People often ask Samantha how she has done it all and well. For the overachievers and the ambitious, she shares tips on how she accomplished so much, developed a life-long marriage, and raised 3 thriving young adults. Remember, we only have a limited time on this Earth. So how can we do it all in our lifetime? Samantha Postman ponders on this question and provides three tips that can help you live your best life.
She shares some of her personal experiences that helped her realize the important things in life, how always looking forward and not looking back took her to where she is now. We can never take back wasted time. We have to live every moment like it is our last. Listen to what Samantha has to say as she guides you to do it all.
In this episode:
Tip #1: Lavish Love And Support For Your Partner – 13:48
Tip #2: Pursue The Present With All Your Head, Heart, And Hands – 23:40
Tip #3: Live Life Like You Have An Expiry Date At The Age Of 60 – 32.39
Bonus Tip: Make Good Money In One Or Two Areas – 40:45
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Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
Three Tips On How To Do It All In Your Lifetime
In this episode, we’re going to talk about how I responded to a question I got from someone, and he wanted to know how he could do it all in his lifetime. It sounds like a valid question. What came out of it surprised me. Stay tuned so you can gain some of those life advice and insights that I shared with someone on my LinkedIn.
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What happened is somebody reached out to me that I didn’t know. He wasn’t part of my network. It caught me off guard. I wasn’t sure how he got in touch with me. This is how the message started, “Samantha, how is business treating you?” That’s it. It didn’t right away try to sell me a product and it didn’t sound like a robot. It sounded something a little personal, but it wasn’t too elaborate. I responded back. I was busy at the time, I thought it was a cold call. I was like, “I co-run a farm and it’s crazy right here.” It was my way of letting him to know I’m a little busy and now is not a good time to be chatting up on LinkedIn. He responded, “I see that.” He checked my LinkedIn profile and looked it over carefully. He’s like, “I noticed you’re also the CEO of SmartArrow and co-owning a farm sounds hectic.”
He started asking me questions like, “What does your farm mostly produce?” It’s not a generic response either, so there’s a human being behind it and some work to it. I was feeling cheeky that day. I responded back and I’m like, “I think my young adult kids are more hectic and they need a lot of guidance while figuring out how to adults. On the farm side, we grow mixed grains, oilseeds and pulses.” He responded a few days later back with, “Samantha, I’m not trying to sell you anything, but I’ve been looking at connecting with more people in 2020, and LinkedIn seems to be the new best way. I’m hoping to learn more about what people do so I can refer business their way and vice versa. Would you be free for a fifteen-minute call sometime next week?”
This guy intrigued me. I loved how he gently pursued. This was over six days, a couple of small, tight little messages, responded with some humanism to it and it didn’t push me right away. Usually, when I get a cold message, it’s right off the bat they’re trying to sell me something. He took six days to do a light pitch. I know how networking goes, so he sounded fascinating to me. I’m like, “Sure, connect with me on Tuesday.” I gave him the time of day and I gave him my number. He responded with, “Samantha, no problem at all. Let’s connect tomorrow and find a way to make it work.”
When you physically do something, even if you don't emotionally feel that way, it resurges. Click To Tweet
This was a fascinating conversation. The fifteen-minute call turned into 45 minutes. It was quite a while. This guy is fascinating. He’s a young guy, super eager, hungry, and running multiple businesses. He is working in the finance world, and because of my tax background, we connected on a few levels. He’s got a new startup company. I find a new way of doing finance advising and I find it fascinating. When we started the conversation, it’s like a normal conversation. We ask a bit about each other, “What do you do for business? What got you in it? Why do you love it? Where do you see it going? He does the same thing with me.”
It’s interesting because he started asking me some questions like, “I’m trying to figure out this part of it. Do you have any advice for that?” Right away, it was this organic mentoring session. I found that even fascinating. He is akin, he’s teachable, he had some value and some intellectual engagement there. We chatted for quite a while. I won’t go into all of what we talked about. It was a cross between business and mentoring by accident. At the end of the conversation, he’s like, “I don’t know if you’re up for this. I’d love to have another call with you. Would that be okay with you?” I’m like, “This was great. It fitted into my day. I could do it from home. I normally do something organic like this at a coffee shop.”
