't live in Disneyland, but we can visit. That's no problem, but nobody can really live in Disneyland. And I was like, your next place. right, like she didn't hesitate, right? She shoots to the Kava'i. And I was like, I look at my husband and I'm just like, what I never told anybody earlier that year, and when we do our New Year's resolution, whatever I had written down, I was like,

Right, right. You

If I can dream as big as I want, the top three places where I live. was like Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii. And there it is. I looked at my husband. It all like made sense because my husband's dual citizen. I was like, hey, let's do it. I don't want to be in the cold. Let's try. Something's calling us there. And on our travels, someone had told me and planted the seed and saying, Hawaii is the heart chakra of the earth. And I was like, at that point, I remember being like, I know my heart needs to open more. with everything that's happened. And in order for me to integrate this all big life experience, I need a space where I can be held, I can integrate, and I need the space away from my family to do this with my immediate family, to really just... So that was two years ago. We literally booked our flights. We didn't know about school because now it's beginning of August. School starts in Hawaii at the beginning of August. So we're like scrambling. But again, We leaned in, we booked our flight, and my husband and I, looked, we reached out to a couple of friends who knew Hawaii, lived here, and they're like, ⁓ you gotta live in Kailua, it's such a great community, family, school. We listened, we found a furnished rental, and we're like, let's go. As Canadians, Mila and I were, we can go there six months, let's try it out, and I said, we'll figure it out as we go, like anything else. And here we are, we come. We land like a week before we arrive, we find our rental, sign the lease, and then we get Mila into this chartered school that we're like, okay, it's a small school. All the private schools, they've closed off their everything. So we got a pivot. And so many pivots later, we just kept saying yes, yes, yes, and trusting. And now we're two years in living in Hawaii. My husband, on our world around the trips. Halfway through, he'd opened his own business consulting firm and he started consulting. So that started to bring in revenue. And I had started already coaching women. ⁓ At the time it was more genetic mindset coaching and just overall life coaching. And as I've kind of built and landed here and got my family settled, got my daughter ⁓ and I our green cards and my husband's business stable.

Mm-hmm.

Now I've sneaked and now I ⁓ help women rebrand and do the restyle their life and more niche and focused on midlife women, whether you're new, a new mom, new entrepreneur or ⁓ a metaposil and you're going through some extreme large life changes and you feel lost. want to help ground them back in there and themselves and remember who they are, not what everybody tells them to be and remind them they can be whoever the hell they want. any time in any stage of their life, they can re-style all of their life. that it's connected to mindset because it all starts here and here and in the outside reflects. And as much as we say, it doesn't matter. Yes, it does. You tell me when you're feeling your best and you show up in your clean hair, cut fresh hair, you feel good about yourself. You're walking into that next meeting confident and you own yourself. So.

Absolutely.

I think as women after having our children or going through these major life changes, we kind of like put ourselves on the back burner. We lose our compass and we just need help. And I know I've, I hire coaches and I have coaches. If I don't know something, I'm hiring somebody to get me to that next place I want to go that's done it before and is kind of, is a bit more of an expert. So I love helping women because I've been through all of this in my life. And I know I didn't get here alone, but I needed to really value myself. And I am my greatest return on investment. If I don't invest in myself, my family, my daughter, my relationships, everything in my life shows and suffers. So this has been the journey back home. And so I coach women, whether they're rebranding their business and they want to re relaunch, whether they are a mom and they're just feeling like I don't fit this body anymore. or I don't know what to do, let's let you love and accept where you are. If you want the change to come, you have to put the things in process, but that you can't do unless you accept exactly, exactly 100 % who you are, where you are today. And then we build.

Right. Right. Yeah, I love that. On that note, read last question. Since you're a coach, this might be right up your alley. But if if someone were listening to this segment today and they were feeling stuck or lost or just needed some guidance, right, or disconnected from themselves, What's one small thing they could do to help reignite that light in them to keep them going?

I think the single most impactful thing, and we underestimate it, and I'm always amazed at the women I coach. They don't know their values. They don't understand their values. And I think what was so pivotal for me is sit down, open a book, a blank page, and write down what's important to you. Don't judge it. Sit open.

Mm-hmm. Mmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And take the pressure off that you have to have it all figured out because it will uncover, right? We're here to just peel away the layers and write down what's really important, not important to your mom and dad, not important to your kids even, not important to your husband. It starts with you. And get really curious with that list, that list that you make. minor health, relationships, joy and play. ⁓

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.

You know, these are just, these are the words I'm throwing out that are my top values. I, I, if I don't stay true to those, I find myself lost or I'm angry at somebody else because again, it comes back to you. And it may, it may seem like, and you, it's very simple. can Google chat GPT and say, me some questions to figure out my values. It'll generate some questions you ask yourself. And with the tools we have, if you don't have the money, it's the first exercise I go with all my rebranding, resell. Let's get clear on your values first. What is not the how, what is your why? Right? And it's really, you'll shock yourself because some of the most simplest things it gives you clarity on. And sometimes we're living in other people's values.

Great. Yeah.

that were imprinted on us, that we were reprogrammed. And what was my parents' values? That I should have been a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. And I was chasing for so long, going to school for all of these things that one, I would just keep dropping out because I didn't wanna do it. I wasn't aligned. It was not an alignment. And when I started to do what I wanted to do and I left the corporate world, I went and served at a restaurant without the judgment, I drew the people into my life. I became magnetic. I got, I had the most fun. I played and I had more joy in my life. And you know what? I was of service. Every day I got up, my purpose was just go serve people. Serve people food, make them hungry, like hungry people fed. And service is the greatest, is the currency of the universe. So when you align your values and you figure out you a little bit.

⁓ Yeah, I believe it. huh.

you'll be able to serve people. And I think just getting out of our own way and not making it all about us. We're in this world consciously and we're all together as one and connected. we think we're separate from, you know, different minorities and different ethnicities, we're separate. coming back home was reminding me I'm connected to my people.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm connected to Caucasian people. I'm connected to African and European. We are human first.

Yeah, I love that. I love that.

So ⁓ that would be just really sit down and ask yourself like, what do I value in life? Not my mom and dad and my husband and my sister. What do I value as your eight year old self? What was the things that brought you joy? Because that's where the answer is. Go back to where link it to when you were a kid. We got all messed up throughout our adolescence, but what? Yeah, that's the key. Link it back to

Yeah, we lost track somewhere, for sure.

What did you love doing as a kid? you playing with your hands, building? Art? Music? That's where the key and the answer is.

Yep. Yep. Yep, I love that. Reet my friend. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and your story. It was amazing and inspiring and in many ways the complete opposite of my story, which is it's something I'm aspiring to do, you know, to blow up your life and to be brave enough to start again. And I've appreciated you coming on. So thank you so much.

My pleasure, Savan. Thank you for having me on and I loved learning and sharing and having this conversation. Thank you for holding space for me. I appreciate it.

Be well my friend, we'll talk soon. Alright, bye bye.

You too. Bye.