140 - Are we ever going back on social media?

Jason: Well, hello there and welcome to episode 140 of our podcast. Sixty episodes left of our podcast episodes.

Caroline: You know who you sounded like?

Jason: Who's that?

Caroline: I was like, What is that intonation sound like? Dax doing the intro to Armchair Expert, that's where you got that from.

Jason: I haven't listened to an Armchair Expert in a long time.

Caroline: But that sound is, like, in your brain because that sounded just like that.

Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All for? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

Jason: And I'm here too.

Jason: How do you know I wasn't doing that before Dax and Dax listened to our podcast?

Caroline: (laughing) Good point. I don't know.

Jason: Hello, welcome to our podcast. We are currently in a new country, which we'll tell you about in a couple of weeks.

Caroline: Are you kidding?

Jason: What?

Caroline: That's such a tease.

Jason: I know, but that's the fun of it. You know what else is really fun?

Caroline: You're such a tease.

Jason: We got new water bottles.

Both: (laughing)

Caroline: We did.

Jason: This is just to share, like a small part of the traveling adventure when you're traveling full time is you start the year with a full roster of your stuff, 246 items, however many we had that we brought with us combined. Right. And we had these water bottles that we scouted out. We showed them in our packing videos. They were great.

Caroline: They were brittle water bottles that had charcoal filters that you replace about once a month and you can basically use sink water anywhere and it'll filter in the bottle.

Jason: They were great.

Caroline: Fantastic.

Jason: Two problems with them. Number one, we could not get new filters in Europe.

Caroline: Because we only got enough for like six months or something?

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: Because there's a lot to bring and also two of them broke. They're kind of fragile because they're charcoal.

Caroline: They are pretty fragile. They're just charcoal.

Jason: But I ordered a set, they never showed up.

Caroline: Never showed up. Dispatched but just into the ether.

Jason: Never showed up. And then I was actually thinking, we've got some family coming over to join us. Like, Oh, my family can bring... Like, that's really a big pain. It's not that big, but just still, it's like a little ask.

Caroline: One thing you get they have to worry about. Yeah.

Jason: And as people who, like their bags are stuffed to the brim, we don't want you to try and fit more things. So we bought new water bottles. And I'm just curious because everyone has been asking in the comments, How are you enjoying the new water bottle?

Caroline: (laughing) It's great. It works very similar to the other one. I told you, the only thing that bothers me is like, the piece, the filter that goes into the water bottle. It sort of has this lip, floaty quality to it. It's this long-found object.

Jason: That dangles.

Caroline: That dingle-dangles around in there. And it makes me feel weird every time I drink. (laughing)

Jason: So I told you...

Caroline: So, that's a feature.

Jason: I knew you had some feelings about this water bottle.

Caroline: But knowing who I am and the fact that you're my husband. When we got them in the mail and we were filling them up, you gave me the piece of paper that comes with it that says, Set your expectations. There might be, like...

Jason: It's like a little sour aftertaste.

Caroline: A little aftertaste is what it said. And so I was like, Oh, here it goes. This is where I'm so disappointed in the purchase. Didn't have an aftertaste at all.

Jason: Because I set you up for it. I also did the prep work on the water bottle. 15 minutes of soap. Then I did a back flush. I really set you up.

Caroline: A back flush?

Jason: Yeah, I really set you up.

Caroline: Okay. You're devoting your pramvel time to the water bottle. I wanted to bring something up in our travel pramvel.

Jason: Also, please send me an email. Let me know if you just enjoyed our Dingle Dangle Water Bottle, which you can find at your local retailer. Just ask them for the Dangle Water Bottle.

Caroline: These are the times where, this is why we aren't influencers.

Jason: Right, exactly.

Caroline: We would be like, have a partnership with this water bottle company and we'd be like, Yep, it's a lot like a floppy dick.

Both: (laughing)

Caroline: Yeah, we're not going to re-up our sponsorship.

Jason: Okay. Yeah. The dingle-dangle water bottle that we renamed it. You don't like that?

Caroline: You might have to bleep out.

Jason: What you just said?

Caroline: I was just thinking people who listen with their children.

Jason: Children? But if you said it fast enough. Also, it's just a piece of our anatomy. Come on.

Caroline: Not in the way that I presented it.

Jason: All right, so let's actually talk about some real pramvel stuff.

Caroline: Yea--no.

Jason: No, I want to transition to real pramvel.

Caroline: You can't. You devoted your time to the water bottle. And I want to say something.

Jason: Okay.

Caroline: I just want to say I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've been talking to you about it for the past couple of days. But I am so filled with gratitude for the ways that this trip, which has been difficult at times, amazing at times...

Jason: We're in our 9th month now.

Caroline: Yeah. But definitely challenging. But for all of my anxiety warrior folks out there, I have to say, especially lately, I don't know why it's so noticeable lately, but my anxiety threshold, my baseline anxiety, has gone so much further down than it used to be. And it's wild because it's, like, counterintuitive. You would think that putting yourself in these, like, anxiety-inducing situations all the time would make me more anxious. But it's something has happened where my brain is now able to process those things in a way where, I know this sounds absolutely wild. But I got my hair done when we were in England. And I used to have such debilitating anxiety to go get my hair done. Which sounds so weird. But whenever I'd be in a new environment. With weird things happening and talking to people and leaning my head back and there's weird lights and like... All these things used to really trigger me. And I would get dizzy and I would feel weird and I would just feel uncomfortable. And so getting my hair done was not even fun because it was such an anxiety-inducing experience. I just have such wild anxiety walking through a mall, and it's just because of how many stimuli there were. It was just messing with my brain. I used to get anxiety going on trains or...

Jason: I mean, any transport...