At the end, I asked him a question, “Out of all the people that reached out to you, what drew you to my profile? How did you get connected with me and what motivated you to reach out?” He goes, “One of the reasons I did connect with you is because I read your profile and I was like, ‘how did she do so much in one lifetime?’ This is someone I want to learn from and I want to ask some questions from because she must know how it’s done.’” That caught me off guard, to be honest. I was not expecting that at all. It wasn’t even remotely where my brain was sitting at the time. I didn’t know how to respond, we’re at the end of the conversation. I started to laughed it off like how we do when we’re not quite sure how to respond to an unexpected question.
I’m like, “Doesn’t everyone do it this way?” He’s like, “No, they don’t. We could talk about it the next time we talk.” We set a meeting up for two weeks later on a Friday during his lunch break. It’s a good time for me because Fridays, I don’t like to do a lot of brainwork. I like to do mentoring type stuff, usually mid-Friday. We hung up and that question does bore on me. I started thinking about it and I’m like, “This question requires quite a bit more thought on my part.” It’s a good question. Did I do it differently? Do I have something to offer? He thinks I do.
Do It All: Isn’t that how it is? Somebody will call out something they see in us that they like, and it’s the time we feel the most inadequate about it.I went onto my LinkedIn and I started writing back. I responded like this, “It was nice to connect with someone as knowledgeable as you. I miss connecting with business-minded people like I used to in an office. There’s so much value in hearing other people’s passion and how to help people live better lives. I love how you do two things. One, I love how you help people with their finances so they can live their best life now and in the future.” Something else that I love about him is how he helps people find jobs so that they can help others provide services and products while providing for themselves in a meaningful way.
He got a couple of businesses on the go. He’s got his finance advising company. He also has a company where he does a virtual assistant placement. He helps virtual assistants overseas find good fits locally for businesses who are looking to outsource and get some good help. His virtual assistants have some finance training. I help people find jobs quite a bit. I thought this is noble of him. I guess we like things and others that we like about ourselves and vice versa. I wrote that at 7:00 at night, an hour later, my brain is still going so I wrote again. I felt motivated. He intrigued me so much that I checked out the websites that he had referred for his businesses.
This is harvest time, so I’m busy. For me to take the time to do that was a big deal. One of my responsibilities during farm season is to make sure that the harvest workers have hot meals ready for supper. I wrote this in the email and I said, “I checked out your websites after getting the meal harvest out.” I started thinking about what he did again, those are two important areas, to serve people in finance and helping them find jobs. I said to him again, “Thank you for dedicating your life to helping people through businesses. During our conversation, you asked, ‘How do you do it all?’ I have to apologize for not responding well then.” I shared something personal, part of the reason why I was having difficulty explaining that other than the fact that it surprised me. He’s saying I’ve done it all and he wants to be me and trying to figure out how he can incorporate some of the things I’ve done.
I shared with him this personal bit about how my parents had recently expressed that I wasn’t meeting their needs. My dad at the time was dying of cancer and they needed more help. Farm season is busy for me and for us, I was even less available to be there for them. I know that they needed help and it was done for a cry for help, but I was feeling inadequate at the time. Isn’t that how it is? Somebody will call out something they see in us that they like, and it’s the time we feel the most inadequate about it. I’m part of the sandwich generation too. I feel like doing it all is almost impossible because we got this older generation of parents to take care of, and my young adult children who still need a lot of mentoring. I’m not feeling I’m doing it all well. I then wrote down, “Upon reflection, I’d like a retake on that question, how do I do it all? If it’s okay with you, you had a genuine question that desired a bit more thought.” I began to write three things that came to mind as I cleaned up supper about what I could offer him in this time and where I was at that time. What I’m going to share with you are those three ways that I felt that I could offer advice to him about how I did it all.
If you repeat the past, it becomes part of your present. Click To Tweet
Tip #1: Lavish Love And Support For Your Partner
The first tip that I put on this messaging, which is a life hack was this one. It’s lavish love and support for your partner. This person will get you through anything. They will take primary on parenting when you need to focus elsewhere, and will even type out your presentation notes when you’re on a time crunch. I’ve been married for many years and since I was raised by a rebel teenage mom, being married this long and having three well-balanced young adult children is the biggest accomplishment of my lifetime. I’ve since started thinking about that a little bit more. The ways that it played out was part of our conversation that we had later.
