CwL Ep 143 When it’s time for a change – The Idea (Part One)

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life, and if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you are here. Enjoy. I can’t remember what year it was. I think it was around 2016 and I was sitting on my couch

In our house in Brisbane and all the kids were asleep and I had my laptop open and my husband was probably off writing music downstairs, and I just had this flash of the name of something came to my mind at this stage of my life. I didn’t realise that I was entrepreneurial, that I could create ideas and then make things happen off the back of them. And the words that came into my mind were the grass is greener. And I saw it and I ran to Nick and I said, I think I know what we should do. And he’s like, okay.

And I said, I think we should pitch a documentary to Netflix about a couple with three kids who travel to places around the world where we assume the grass is greener and we actually live there for a bit and talk to locals and find out what they’re worried about for their kids, what life looks like. Is the grass greener living a self-sufficient lifestyle on a farm, or is it the grass greener in Scandinavia? And we would do this thing and we would call it the grass is greener and it’s such a good idea, isn’t it? And he goes, well, that’s a brilliant idea. I love that idea. And I felt in my body that this was our next thing. He was feeling pretty dissatisfied with corporate life.

He wasn’t super well in himself. We were both sort of thinking, what kind of life do we want for our children? What life do we want for us? Neither of us have been, we’re attracted to the standard, kind of have buy house, have kids settle somewhere. I’ve never felt myself kind of drawn to that idea and neither was he and I figure, wow, let’s actually just make a documentary about this. I can remember writing out a sort of proposal thing and then as happens to me, life was kind of continuing and I had three very little children in my own business to run, and the idea sort of fell off the bandwagon. It just fell away. We entered some pretty intense time. I mean, obviously Nick was not okay and he was struggling with addiction that I wasn’t fully aware of at that time, and we didn’t make our documentary.

The Grass is Greener, but it was a theme for us. He had a blog called Rat Race Philosophy. Back then he was studying philosophy as well as being an aerospace engineer by day and as you do, and he had this blog called Rat Race Philosophy, and the logo for this blog was an image of a rat in a car sticking its finger up and leaning out of the window with a cigarette sort of hanging out of its mouth, just angry, angry at commuting, angry at the rat race, this life this rat had found himself in. And we talked about this stuff all the time. What are we doing? Why this way when there’s loads of different ways to live and adventure and travel was always a really, really big part of our lives. He had worked for Qantas for 10 years, so we had staff travel benefits the best and went to all sorts of different places.

But my life since then has gotten smaller and smaller in terms of where I’ve been and what feels possible because hello Covid like everyone experienced that we were all unable to move in ways that we were used to moving. I without a doubt have found travel, particularly solo travel as the fast track to back to myself when I really have felt unscented or unmotivated, untethered, just not great. I would take myself away and it would ground me again and lift me. It was plugging myself into an electric socket and I needed it and I can’t have it right now, and I struggle with that. So if you listen to the episodes about the making of Harvest, you’ll know that the start of 2023 has been a little bit eventful and I’ve been asking myself much bigger questions.

I have a sense of being in some sort of transition, messy middle, but I actually feel like messy middle is life now, and that when you are in those spaces, you still have choices. To be honest, I’ve found that it really, really hard to get motivated and to get into consistent momentum this year. If I sat down to count them, I reckon I’ve had about, I reckon I’ve had over 20 ideas for new paths to go down with work, new avenues, some totally amazing, and I just couldn’t press go on things. I lost steam, I lost trust in myself. I’m finding it really, really hard to figure out the balance between parenting these three kids especially. I’ve just found it quite extraordinary the ways in which my son who started year seven is needing me and balancing that with work, and I’m a proponent for flexibility. I run my own show, so I have so many options for creating this in a way that works for me, but I can’t get it. I can’t access, I don’t even know what the word is for it, the secret spark that I need for everything else in my life to work well, and it’s a frustrating place to be and I feel like I’ve been here for a while, and so I just started to think outside the square about what I need conscious to desiring some sort of change, but not sure how to make that happen. And so I started to think about what truly makes me feel lit up.

I was having conversations with friends about the education that our kids are getting right now and whether that’s actually setting them up for the life that they’re going to enter. I think about the work that I do and that it’s not just me. I know it’s not just me feeling a bit strange. I mean we’re all in some form of changing times. It feels like the world’s in the messy middle. It’s like we could see that something like we had realisations through the covid years. We all kind of went, whoa, and we questioned things. You can’t go through something like that. And I know that some people felt it more than others, and I always feel like I have to reference that I’m from Melbourne, just because we seem to have the longest and harshest lockdowns anywhere in the world. It was messed up and I know it was messed up for lots of different people, but I think all of us had an experience of it.