Caroline: Any transport. In the car. All of these daily experiences used to be so wildly uncomfortable for me, and it just left me feeling exhausted to be alive because it was just everything. And I don't think people who don't deal with whether it's anxiety or any type of daily battle like that can fully... People who don't necessarily have to fight that battle, I don't know that they understand how constant that ticker is in your brain of like, Well, okay, this experience is going to be and it's just like it's hard. And so just the past few days, I've noticed how much I don't have that ticker anymore in my brain going, This is going to be terrible. This is going to be hard. The physical sensations of my anxiety are so much duller. And the reason I want to share that is, one, just because I just want to say out loud that I'm really grateful for it, but two, I want to share that for anyone who does deal with anxiety as proof that, because sometimes when you deal with that, you can convince yourself that you're going to be like this forever and that it's not going to change in any way or transform in any way. And that you feel like your brain has a limitation that you can't break through. And we all have limitations. I'm not going to pretend they don't exist. I'm not going to pretend that you can just manifest them away. I'm not going to pretend that you just have to think happy thoughts and that you're not going to experience anxiety. But what I do want to share with you is that from someone who has put themselves in uncomfortable situations over and over again, I'm telling you, it's possible for it to change. It's possible to change your brain. And I just hope that provides a little sliver of hope to people who deal with that.

Jason: Can I offer a medical diagnosis from the...?

Caroline: I wish you wouldn't.

Jason: PhD that I don't have?

Caroline: I wish you wouldn't.

Jason: It's not a bad one, and I'm not going to mansplain anything to anybody. My hypothesis is the same thing when it comes to physical exercise.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: And it's whenever you start physical exercise, even if you're someone who has worked out a ton or someone who has not worked out at all, the beginning and middle of that journey, it sucks. It's terrible. You don't feel like you're getting any fitter, you don't feel like you're getting any stronger. You don't feel like you're getting, like it's always hard, right? Like you're going and you're doing whatever thing, and you're like, This is still so difficult. And I really believe that for you, that was like six months of this journey. It was just every day going into the gym, quote unquote, which is our travels, and it all sucked. But then there is always a time, and now you know this after doing a year of physical fitness journey, there's this moment where it's almost an overnight shift where you realize, like, Oh, this is not as difficult as it once was.

Caroline: You almost realize things that you put so much mental effort towards. You don't have to put very much mental effort towards like before.

Jason: And I really think that is, again, coming from my PhD that I don't have is the mental rewiring of the neural pathways.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: I think it takes time and then just something clicks it over and it goes, Oh, okay, I have new pathways now. I don't have to use the old pathways. I can use these new ones.

Caroline: Yeah. I think there is also something to, again, from my lack of PhD to speak on the subject.

Jason: You have a double masters in non-PhD.

Caroline: Double Masters in not qualified at all to talk about this.

Jason: Right.

Caroline: And I think there's something to the desensitization factor where I've just now done these hard things so many days in a row for so long that my brain, because so much of anxiety is a hypersensitivity to your surroundings. It's like a hyper-vigilance, right? It's how you could describe it. And so I think just my brain has been vigilant for so long and in these scenarios that it's almost like it can take its rest now.

Jason: And think about our time living in California, especially during the pandemic, for two years, there were no new experiences.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: I mean, it was the same thing. So your anxiety never had a chance to get better because it was just stuck in the same loop.

Caroline: And I know this about, remember when I had driving anxiety and I was like, I really want to find a way to lessen this. And what did we do? We practiced repetition. If you've been listening to the podcast for long enough, you remember this, where we would just get in the car and we would literally go around the block and that would be it for the day. And then the next day we'd go a little bit farther and a little bit farther, and it's the same methodology.

Jason: Eventually you drove me home from my...

Caroline: Dental appointment.

Jason: Dental appointment, where I forced you to get in and out.

Caroline: You forced me to get in and out, which was not on the plan.

Jason: And you had to go in.

Caroline: I was like, Jason, do not deviate from the plan. And high Jason from his dental appointment was like, Too-doo, I don't know.

Jason: Yeah, the person told me...

Caroline: And then like, Jason! And remember the line was backed up. And I was like, Oh, sorry, but the line is too far. And they go and you go, Do you think you should go inside? (laughing)

Jason: And?

Caroline: And I did.

Jason: Yeah. Thank you for that. All right, let's get into the actual pramvel.

Caroline: God, that's a good line. We need to bring that back in rotation. Do you think you should go inside?

Jason: For those of you who are curious, my asthma is definitely better.

Caroline: Definitely better.

Jason: We have changed countries from being in England, and I have already noticed a big difference. And we'll see how it goes throughout talking, because talking is really the thing that is the worst of it. But we'll see how it goes. It's definitely feeling better. Let's talk about a couple of different stories from our time in Portugal, though. So that's actually what we want to share some time from. So if you listen to a couple of episodes ago, episode 137, we shared the news that we are moving to Portugal. So exciting. We talked a lot about in that, but there were a couple of different stories from there we wanted to bring back around.

Caroline: Right. We told you a little bit about our scouting trip in that episode, but we mainly focused on our decision to move. And then through the past few weeks of episodes, we told you about how then we went back to England.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: No, then we caught up the England before Portugal. That's what happened.

Jason: Yeah, we went back afterwards. You'll hear about that next.

Caroline: So now where we are in the world is, we left you off at the Dutch barn.

Jason: Not physically where we are in the world.

Caroline: No, no.

Jason: When we're storytelling...

Caroline: In the storytelling world...

Jason: It's so difficult to keep track.

Caroline: Is we were in a little area called Wicken. We stayed at the Dutch barn. We did the corn maze.

Jason: Yeah, yeah.

Caroline: Okay.

Jason: I think we've already talked about being in Portugal. Maybe I'll help you if I tell you what I had in mind.

Caroline: Okay, great. What about what I just said would make you think I need help?

Jason: Yeah, in Nazare/ Nazare/ Nazare.

Caroline: Nazare. If any of you have seen the documentary, The 100-Foot Wave...

Jason: On HBO.

Caroline: On HBO. This is all about the, it's arguably the biggest waves in the world are off the coast of this tiny Portugal town called, we're going to call it Nazare because it's just easy, okay?

Jason: Sure.

Caroline: But in this documentary, we're like, let's listen to how they pronounce it, like Portuguese people in the documentary, because all the Americans pretty much call it Nazare. But they're interviewing also locals in Portugal. And we're like, Oh, we want to say it right. And so I'm like, I think it's Nazare. And then no one said it that way. It was like, Nazare, Nazare.

Jason: It was so many different pronunciations.