In the personal conversation that we had later, I shared a little bit about how I had gotten sick. In 2009, I was in the prime of my life. I have multiple businesses at the time. I was learning about ten different hobbies. I was doing some professional photography at the time. Our main bit was still farming. I also ran a tax consultancy because in my first lifetime I was a tax expert. I was on multiple committees at the school. I was on education committee. I was spearing up a brand new tuition assistance committee to help parents with getting their kids into this great school we have in our city. All of a sudden, out of nowhere within weeks, I was incapacitated.
I was in pain all the time. I wasn’t even able to cut food. Here I’m going from Wonder Woman to not being able to cut food for myself. We were going into the harvest season at the time. You have no idea how devastating this is for an overachiever at the time. This is the short cliffnote version. I lost everything other than the farm business. Even now, I have a hard time doing photography for any length of time because of the damage that I have. It turned out that I ended up with an auto-immune disorder that took me down. I spent months in a wheelchair. I’m from Canada, and after a year and a half of trying to seek medical treatment and what to do, eventually the Canadian government paid for me to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. We were able to get a bit of movement from there once I was able to get diagnosed properly. It was the hardest time in my life, and I’ve been through some tough stuff.
Before that time in our marriage, we’d already been married for fifteen years. The whole lavish love and support on your partner part played a big role when it was time for me to be loved on. I’m not saying that he wasn’t doing that earlier. However, these times are when you don’t know they’re going to come in the future and I’m telling you that hardship is going to come. It’s part of being human. It’s like putting all these investments and what we call a return on investment or return on your energy if that’s what it takes. I invest the time in our marriage. I invest the time in my partner, and when it came to needing help, he was there.
He took primary on the parenting. Our children were all in elementary at the time. They were at that age where they were fighting a lot and they weren’t able to even cook a meal. On a farm, that’s serious when your wife can’t cook the meals and you’ve got young children. I wasn’t even able to handle them in general. I spent most of my time in bed unable to even process people talking. I know when you’re looking at me is hard to see that, and maybe someday I’ll share a bit about my journey for the last years about how I went from wheelchair Samantha back to this, but I’m not at full capacity anymore.
That was my long way of going around. Your investments are worth it. We don’t do something to get something in return. We do it because at the time, it’s the right thing to do. I lavishly love and support on my partner because it was the right thing to do and I loved him. I knew sometimes I didn’t always like him. I’m sure he didn’t always like me. We’ll probably both admit that. That’s how marriage is and yet even when I didn’t feel like it, I still lavish love and support, because when you physically do something, even if you don’t emotionally feel that way, it resurges. Mostly that’s often what happens. When you act caring or you are caring, the feelings of caring return back to you. That was a little side tip. I’m going to make a little light of something.
Fast forward all these years, we’re not going to go into the sad part of why you want to invest in somebody. From a business perspective, I was into this new project and I was way over my head. I’ve got young adult children at the time. They’re busy in a mental way which you might be surprised how much they can take from you when you’re trying to do a new project because they require you to intellectually engage. I was way over my head with family and business. I had a big presentation due the next day, and I had done a ton of brainstorming handwritten. Sometimes I do free-thinking when I’ve got a project on the go. I have an iPad Pro and it has a pen and it’s like a piece of paper. I think and write. During that process, I came up with some good points. I needed to get some of them typed out and I did not have time for this.
I’m getting all the meeting organized and getting my presentation ready. Here it is late at night, he’s like, “What can I do to help?” I’m like, “Can you type out my handwritten notes from the other day?” He’s like, “I can do that for you.” Sure enough, he goes on the computer and does his pecking typing thing. He did it. He typed out my notes for me and you have no idea how much that helped. I was able to get my presentation ready on time and not feel like I was going to stay up to 4:00 in the morning and then be so dragged out for my presentation the next day. Sometimes when it’s down and we’re broken and other times, it’s getting that last bit down before an important presentation.