Whether you’ve gone back to normal life and you’ve bounced and recovered and your kids are perfectly fine and there’s no issues whatsoever, amazing, but you still had it, still lived through it or whether you are like, yep, something’s off. I promised myself I wouldn’t be here or I can’t not know how good it felt to not be racing around all the time. My body now knows that, and so something fills off. I mean, we are seeing all sorts of things happen. People pushing for four day work weeks in their workplaces and increased flexibility in terms of working from home and working in an office. People are shifting careers, people are ending marriages, people are moving, people are taking some big leaps, and I felt like I had come to this point where I needed to make a bit of a big, big leap too, and what was calling me made no sense.

 What was calling me and knocking on the door for me was like, what? There’s no way. I couldn’t possibly, and in the next episode I’ll share exactly the reasons why I was telling myself what I’m planning isn’t possible wasn’t possible for me. But there are a few things that

Culminated to have me go now is the time when it’s time for a change and it’s not the one that’s kind of given to you. We all know what that feels like. We know what it feels like to be like, shit, I didn’t expect this. God, now I have to cope. There’s that kind of change. There’s a diagnosis, there’s a redundancy, there’s a death, and life is different and we adapt. Humans are amazing. Then there’s change that, well, it’s change that we have to create for ourselves, and it’s things like habit changes. I don’t want to do this anymore. This isn’t working for me, or I want to start doing this. I want to create a change and I want to create a shift. I want to evolve this aspect of my life and change things up.

And then there’s those big, hairy, scary, oh God, this requires a leap of faith. Can I even do it? Is this even possible for me? This only happens to other people, but I desperately need to move towards this thing. Then there’s that kind of change, and that is what I know I have needed. I am pretty damn good at the small changes I am. I literally teach it. You can go and enter the change room and I will walk you step by step through upgrading your life, taking small steps. I will help you make those changes. It will happen, not in a way you expect and it’s not follow this plan. It’s not that at all. I know what it takes to create those small shifts that can have huge ripple effects, and I actually spent a lot of last year doing that. I live a wonderfully beautiful life. I love our home routine, even though it can be fucking monotonous with these kids. I love where we live. I feel fit and well after a bit of a major blip this year. There’s so much, so much. I’m grateful for so much that’s working well,

And I just knew that I needed to create a major shift and when it’s time for one of those changes, it’s so scary and I did exactly what I teach not to do. I felt stuck even although I wasn’t stuck, and I am so interested in giving my kids a sense that life is more than the bubble that they live in. I believe the best education is life and living. I can see that the education that they’re going to get, I mean, it’s definitely not perfect. You do not have to be, I don’t think there’s anyone who isn’t kind of questioning an education system that is old school and is not adapting even. Although the school that my kids, well, my son is at and my girls will most likely go to is, I mean one Australian School of the year, I think last year or the year before. It’s progressive and it’s a phenomenal school if in so many different reasons, but I had this call that we should go, that we need to go somewhere that we need a big time change of scenery and it needs to be long enough to leave an impact. I’m not talking about two weeks in Fiji here even, although that’s probably more logical.

I want them as they enter high school and enter the teen years to have a confidence in themselves that I don’t think, well, I don’t know how to create it for them, but I want to give them an adventure that they part own. They’re part owners in the adventure they are. They will see different things and see themselves in different contexts. I want to really shake it up for them. They are so into routine and life is not predictable. Life is uncertainty, and they try to control a lot of things for themselves because life was so unpredictable that their dad died when he went on holidays and they don’t like when I’m not around and that’s all okay. It’s all okay. It’s can feel suffocating, but it’s okay. And I just felt like no high school’s only going to get more intense. You, my son’s in year seven this year if I want to do this thing that is calling me, the time is now, but it seems so ridiculous. I wanted to take the kids away for six months and travel and school and have an adventure. Who even does that? Who is that possible for? Turns out, maybe me, I have a business that I run totally online. I don’t actually have to be here,

And I think that this might be the answer. I think that this is what I need to do. I need want to go and talk to people who live in different countries. I want to find out how they’re doing life with their kids. What does it look like over here? I want to go visit people who I miss, people I used to live with or know when I was overseas. I want us to shake shit up and this is the time, but there was so many reasons why I shouldn’t so many, and in the next episode, I’m going to tell you exactly the stories and some of the truth that I was telling myself about. Why not this not now and the edges that I have had to bump up against with myself to get me to the point where we are leaving, we are growing. It won’t be for the full six months because an amazing work opportunity has presented itself for me that I need to be back for and at this stage of where things are at, the plans are still pretty loose, but I have a leaving date and a comeback date

And I have no idea how I’m going to get us ready in one month because it’s just been the last few days that the final pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place and the calling that I really could very easily talk myself out of and did for a while. It’s being answered. Holy shit. We’re going on an adventure.

In the next episode, I’m going to break down the exact process that I use with myself and I teach in the change method. In fact, the last and final round of that for this year that I’m teaching live is happening in June this month. So if you have been wanting to create your own change for yourself and step into something more, then I really encourage you to go to lisacorduff.com/tcm that is, and get a seat in that training. It will. I mean, it’s the reason why I got myself to the point where I’m going. I’ll see you in the next episode.

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