Caroline: We have no idea. So we're going to go with Nazare.

Jason: So I want to talk about our beach day in Nazare. I want to talk about our Well Hotel that we had and then just want to talk about just where our mindset was at the end of that trip and how we're feeling. Those are my three little parts and we have ten minutes to do it or less.

Caroline: Okay. And then we'll move on to the bulk of the episode?

Jason: Yeah, actually what we want to talk about. So Nazare again, trying to just say it one way is difficult now because I've said it so many different ways. We had this day where we decided we were going to walk from our Airbnb down to the beach. And if you look up any photos of Nazare beach, you see this like super packed beach. But if you look up North Beach, there's a beach that's on the other side of the lighthouse. The lighthouse is kind of like the dividing point of Nazare. You have like the southern beach and you have the northern beach.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: The northern beach is actually where they go in for the 100-foot wave surfing. We didn't really know any of this.

Caroline: No, we didn't.

Jason: We hadn't started watching the show until after we...

Caroline: Highly recommend staying in Nazare and watching the documentary.

Jason: It was great. You really get a nice acclimation to the area. But anyway, so we have this like I think it was a 30-minute walk to get to the beach.

Caroline: Probably.

Jason: So not close, but also physically it's not that far, it's just there's no direct route.

Caroline: Exactly. So from our Airbnb, you're basically behind this little local neighborhood and you can see just like expansive ocean views. And so you think to yourself, Just walk that way, just walk that direction. Nope, nope nope.

Jason: Took 30 minutes. We navigated down, there were tons of signs that didn't end up having to use Google Maps. I was looking at the map like, Oh, there's just lots of signs that say "Beach this way" and you're following all the cars and you're going, you're going. But we get down to the beach and we finally are walking onto the sand and I just wanted to share this moment where that was, for you, where I think you started looking around and you were like, Oh, I could live here.

Caroline: Yes. And it was something about... SO the way that that beach is set up. There's like this dune, this big dune in front of where everyone parks. So it's like this skinny road down to where people can park. But it's jam-packed. Obviously. Because it's the summer and you're kind of... All the cars. You have all the surfers who are hanging their wetsuits out of their van doors and stuff and it gave me this like very... I grew up in Florida in the States and it gave me this wave of nostalgia for just that life of, that beach life that I grew up with and it was this weird transformative moment where I thought my childhood and my comfort is combining with this new environment and I'm seeing that that feeling exists somewhere else in the world. And it was so cool because I was like, Oh my gosh, I could see us coming down... And again, we're not planning on living in Nazare, but it really showed me, like, what a Portugal beach experience felt like, and it was just so fun. And then you get down to the beach and it's huge.

Jason: Oh, the beach itself? Yeah, gigantic. And also it was pretty empty.

Caroline: Fairly.

Jason: There were a good amount of people, but the beach was so big, you couldn't tell.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: But later that day... So we spent time at the beach, couple of topless people at the beach, in case those of you were wondering, Is it a thing in Europe?

Caroline: Absolutely.

Jason Yes, that is. And just, as Americans who don't see that often, I'm obviously not staring at another person, but I'm just like, I don't see this in life. I don't know what to do with myself.

Caroline: Gotta get used to it.

Jason: I know. So we decided we were going to walk back into town. This is where we looked at Google Maps because we weren't going to go back the way we came because our Airbnb isn't right in town. And it was like, Okay, this is like a 17-minute route. And we're like, Okay, that's not bad.

Caroline: Great.

Jason: So we start walking and all of a sudden we're noticing like, Oh, this isn't on a road, this is like a trail. We're like, Oh, that's okay. But the trail is soft sand the whole time.

Caroline: Think, a forest, an actual forest with hills, but the entire ground is just soft sand.

Jason: Like, imagine it's about to be quicksand. Like you've seen movies and quicksand is coming. It's that we... We were fighting through. We had to stop every four minutes to rest because it took us 40 minutes to walk there. It may have been 17 minutes at a pace you can walk. Not in soft sand.

Caroline: No. We were laughing so hard. You're like, Okay, well, this is what we get for trying to go the shorter route. That was somehow through this...

Jason: We should've gone on the road.

Caroline: The quicksand forest.

Jason: So anyway. But when we got back into the town of Nazare, we got to basically where the lighthouse is, which is like the famous point. We didn't go out to it.

Caroline: The main little city center, the plaza.

Jason: Yeah, we got a little burger to go, for takeaway. And then we sat and overlooked the south beach. And this is where you saw the like, Oh, my gosh, this is packed. But it's so funny to me because it's like, if you just drive ten minutes further, you can go to a beach where there's not that many people.

Caroline: I don't get it.

Jason: Which is very interesting. But nonetheless, that was our little beach day trip at Nazare. I think that...

Caroline: It was so enjoyable.

Jason: It started this feeling of, Uh oh, we could possibly live here.

Caroline: Yes.

Jason: So the second part of this journey that was fun. So we were going to be on this two-week scouting trip. We did the first week. We stayed in Nazare and then just drove all over the Silver Coast area. And we got to the end of that second week, basically, and we were like, Let's just stay in the Silver Coast. For those of you listen to episode 137, you already heard a lot of this. But what you didn't hear that we didn't talk about was, Well, now how the heck do we do that? Because we wanted to book the place that we saw that was for rent, but just for the week because it was available for a short term rental. But there was one night that we couldn't go into that place.

Caroline: Yeah, they only booked from Saturday to Saturday. And so we had this Friday night kind of lingering that we didn't have a place to stay.

Jason: So yeah, our Airbnb we couldn't stay the Friday night, so we had to find a place to stay. So quickly, I started looking and I found two hotels that looked very interesting and unique that were in the Silver Coast area. One of them was like, super funky and modern. I'm going to leave both of these as links in the description so you can check them out. Just so funky and modern, but they had no availability. Again, it's August. This is peak tourism season.

Caroline: This is for the day after, basically.

Jason: This is literally the next day.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: The other hotel, which is called the Well Hotel & Spa, which is like a Spa hotel, had an availability, it had a larger room. And I was like, Okay, great, I'm going to book this. So I book it. I tell Carol. I'm like, Yeah, we're good to go. We then book the week stay. We let that person know. So we're good to go.