Learn from your past using hindsight so that forward, we can have foresight. Click To Tweet
The other thing that I talked about was the fact that I’ve been married for many years. That is a huge accomplishment. This may be something for another episode, but all of you know that in developing countries, to be married for 26 years is quite an accomplishment. My husband and I started dating when I was sixteen. We got married when I was twenty and beat the odds from getting married as a young couple. We’ve been married for many years and it’s great. It’s not always great. We have non-great times like anything in our life. However, all those investments, all that time that you put into each other is worth it because I can’t even imagine doing life, starting all over with no one or starting off and doing this with someone new again. I do know that this isn’t true for everybody. For those of you who haven’t been able to do this or this isn’t part of your life story, there are different ways to do life. I feel for you if this is something that you’ve longed for in your heart. I don’t in any way want to be unempathetic because I am empathetic. I also want to celebrate when things do go well. That’s part of what this is.
Tip #2: Pursue The Present With All Your Head, Heart, And Hands
The second one is to pursue the present with all of your head, heart and hands. What I wrote to him was, this was ending with that section is, “Even if you’re being a mom or a dad, when the kids need you, it could be serving a 70-year-old grieving widow who’s trying to make sense of her financial affairs after her late husband used to manage them, and she herself has zero experience, or teaching English to others so they can expand their work opportunities and live a more fulfilling life.” Where I’m going with that is pursue your present with all your head, heart and hands. I feel it’s worthy to say twice because it’s been my motto like live in the present and seize opportunities.
Many of us live in our past and we repeat the past a lot. If you repeat the past, it becomes part of your present. If you want to do more in your life, you have to add more experiences. You can’t re-experience old ones as new, they’re not that new then. I always live in the present, sometimes that does mean when your kids need you that you’re there. You drop everything else or set it over a little bit so that you can spend some time with them. There are many times in my parenting career that I was so tired. I had a long day, I pushed hard in the office that day, and then it’s 11:00 at night and I’m ready to call her in.
One of my kids comes in and they have this look on their face like they want to talk. They start chatting up about nothing to start with. That’s usually how it goes, just feeling the waters there, see if you’re willing to listen. As time goes, I realized they need to talk. That’s mostly when teenagers like to talk is late at night. I remember thinking, “These are defining mommy moments. I need to listen right now. It’s not about how tighter I am. I need to like pull myself together for a bit extra.” These have paid for themselves. How could I do so much? If your kids are healthy, well and they feel listened to, then they’re doing well. There are a lot of layers to that. Something that comes to mind with that is that I don’t have to worry about them as much. They’re going to take up less of my brain drag because I’m not going to be worried about them. They’re going to come to me when they need help, and I’m going to feel like they’re doing well. If they are sharing something tough that’s going on in their life, but I feel like it’s something I know what to put my finger on, instead of trying to guess what’s going on.
The other thing too, as they’ve grown older, this has helped because we run a farm and all of them pitch in. There are times when things don’t go well on the farm and tempers go. They’re there to be like, “Let’s handle this situation. Let’s get through it. Let’s make the best of the situation.” They handled it like adults. They don’t shirk talking about difficult things, even when they’re tired and they’ve been running long hours. In a selfish way, it’s allowed me a lot more space to develop some of my own interests because we have a good relationship. They cook, they help their dad on the farm, they pick up groceries, they’re well-adjusted in life, and they’re doing well. It has opened up a lot of space for me to be able to develop my own and have them pitching up things that I normally would do. It’s not just giving me more time but energy, mind energy and mind space to develop some of my own interests.
I also made this reference to the grieving widow. When I was a tax expert, it’s heartbreaking when you have some clients for many years and one of them passes away. You try to prepare for that, but it hurts. Afterwards, I get the widow in and the widow comes in. Traditionally, especially when I was doing taxes back then, the male took lead in the finances. Usually, the male is older and they pass away first. Most often I had a female widow in my office with little financial experience affairs and not even knowing where everything is, like what to cancel, what team is their name to, which offices they need to notify. That’s probably an episode in itself of what I would encounter, and how I could maybe help some of you to think about how to help the spouse you leave behind so this isn’t such a difficult time with them.
