This is us, enjoying a gorgeous Mauritian sunset and exploring the unexplored after a day spent creating and working on our own goals and dreams.
A year ago, we never thought this would be possible and here we are 4 months after saying goodbye to our corporate careers, living our dream. How did we get to this point?
For us, this journey has not been linear, we did not wake up one morning, sit down with our coffee and plan how we would get from point A to point B. It was more a gradual awakening with a lot of unlearning, growth and exploration along the way. Looking back, we now realise that there were some definitive steps that we actively took over a period of a year that have enabled us to get to this place in our life. A place of freedom.
If you have read Our Story, you will know that we found ourselves no longer inspired and motivated by the thought of climbing the corporate ladder. We looked onwards towards our projected career titles in the corporate world and realised that was not where we want to be.
We craved a life of freedom with space to be able to work on our own goals and projects. We wanted a life of joy, growth and exploration. A life where passion, work and health can collide and exist peacefully. We realised success to us no longer looked like what it had 5 years prior.
Upon realising that at some point we would need to make a career change, we identified one large thing. You know the saying, “Money equals Freedom,” well in this case, to a large degree it was true. We set out to create a safety net of cash that would enable us to walk away when we needed too. The last thing we wanted was to use finances as an excuse not to make our dreams come true.
Once we made this decision, we sat down, put a hold on buying anything new, cut down our expenses and started funneling all the money we could into savings. We sold unnecessary items and after a few months, even got rid of our car.
We also started to explore ways in which we could use our current skills (or learn some new ones) in order to make money on the road and as a result realised that we could easily set up a business to work remotely.
Very early on we understood that we had to become comfortable with internal and external resistance, but keep going anyways. There was (and still is) a lot of self-doubt and self- criticism that creeps in. We consistently choose to push through these self limiting beliefs and slowly as time has gone by, it has become easier and easier to trust in our path, trust in our process and keep going.
We keep coming back to the fact that our intuition is yet to lead us astray.
As we continue down this path, we keep reframing what we want and how we plan to get there. We started off with some really big dreams and goals, some of them have survived to this point, some of them have not. However, one thing has remained the same, we keep redefining our plans by stripping back what no longer serves our big picture. At this point, we also make a conscious effort to follow the process and trust in the importance of the baby steps. It is very easy to get side tracked, over complicated and overwhelmed by the large grand plan.
We didn’t have it all figured out at the beginning- We still don’t, but once we decided that this is the life we wanted to create, we began to show up everyday for that goal. It is not always easy and as mentioned above, there are moments of fear and self doubt but we keep working at it, keep realigning ourselves to this dream and even on those days that feel tough, we take the smallest steps we can, the main goal is to keep moving forward!
The most important step we took was just jumping… Just jumping into the unknown. After months of going through the steps above, we found ourselves saying, “Okay, its now or never, ” and it was that day that we both put in our resignations and gave ourselves a date to fully begin the self-employed digital nomad life. We realised that there would always be an excuse, there would never be a right time, never be enough money saved or even enough skills learnt and so we put all that aside and just look the leap. While the process of these steps took the better part of 6 months before we got to a point that we felt confident enough to just jump, it is now four months later and we have not once regretted the decision to leave our corporate lives for one second.
We still have so far to go on this journey and so many more dreams to achieve along the way, this is really only the beginning for us. But as long as we are growing, learning and exploring then we are content.
So excited to see what the next few months have install for us.
Have you recently made a similar leap, let us know in the comments below- We would love to connect.
Stay Adventurous, Keep Exploring and Play More.
Until Next time, Sarah & JP
One Year of living as Digital Nomads!
This means that it has been over a year of no permanent address, of carrying all our belongings in two suitcases and our backpacks and bouncing around every few months. We cannot believe how different our life has become.
On May 01, we woke up, went into the office for the last time since we started working from home to hand back our electronics and equipment, it was official, we were on our own as freelancers. The real journey had began. We cannot believe how quickly 6 months has gone, how much we have grown and shifted. It has absolutely been a bit of a roller-coaster ride to say the least but in the past 6 months we have learnt 7 very valuable things.
After leaving my corporate job to enter the world of freelancing I really struggled with motivation. These are the 7 steps I implemented that transformed the way I work.
Welcome to our life, we are just “a couple of architects.”
Almost two years ago, we left our corporate careers to set off on a journey to find ourselves, to find our place. During that time we took our passion for design, architecture and life and merged them to create our own creative studio, ACOARCH Studio. We now live on the beautiful island of Mauritius, offering a multitude of design and architectural resource packages to both individuals and companies all over the world.
Here we share our personal life experiences, stories of travel and island living.