Caroline: Good to go.

Jason: So we pack up from Nazare. It's an hour south. We drive down. We get to the hotel. Did we have lunch somewhere or we just went straight to the hotel?

Caroline: Yeah. We had lunch somewhere.

Jason: We had lunch somewhere. So bellies are full. We're excited. We're going to be staying the Silver Coast longer for another week. This could be our new life. We're figuring this all out. We get to the hotel. We go to check in, extremely friendly people at the check-in desk. And I give her our passports, and she's like, I don't have a booking for you. And I'm like, That's okay. Listen, we're seasoned travelers. Things go wrong. So I'm pulling up my reservation. I'm like, Here it is, Booking.com. And I show it to her, and she's looking. She's like, Yeah, okay. She's like, Let me see it again. She's like, Oh, you booked it for next Friday. And I was like, Wait, what? I'm going to save you the rigamarole of why that happened, why I think that happened, I don't blame myself. I blame Booking.com, which we never use, blah, blah, blah. Anyhoo, so we're asking her. And so it was paid. It was a non-refundable. We always book refundable, but because it was the next day. I'm like, Why would we possibly cancel it?

Caroline: That's what was so funny. We were like, Why would we?

Jason: So basically what she said was, I can't do anything to give you your money back. She's like, We do have a room for you.

Caroline: And so basically, we were going to have to pay double.

Jason: We were just going to have to pay double.

Caroline: We were going to have to pay for the room that we had already booked, non-refundable, then night that... And it was not the same room, but she was so nice about it, and also, we were very not frazzled by it.

Jason: No, yeah, I think we were riding the high of Silver Coast.

Caroline: We were riding the high. We were like, You can't ruin our vibe. Mistakes happen. We've talked about this many times. We saved up a fund before this trip for an "Oh, crap" Airbnb situation thing. So, like, the money part, we were like, we planned ahead for this. It's fine. But she was so kind, and Jason had written that it was my birthday because it was my birthday on Tuesday when he booked it. And so she was like, I think she felt so bad because it was, like, my birthday and everything. And so she was trying to figure out anything that she could do, and so she was like, Okay. She basically was like, Go to the beach and come back. Give me 20 minutes and come back, and we'll have a surprise for you. And I was like, That's so sweet. So we do exactly that. We go, we have a nice little cocktail overlooking the beach. It's a very cute little beach town, little fishing village town. We come back in to, getting ready to check in. We go up to our room. First of all, love the hotel. Very much our vibe. Concrete floors. It's very almost Tulum, Mexico vibes.

Jason: It definitely felt like that.

Caroline: And they have set up, like, rose petals from the front door to this little slab of wood bench with, like, hearts and this whole fruit plate, this cake, a mini cake.

Jason: Little coconut cake.

Caroline: Coconut birthday cake and a bottle of champagne. And it was just the most delightful thing. And I just think that's a lesson in life about, sometimes, if you just remember that people are there doing their job and you don't...

Jason: Yeah, you don't get angry.

Caroline: It's not their fault, you know.

Jason: It would have been so easy just to be upset with them because of something that I did wrong or the website did wrong or whatever, just because you're frustrated in that moment. But it's just like, It's fine. It'll all work out. And she really appreciated that. We really appreciated her. In the end, I didn't even get to see her when we checked out the next day because she worked a different shift, and I was like, Okay, I'm expecting to pay double the room. And the woman, she was like, No, Anna took care of it. She was like, She figured out...

Caroline: She was like, She figured it out.

Jason: Like, What do you mean she figured it out? And she was like, I don't know. She figured it out. So somehow they figured it out, and it was just such an amazing experience. So we can't say enough good things about Well Hotel & Spa.

Caroline: Not sponsored.

Jason: The next time you're in Portugal, scouting out Silver Coast to move to.

Caroline: Go there.

Jason: Please feel free to stay there for at least a night and say hello to Anna. Okay, so the last thing I want to say just to wrap up the pramvel from Portugal is just how you felt at the end of it and then basically making this life decision, or at least thinking we were going to make that life decision.

Caroline: Yeah, I mean, by the end of the week that we...

Jason: The second week, yeah.

Caroline: The second week where it was really like, that was our test drive week. By the end of that week, it was almost like, Yeah, I don't know why we wouldn't do this. And what's funny is we didn't really sit down and have a conversation.

Jason: That's what I wanted you to get to, yeah.

Caroline: In my mind when we started the scouting trip, I thought, This is going to be hard. I'm going to have an experience. And at the end of this experience, we're going to sit down and we're going to do pros and cons, and we're going to weigh it out and we're going to really decide. But something happened while we were there, which was that my whole soul felt so in alignment with this decision that you and I didn't really have a discussion about it.

Jason: And it wasn't even by choice. And I think you actually led the charge more than I did because I was really trying to not push you into anything, not put pressure.

Caroline: You very much left to me. And I was just like, Well, guess we're doing this. So you were like, Okay, don't say anything because maybe it will freak her out.

Jason: Play it cool, play it cool, play it cool.

Caroline: Play it cool, play it cool.

Jason: Look around, look around.

Caroline: And so the best way I can describe it is it felt like a "Hell, yes." And so in many things in life, when you feel that way and you feel drawn to taking the next step in that way, you kind of have this mentality of, I'll figure it out. Whatever the cons are, the pros are so worth it. And so I think that's why we didn't need to have the conversation. I imagined it would be a much harder decision, but the decision became so clear that I just was sort of like, we'll figure out whatever the challenges are that arise. Now, I will say, and maybe we'll talk about this in future episodes. There was sort of a hangover from that because, this past week, not to jump ahead too much, but I was having feelings and I was sort of like, something weird is in the air, like the energy-wise. And whenever you and I are not fully on the same page, I always know, there's some...

Jason: Deeper.

Caroline: There's some deeper feeling that has not been said aloud. And so I'm always like, Wait a second. And sometimes it's you. Sometimes it's like a thing that you're like, I don't think I've been honest about how much I'm taking on or whatever. And a lot of times it's me, and I have to just interrogate my own feelings for a second to be like, Why am I bringing unnecessary attention to these interactions? And what I discovered this past week was, Oh, I think this is the hangover of us not having a full conversation about...