I loved being able to step into that moment when they’re going through a tough time. It’s vulnerable when finances are coming out and they’re vulnerable. It’s something that I did. I live with my heart. I was using my head for them, but I was using my heart more for them. How does this play into success? I don’t know. It’s not necessarily that I was successful doing it or made a ton of money on it because I didn’t. It was satisfaction. The success comes from satisfaction about life and satisfaction that you’re making a meaningful difference. It’s not all measured in how many businesses you have, whether or not you’re someone like me who came from a welfare kid and is far from that now. Those are easy successes, but I don’t know. It’s being okay with who you are and happy with what kind of person you turned out to be is a success. What goes with that is when you put everything into the present, your family, your partner, and you live with your head, your heart and hands. A dream of mine was always to travel abroad and do some short-term projects.
Something that I did several years ago is I took my sixteen-year-old daughter to Costa Rica. She homeschooled for that semester. What we did is we went to learn how to teach English there. We did that for a whole month. We took her teaching English as a second language certification, then we also volunteer talk for a month. You’re going to wonder how was I able to do this when we’re running this farm at home and these other businesses. In this particular case, we were able to fit it in right after the harvest season. Because I have a good relationship with my daughter, she’s able to handle a lot of her own life, especially with school. This is something we could do. Because I had invested in these relationships, I was able to pursue an interest of mine.
Bonus: Make real good money in 1 or 2 areas so you can dabble in 'other interests' for fun. One of my businesses makes serious money. This allows me to take courses in every interest possible, start a Masters at age 40, and… Click To Tweet
When you teach people English from another country, because English is such a trade language, we’re not going there to be saviors. What we need to remind ourselves is that it expands their work opportunities. When a foreigner has English, they can choose what jobs they have. It improves those opportunities. It doesn’t always mean they’re going to make more money. Maybe they don’t want to, but it means they get to choose what job they have. I’ve heard some great stories from people who got to do something they loved because they had picked up some English. That’s fulfilling to me. I’m helping somebody else live a better life. I was able to fit it into these two months. During COVID, I look back and I see these pictures on my Facebook of this time when I was in Costa Rica with my daughter, and we were bonding and the relationships we developed there. To be able to fit that into your life, to be able to travel abroad, and spend two months living in a foreign country, learning a language, a culture and connecting with people, I consider that a success.
Tip #3: Live Life Like You Have An Expiry Date At The Age Of 60
We’re going to go onto the next one, and that is to live life like you have an expiry date of the age of 60. I’m going to refer back to being a tax expert because my friend that reached out to me is from a financial background and that’s what’s coming out. What I’d like to highlight there is what I learned through clients. In my walk of life, I’ve had the privilege to meet a lot of people, especially when I had my tax consultancy. When I first started out, my first few years, I was located in an office which mostly had seniors as their clients. I was able to learn a lot. You could ask them anything and I did. They were so fascinating to me. What I love about them is how honest they’ll be about what they would tell someone younger who’s asking. This was back before the internet was big. We weren’t able to have these growth mindset groups from Facebook where we can ask, “If you were to tell your younger self something, what would it be?” It’s so fascinating to hear what people will say.
I would ask these seniors time and time again, “What did you do right? What would you change if you could?” Something that I learned is this life advice that I’m talking about. It is to live your life like you have an expiry date of 60. What I often saw was that once someone hits around the age of 60, there are often huge health ailments that came with it or limitations. What they would tell me is, “You say you’re going to wait until you retire to do all these great things, however, you’re confronted with the reality that you can’t get the time, the energy or the passion that you had when you were young and able. You think you’re going to have more money when you’re retired, but that’s often not true. Often your income is somewhat more limited in many ways.”
Something that was sad to me is I always wanted to travel when I was young. I heard that story quite a bit with seniors. One of them wanted to travel back to their homeland or to the ancestral home. That’s something they’ll do when they retire. When they retire, there were a few things that could happen. They didn’t have the finances to do that. Often it’s health, but not of them who want to travel, it was often the health of one of the spouses that restricted the other one from traveling.
The one who kept saying, “No, let’s wait until we retire,” I felt bad for not doing this when they were younger and able. If they would have done it when they were younger and able, they would have those connections with their relatives abroad. Whereas when you’re in your 60s, a lot of those connections are not as strong as they would have been, and in your interest isn’t necessarily the same. They missed out on a lifetime of being able to grow these connections that they would have grown if they were younger. That was one of the things that come out of what you want to do when you’re young. Travel was one. If you have an interest or a hobby that you would like to pursue, it’s not rocket science to know that arthritis can set in. Those hobbies that you wanted to try if they were to do it with hands, you would be restricted in being able to do something that would require some fineness and some fine motor skills.