Jason: This small change in our lives.

Caroline: Tiny, minuscule change in our lives. And it was starting to make me feel like all the worries were being held within just me, and I needed to share those and really kind of talk it out. And the second I made that awareness, it was so much easier. The tension was gone. And so that's just also a lesson for life is, in making these big decisions, sometimes it is a "Hell, yes," but set aside that time to really allow yourself to, and sometimes it's not right away, you have to let it process and then communicate whatever your fears are. Because if you don't communicate those things, you can bottle them up inside. And especially if you have a partner who is more risky, that can start to feel like it shows up in tension.

Jason: Yeah. So we're going to talk more about the Portugal move and all the logistics that are going on with it. And I think what we'll do is we'll have the Portu-bel, Por-bel, Por-pramvel, whatever the Portugal part is.

Caroline: Portu-pram.

Jason: Portu-pram. Thank you. This is kind of like a full version of that, but each week we'll be just checking in on some stuff and how we're feeling. But as of right now, percentage of wanting to move to Portugal?

Caroline: Oh, 100%.

Jason: Okay. I'm still at 160%. You've gone down 10%, which is not good.

Caroline: I was at 110%?

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: That feels right.

Jason: Okay.

Caroline: Because now the reality has set it. So I'm still 100%.

Jason: Let's get into the actual episode topic here. And we are talking about social media yet again, which feels like we've done tons of episodes about social media, but I think in looking back, we've actually done like, 4 out of 140. So it's not that many when this is such a large thing that people think about and have to deal with. And I think it's something that we take for granted, as we said in the notes, our ability to not use social media. And so I think we want to talk about that for business specifically.

Caroline: Definitely. So a couple of things in this episode, I want to check in with just us on where we are with our own social media detox. For those of you who are maybe just newer, I made the decision. Jason has done many social media detoxes over the years.

Jason: Since 2014.

Caroline: Yeah. He's been taking time off since 2014. I made the decision at the beginning of this year to really do a complete off Instagram, complete off TikTok, like everything, and not posting and also not consuming. And I did that as like an experiment of let me just do this for 30 days. It was because we had just started our trip. We were in Portugal. It was a lot coming at me, and I just needed to feel like I wasn't in the noise anymore. And a month turned into two months turned into three months, and now it's been nine months since I've even looked at Instagram. Every once in a while, I'm like, What's so and so up to? And I'll go look at their accounts. It's not like I don't have the app or anything like that, but I mean, it is not in my daily routine whatsoever. And so we want to check in on that. How are we feeling about that? And then also, now that Jason and I are very much in this place of, our business runs without social media. We already sort of proved that with our Spring enrollment. I want to talk about, though, I want to make it really clear where we stand as far as I have no desire to tell people that it's as easy as just, Oh, you don't have to be on social media. You can just run your business. Because if you're a new business getting started, I do think that social media is an important tool to use in order to get visibility. And we're going to talk about that. I want to be really clear about that. However, if you're someone who doesn't like the experience of it, if you're someone who thinks it hurts your mental health, if you're someone who doesn't want to be beholden to it in order to run your business, I want to talk about some ways that I do think it's possible to create an off-ramp for yourself of how you don't have to use social media. And you may not be able to quit it right away, but it's sort of like what we have been able to do with our business.

Jason: Yeah. So you want to talk about the personal stuff first?

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: So I think for me, and I've talked about this before, but I get so much of my personal social online interaction from our Wandering Aimfully Slack community.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: So this is really helpful for me because I think if I didn't have that, I would probably have the FOMO feelings quite a bit more from not being on Instagram or Twitter or whatever. But I feel very fortunate that we've built this community of amazing, creative humans who come from all walks of life and share all kinds of interests, some similar, some dissimilar, and I get to have so many interactions with them, and I spend so much time in our WAIM Slack channel. And so that really does it for me. But there are certain people that I have followed for years or been connected to for years on Instagram specifically, or Twitter, and I do miss out on seeing their stuff. And so every once in a while, and I would say it's probably like once every two to three months, I'll be like, Oh, what's that person up to? And then I'll pop over to their account and I'll click on a few things. And then inevitably, as you do when you're in an app, you're like, Oh, I'll check on some other stuff. And then immediately when I start checking on other stuff, I want to get out as fast as possible. Like, I just had this immediate feeling of, I don't want to be here. I don't like the way that this makes me feel, and I don't like that, psychologically, the app is just trying to keep me here doing other things. And what's crazy, too, and we've always talked about this as this weird thing between our two accounts. My account from the beginning has had so many ads on it. I was just looking through an Instagram story the other day because I was looking up, like, a restaurant or something, and I'm trying to click through, and I got three account ads in a row after the story. I'm like, Three different account ads? I'm not even getting any of my own stuff. And for your account, what's so wild is that you have rarely gotten ads?

Caroline: No, no, no, my personal account, I get no ads.

Jason: It's wild.

Caroline: I don't know how it happened. I think I joined Instagram in this weird beta group or something, this cohort where they were like, I've never gotten an ad on my personal Instagram. It's very strange. Keep going.

Jason: Yeah. So I think for me, when I think about not being on social media, especially for now, for me, it's almost two years that I haven't really been on anything. Like, I got back on social media at the very, or Instagram, at the very beginning of this trip, because I was like, Oh, I'll post, like, a story and things. And then I just quickly was like, I don't like doing this. It's not fun. I don't miss Twitter at all. Sometimes I'll get emailed something and someone's like, This is an interesting Twitter thread. And so I'll click it and I'll read it, and I'll be like, Yeah, that was interesting. But then I have no interest because I'll see the breaking news in the right column, and I'll see this other stuff, and I'm like, this just feels awful. I don't want to be here. And so I really don't miss Twitter at all. And honestly, I constantly go back to it, and this is just how I think about it. But it's like Twitter to me is just a constant ego stroke. All it is, is a, "Look at what I'm doing here, here are the things that I'm doing, here are the things you need to know that I'm doing," as opposed to Instagram, which was more like, "Here's a snippet of my life, here's what I'm up to. I'm sharing the mundane, a little bit of things," and I'm less personally offended by the content, I think, of Instagram versus Twitter. Like Twitter I could never see myself going back to ever again.