The other thing too is when you get to your 60s, often you become grandparents. Your time gets taken with other interests. You love your grandchildren. However, you have less energy to go around. When you have your grandchildren, if you’re still working, there’s not any time to pursue your interests. If this is something that’s important to you and there are things in your life that you want to try or accomplish, I recommend living like you have an expiry date. If you make it past 60, that’s a bonus. If you’re doing well when you make it to 60, that’s a bonus. You can bonus live in those years, which I’m hoping to do myself. However, don’t wait to do those things you want to do. If you want to do them, then you have to ask yourself, “Is this wishful thinking or is it a value?” Do you wishfully think you could travel or is this a true value? If it’s a true value to travel like it was in my case, then I need to live like I have an expiry date.
I shared with you about my health issues. If I wouldn’t have got some of this back, I maybe never would have been able to travel. I had traveled a bit up to that age, but at the age of 35, I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to travel again. I thought maybe I was going to die, and I wasn’t going to live much longer, then my husband and I wouldn’t have been able to travel again. Live life like you have an expiry date of 60, and I promise you that when you hit that age, you’ll be happy that you did. For any of you who need a little more urging, think about the COVID crisis. I was talking to a friend of mine who’ve spent ten years saving for this elaborate cruise for her and her husband. They always wanted to go on one. They had it booked in April 2020, and ten years they’ve been waiting to go on this cruise then COVID hit. They’re in their 60s. They may be able to go on this cruise, but it doesn’t look like any time soon. My heart broke for them. This was a big dream of theirs. It’s something they spent a lot of time on. They did everything right. They saved for it. They didn’t go when they couldn’t afford it.
What I would recommend is to think about this differently. What if they would have gone on a smaller cruise that cost less in their earlier years, and then they would be able to go on this cruise. That’s what I’d recommend. Go with what you can afford. You shouldn’t go into debt to go on a cruise. They could have gone on a much smaller and lower scale one at the five-year mark or the six-year mark. If anything, I’d like to pass that onto you, so you can take those words of the regret. What I want to talk about on my show is learning from others, learning from my past, using the hindsight so that forward we can have foresight. We’ve covered all three that I covered in my email. To remind you, I did not write all of that in my email to him or my messages through LinkedIn. I wrote small bits and then during a follow-up conversation, we’ve unpacked parts of those where he asked me more about each of them.
Question: 'How did you 'do it all' in your lifetime?' Click To Tweet
Bonus Tip: Make Good Money In One Or Two Areas
For those of you who have stuck around this long, you get a bonus life advice tip. I didn’t include this at the beginning so I’m going to pass it on right here. I did include this as an add-on to my LinkedIn messaging. Here is bonus tip number four, make good money in 1 or 2 areas so you can dabble in other interests for fun. One of my businesses makes good money sometimes, but usually it’s enough that we can coast off of it for a year if it’s not good the next year. That’s how farming is. Sometimes we have a good year when it rains, the next year during drought, then we have to use the money from the rainy year for the drought years. There are times when we do well that I’m able to do some extra adventures. Because that business can do well, it’s allowed me to start a Master’s program at the age of 40. I volunteer in developing countries for months at a time moonlighting as a photographer.
What I mean by making good money in 1 or 2 areas is farming and I had my additional income of tax consulting. We were able to put money away for travel because that’s important to me, but also for these other interests like doing my Master’s. When I talked about moonlighting as a photographer, especially when your SLRs is not inexpensive. Our phones are awesome, but 15, 20 years ago, those SLR digital cameras were a serious penny. They still are. If you want a great lens, they are that way too. I was able to pursue those passions because I focused on making sure that we did well in a couple of areas.