Caroline: I just had a weird thought and observation.

Jason: Sure.

Caroline: And I'm just going to talk it out here. This is not a well-formed thought at all. But I think it is interesting that you said that Twitter kind of gets under your skin because it's this ego-driven thing. But Instagram is innocuous to you because I feel the reverse where the stuff on Twitter like, yes, it is that. But it doesn't bother me in the way that, because Instagram to me isn't just mundane things. To me it feels very like sort of vanity. Because when you were like, Look at me, I'm like, that is what Instagram is. It's like, Look at me, look at my life. But it's in this more of a visual thing. And so, again, not to share a non-well formed thought and not to overly genderize it. However, I wonder if a lot of times, the currency of the traditionally, the traditional role that being a male has played in our society, my currency is my thoughts and my ego and my success and like, you know what I mean? And then for females traditionally, or for women traditionally, it's the way that I look.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: And so it's very interesting to me that, I don't know if there's something to be said about the way that, and again, not to apply weird gender stereotypes to social media platforms, but it is very fascinating to me that the energy that sometimes comes from Twitter is very much this like sort of testosterone-driven...

Jason: Ego-driven.

Caroline: Ego-driven kind of thing. Whereas sometimes the parts about Instagram that get under my skin are the more trading on looks type of thing. I don't know what there is to that, but it's just something that made me think about when you said that. I have a couple of thoughts about my experience with not being on social.

Jason: Please share my back. Everyone's asking.

Caroline: That I'd like to share. I thought that I, because talking about FOMO and all of that. I don't really have any FOMO when it comes to not being in the know with things. I will say the one thing that I do think about every so often is I have a little bit of this anxiety of like, by not knowing exactly what the world is talking about at any given moment, I'm always a little bit afraid that I'm going to sort of like step into something that I didn't know was going on in the world or say something tone deaf or something like that. That hasn't happened yet. But it's part of not being totally in the current of what's happening is that you have a little bit... You put yourself in a position where you could very easily say something that's kind of like, read the room here, because I don't know what people are saying in the room. So it's hard to read the room when I'm not reading the room, not stepping in the room. But again, that hasn't really happened yet, and I don't think that that's a good enough reason to be in the know all the time. Because if that were to happen, I would apologize and I would just be like, I'm sorry I didn't read the room. And we do our fair share of just checking in on things like the news and everything, but it's just like in these very titrated ways where I can go check in on the news of the day without seeing all the millions of think pieces about it right and the social media stream. And that's how I prefer to consume that. As far as personal connections, I already have a hard enough time in this type of lifestyle keeping up with my 1,001 family members. There's so many of them. I have so many family members. Trying to stay connected and deepen those relationships on an ongoing basis while we're moving in timezones and all these things. That's hard. And then I have my kind of core circle of friends, and I want to keep those relationships tight. So it's like I almost don't have room for those more relationships that I could maybe cultivate in an online way through Instagram and things like that. But I haven't missed those as much as I thought that I might.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: But I will say that what I do miss a little bit and this is just a product of the social media age, I think, is that quite a few of my friends, actually, because we're not sharing anything about our trip. They don't even know what's going on with where we are in the world.

Jason: We talk about this all the time. So for those of you who haven't heard of us talk about this before, we have a daily blog that I'm writing that's just for our family and friends, and we've sent that out to people. Now, this is like an old school blog, basically, where there are no push notifications, there are no updates being posted on Instagram. You, as a person who would want to read this, have to remember where it exists, like, bookmark it.

Caroline: But it's a very easy URL. And all you would have to do every day, every few days, or every week is just like, go to this very easy to remember URL, and you'd be able to find it and be like, Oh.

Jason: But the hilarious part is and it's really like, all of our friends who are our age, they all forget that it exists because...

Caroline: It's not pushed.

Jason: It's not being pushed to them.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: Which is really like, you see this and we all know this but when you create content that is off of all these platforms, you see that everyone's behavior has become, if it doesn't get pushed to me, I don't see it.

Caroline: Exactly, which is exactly why, to kind of bridge the gap into the business part of this discussion. That's exactly why I want to make it so clear that I'm not out here saying just because I've left social media means that you can leave social media and it won't affect your business.

Jason: Right.

Caroline: I don't ever want it to sound like we're saying that because I think that would actually be bad business advice.

Jason: Right.

Caroline: What I want to share in us being able to step away from social media is that, because for so many years we invested in things that were not social media, we have traffic that's already working for us. We have a great email sequence that people love through our quiz that gets people onto our email list. We devote so much time and effort into our newsletter content that keeps people nurtured and in our newsletter ecosystem. We have diversified our content so we have YouTube videos as well. That's another way people can find us. We now have affiliates. We've created such a product that delivers on its core promise that people stick around and then they promote it for us. Anyway, I'm only mentioning all those things to say, we didn't get all of that overnight. We built it methodically in an order, and if you're curious about that order, it's our WAIM Un-boring Business Roadmap, and you have access to it inside of our program, WAIM Unlimited. Little shameless plug.

Jason: Nice, nice.

Caroline: But truly we built that foundation so methodically and so on purpose so that finally we got to the place where there were so many things working in our favor that social media was a small, small portion of it which means that we could off-ramp it.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: We no longer needed it and it did actually affect our sales a little bit.

Jason: Yeah. It's like 10% less sales.

Caroline: Right. So now we will accept having 10% less sales in order for my mental health to be probably 60% to 70% better.

Jason: Yeah. And I think there's so many things that I want to discuss and we have so many things that we have notes on about using social media for business and I think as we transition into this. The most important one that I hope someone takes away from this is just that social media does not have to be this thing that you opt into and that you have to post on forever at a rate and then keep up with all the new technology. I think social media needs to be an accompaniment to a bigger plan of content marketing.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: And it's just a piece of it. I think the thing that we have seen for years and I think is still happening because it's very easy to see the vanity metrics of social media working by getting more subscribers, more followers, getting some likes, getting some comments. And what you don't see when you write a really helpful in-depth article about your niche of whatever it is that you're doing. Like. Let's say you're a designer and you want to do a breakdown of all the new differences of Squarespace 7.1 and whatever. What you don't see is when you post that article, some immediate feedback on it. And you might think to yourself like, Oh, I'm not going to do that again because I'm not getting any vanity metrics from that. The traffic isn't going up. But what you don't understand is that that traffic is going to take a year, maybe longer, to build up. Like, we have this start a business with no money and no ideas article that I wrote five years ago that is just now, right now, hitting the homepage of Google for that search. And it's a really good article for us to attract people, to have them get into our long term, like be on our email list for six months to twelve months, to then see a couple of WAIM launches, and then finally be the place where you've started a business, you've dabbled into it, and now you're ready to learn from us.

Caroline: And this is the long tail strategy thinking that Jason and I always talk about, which is patience. You just have to have patience about it. And we always say, I think it's a proverb that says the best... What's the...?

Jason: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

Caroline: But the next best time is today.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: And so that's the point. It's like all of this SEO and articles take so long for it to gain traction, and you can use that as a deterrent to say, Well, I should have done it five years ago. And it's like, Well, okay, but you can't go back. So five years from now you will appreciate that you took some time to carve out time to start planting those trees today.

Jason: And I think that's the thing. The thing is, you see yourself right now as a business owner who's using Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and you're like, Yeah, I know I need to write these articles and maybe start an email newsletter, but I can just go on Instagram and post something and people can reply to it and see it and whatever. But what you're not seeing is that that's keeping you in a loop where you have to continue to do that. And you're never building the off-ramp, you're never building the plan where you have something else working for you that is attracting an audience that will eventually become customers, that gets you out of that loop. And that's the thing for us that I want so badly for everybody who feels disillusioned with using social media every single day for their business to start planting the trees today.

Caroline: Absolutely.

Jason: Start carving out the time. And I think the reality here is that there's no way you can just write a whole bunch of amazing articles, post all this social media content, and in three months, you leave and change everything and drop everything. But I think there is a conversation to be had about, Where are you in your business and what really matters and when are you trying to reach certain milestones or goals? Because then those decisions become easier of like, You know what? I'm not making any money from Instagram right now. I can't attribute an ROI to it. I know I need to be using it to start building an audience, but maybe I need to take a month or two to really crank out these helpful foundation articles that will bring me organic search traffic in a year or two. I get those done now, then go back to using Instagram or just use it once a week moving forward during that time so that you've planted those trees, and then you can go back and do other things.

Caroline: Totally. And I also, again, the people we're talking to right now are the people who know that being on social media is not where they want to be long term. Like, if you like it, if you enjoy it, that's not who we're talking to. I'm talking to the people who they think that it's the thing that they have to do in order to have a successful business, but you know that it's either you don't like it, either it's exhausting to you, or at best or at worst, it's actively harming your mental health. And that's the camp I was in. And something that I think is important to think about is that I was not satisfied with coming to the conclusion that there was a tactic that I needed to engage in to keep our business, quote, unquote, successful. Let's call it profitable. That would also be harming my mental health. To me, that is a cost too high. It's not worth it. I have to find a different way. And that's how drastically I have to think about it, because that's how drastically this insidious effect that social media has on my brain particularly affects me. And when I tell you that I'm in so much more of a peaceful place, I'm in so much more of a self-confident place I'm in so much more of a self-assured place than I was in January, because I just have made the self-discipline to not be on it and made the decision that I'm willing to take 10% less sales.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: And so I just want to say that because I don't think that especially again, I'm speaking to those of you who know that it's harmful. Maybe you just think it's something you have to do, but I want you to question that.

Jason: Yeah. And I think the other part of this conversation, just to be really clear about how we generate traffic and how we turn that traffic into customers of our program. So we've written these articles for years that are on our website that have a good amount of SEO paid attention to. And you can read everything that I've learned about SEO, which I poured in all these articles at wanderingaimfully.com/seo. Also, that article written about four years ago, is, I think, on the second page of like, learning about SEO, which is incredible because that's a nut to crack. That's very difficult. Getting an SEO article to trend for SEO, very meta. But anyway, we have these articles. People are finding them by searching terms in Google, which we all know is not going to go away for a very long time. They're getting to our website. We have a very clear call to action of, Hey, are you an online business owner? Are you currently stuck? Take our free quiz. That quiz helps people self-identify into a certain category of something that they're missing in their business or that they just want to improve. We then send them three helpful emails based on their choice, and then they're on our email list. Now, along with that, we also have our YouTube channel, which has videos that have business videos and also travel videos, but all have links to get back to our site.

Caroline: And we view YouTube very much as like a test drive our personality to see if you like learning from us.

Jason: We have this podcast, which is, to me, not a big growth opportunity because you're not going to have new people finding a podcast that much these days. But we will have people finding our podcast because they heard about us and then listening and going, Okay, I want to learn more. So then they'll go to our website and then I think the other way that we really attract people is through our existing customer base. And this is through, you mentioned, affiliates. So I wanted to share all of that so that you can hear how we're attracting people. And also, I think on average these days, Wandering Aimfully, as a site, get about 500 unique visitors a day. So 15,000 unique visitors coming to our website a month. That's not an astounding amount of traffic these days. In fact, our traffic has gone down in the past four years since starting Wandering Aimfully. But the point is that we have the right traffic. What I really want to hit home here is that I hope that you listening to this now. If you are disillusioned with social media and you don't want to be on this hamster wheel, you're putting a plan in place now that a couple of years from now, and that may be what it takes, you see an exit strategy to not have to be posting on Instagram, let's just say, or jumping onto the new thing like TikTok and pouring all your time and energy. And instead it's a balance. It's a, I'm spending 80% of my time outside of social building up content, building up other things, building relationships, helping my customers, building some type of like affiliate marketing or just referral marketing engine. Then social media on top of it is just like, I'm staying in tune and I'm catching people who are here, but I'm not looking at it as my main place for attracting attention.