There are times when I made no money at my interests. For example, when I did my Master’s, I didn’t do it for a job promotion. I’ve still not been paid in any way for anything that I’ve learned when I did my Master’s. I do teach sometimes what I learned in my Master’s, and in those cases, I did all volunteer. I was able to do that because I had a couple of good solid businesses. I’m giving this advice to someone who’s got a couple of businesses and in his case, can put some of it on passive mode. My advice to him is to get those going, grow those, and then you have time to do those other things. What I was talking about teaching English, we paid to go down there. In my daughter’s case, she was going to an alternate school. The building is owned privately, but the education itself is public. We did have to pay for the school usage fee, and for the semester that she wasn’t in this school, I took the money from that and applied it towards our costs for when we went down to learn how to teach English.
What I didn’t share with you is what I was teaching my daughter was something that I hope is valuable to her. She was thinking about going into being a teacher. She was about 15 or 16, and she was amazing with kids. You should see her at the Sunday school. She’s done a lot of volunteering with teaching and I thought this was something she’s suited to. Although she wasn’t sure she wanted to do it and didn’t feel that was maybe her calling. However, my husband and I talked about it and we thought it would be good for her to try it out before she go into a five-year degree to become a teacher and find out you don’t love it, or not go and do teaching and find out later that you should have done teaching because that’s what you’re called to do.
Often, we learn just as much by what not to do than what to do. When we went to Costa Rica to teach, some of it was self-motivated or self-interest because it was a way for her to try to see if she wanted to teach. That’s way less money to go and live in a foreign country for two months than it is for her to spend five years in university and find out it’s not something she wants to do. That’s how we looked at the investment there. It didn’t cost us a lot to go there. It’s reasonable. Living in a developing country is not near to living in our local country, and the cost of food is less than at home. When you take your resident’s costs for rent when you’re there, that’s the most expensive thing that would cost you more than it would at home.
I want to tell you how amazing it was when we were teaching English. The monetary cost of it or loss of costs far outweighs. For me, the experience is important. One of the top things on my list of what’s important in my life is experience. I don’t care that much about the money as long as I don’t have to worry about if I need new tires and they’re bald and it’s wintertime, that was a serious problem when I was younger. When I lived in Costa Rica, we lived right next to the ocean for two months. One month of it, we lived a few feet from the ocean. While we were preparing on lessons, it’s smoking hot and you’re sitting at the tables. You’ve got the breeze of the ocean and these monkeys lived around the hostel that we were living in. They would climb all over the tables and into the rafters. We’re living the dream life. We’re volunteering, spending our own time and energy, investment and money, but we’re getting the experience of a lifetime.
We do things like turtle releases. I saw hundreds of turtles come out of the ocean. I stroll into the ocean after coming out of a hole. One of the coolest things is we live in hostels with 18 to 30-year-olds from all over the world. In a hostel, people are backpacking in. Where we were teaching was an out of the way spot where it’s not a high touristy area. The people who are coming in there have an extra down to earthness on them. They’re looking for the real Costa Rica, not the tourist Tamarindo that you’re going to get there which what locals think isn’t Costa Rica. It’s more like a tourist town. It was so fascinating sitting at the tables. You want to talk about education and experience. For two months, what our hostel had is a banquet table where everybody eats together, they cook together. The only thing that is private is your room and not everybody even has private rooms. Bathroom and all the other facilities are shared.
What happened at that table was magical. In many ways, we got to hear the hearts of the next generation. I got to see a bit of what I think the future is going to be. They talked about the future. They talked about ideas. The fact that they’re all internationals, they have completely different perspectives. The Germans especially were bold, and my show is called Bold Perspectives, and I have a strong German heritage. I appreciated their directness. Some of the questions they straight up ask you and you’re like, “I forgot. This is okay to straight up ask a question.” Some of them ask me about my parenting techniques. Some of them were challenging my parenting techniques, but we’ve got to have open conversations.
I would do it again in a heartbeat. It’s pretty much glorified camping in a hostel. It was a magical experience for both myself and my daughter. You got the bonus section. Hopefully, in the future episodes I’ll talk a little bit more about my experience in Costa Rica and share with you some of the table talk from these 18 to 19-year-olds. I look forward to sharing some of these stories with you and I love to hear how some of them resonated with you and your life moving forward or any of these a-ha moments and what spoke to you.
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That’s it for this episode. Thank you for tuning in. I hope that you love it enough that you’re going to hit the subscribe button so we can have more of this and that we stay connected. It was great to be with you.
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