Caroline: Totally. And if you love it, great, go all in on it. But it's really about putting your energy where you know that you're going to spend your time. I see these people who, I can tell, just don't want to be on social, but they are showing up because they have to, and it comes through in the content. But going back to what you said about all the things that we have in place, that's how I would approach this. If I was a new business owner and I was like, Well, how am I supposed to do all of this without social? I would say, You don't have to do it all without social. But what I would do is start to... I would reverse engineer, how much money do I want to make? What's my offer price?

Jason: "How much money do I want to make?" is really important because you can't just go, "I want to make $100,000 a year."

Caroline: Of course, of course. And we talk about this all the time, which is enough goals, realistic, enough goals. But let's assume that you have a goal that is realistic and that is not just arbitrary. This is how much money... Especially think of it as like a tiered view, too.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: Right. So what's the most realistic, like, let's say something that you feel like you could realistically achieve in the next six months to a year. What's that monthly number? How many customers at the price of your offer is it going to take to get that on a monthly basis? Great. Let's take that number. Now let's reverse engineer from that number. That's going to be your number of sales. How many people do I need to have on my email list? Nurturing with newsletter content, regular content, or viewing my YouTube views or my YouTube videos or whatever your main sort of acquisition channel is, nurturing channel is. How many people need to be added to that list on a monthly basis? You're going to probably multiply that sales number by ten because that's a 10% conversion rate, maybe even more then you get that number. And so now you start to actually see the numbers and you go, Okay, that's how many people realistically, I need to get coming to my website, getting onto my newsletter. How am I going to do that? And so you can think about your articles and you can think about using social media as a compliment to all of those marketing channels, and you can actually start to develop a clear exit strategy because once you have that machine kind of going and the numbers are working for you and social media is just the cherry on top, you could take that cherry on top any day... You could take that cherry on top off of your cake any day of the week and your business would still function and you'd still be making the money that you want to make.

Jason: And I hope another big takeaway from this for those of you who might feel like you're, like, stuck using social media for your business right now, is at the very least, it doesn't have to be a call-to-action in every post that you put up or every story you create or every reel that you work on or whatever. But there is something that you're always trying to get someone to do outside of that app.

Caroline: Correct.

Jason: So it's like, that's the thing I think so many people fall into the trap of is, I'm creating content for Instagram to keep people in Instagram. Well, guess what's going to happen forever and always in your life then? You are going to create content that keeps people attached to your account in the app. You have to get them out of the app because if they're always stuck in the app, guess what? You're always stuck in the app. And so I think that's a huge part of this too, is just like switching that mind frame of, Oh, I'm using social media for business. I want to grow business. I want to make money. I want to build a customer base. I want to deliver value. I'm not going to do that within Instagram all the time. And I think we're going to do another episode upcoming here, I think, in a few weeks. If we were to start a business right now, what would we do? And so I think that'll be a good complimentary episode to this to actually tell you through, we would create a strategy. Here's exactly how we would think about it. Here's how much we would use social media, how we would use it, and break that down. Now, granted, that's all theory. Like, we're not going to actually build a business and do it because we don't have the time or energy and we don't need to. But I think it's really helpful for you to maybe hear how we would approach that and the actual steps and the mindset that we would get in just to not be stuck in these loops. Like, I want people to not feel like, Oh, I have to log into this thing every day and I got to make a new post every day, and I got to check what's trending and use that audio and do these different things.

Caroline: Absolutely.

Jason: So those are our thoughts on social. Hopefully, they're not...

Caroline: Are we going to go back?

Jason: Go back where?

Caroline: To social.

Jason: Uh, no.

Caroline: Yeah. As of right now, I don't feel the need to go back to... Maybe I'll feel differently when we're stationary and I'm creating art again and things like that. I don't know. I will say one thing I have, because of all the reasons that we talked about with just my friends and family, like not checking the blog. I think I'm toying with the idea of creating a private account just for my family to be able to keep up with us as we move to Portugal so they can get sort of a visual window into that experience that gets pushed to them where they are. And that again, though, is just serving like a personal connection need, not a business need.

Jason: Yeah, I think I would like to at some point, and maybe it's towards the end of this year when we get settled and we're not traveling all the time, is to create the nine-post, kind of like goodbye grid on our channels, specifically on Wandering Aimfully, like a nine-post grid that's...

Caroline: Here's why we're not here.

Jason: Exactly. And here's how to check out our quiz. Here's our five-step checklist article that is really helpful for you. Here's our content strategy so you can see why we're not using social. Here's our podcast, here's our YouTube. Do that kind of, here's our nine-post grid and just leave all the other posts. We don't have to do the full delete and that's all that's there.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: But I think for my personal I kind of want to do the same thing, which is like maybe a couple of different highlights from the year or something. See, but even saying that, I don't care about it for my personal account at all.

Caroline: Yes. Then don't do it.

Jason: For the business account, it makes sense because it's a strategic thing.

Caroline: Absolutely.

Jason: For my personal account I'm like, but what's the point?

Caroline: But why? What is it all for, Jason?

Jason: It's going to be nine photos of me eating cinnamon rolls, which I actually think now would be fun to do.

Caroline: (laughing) You've come back around.

Jason: Okay, that's what I'm going to do.

Caroline: Okay, great.

Jason: So look forward to that on my Instagram account at some point by the end of the year. Yeah, those are our thoughts. We'll see how it all comes together. We'll keep sharing a social media update here and there. If you have found some incredible way that you have loved using social media for your business, feel free to share it with us, especially if it's a resource that we could then reshare. I'd love to put some of those in the show notes or maybe talk about them on future episodes because I know some folks are doing well with social media, but for the most part just for us, it just didn't feel right.

Caroline: Absolutely. There's no doubt it's a great opportunity. It's all about what we talk about in business, which is there's no one size fits all. And especially for people who want to run businesses that are aligned with their values and the things they like doing and the way that they want to spend their days, I just think it's helpful to let people know there is another way. There is another option.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: That's it.

Jason: Okay, that wraps things up from here. We'll talk to you next week. Okay.

Caroline: Thanks for listening.

Jason: Bye.

Caroline: Buh-bye.