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31. How to Take the Business Sabbatical You *Need* with Molly Mahar
12 Plays6 months ago
“My business follows my life, not the other way around.” #preach
We're joined by Molly Mahar, the visionary behind Stratejoy, a community empowering women to cultivate authentic, joyful relationships with themselves.
Hear about her inspiring journey planning—and actually pulling off—a year traveling abroad with her husband and two young kids. She did it without working, without earning, and without having a full-blow meltdown. (PRAISING HER!)
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Take a transformative sabbatical from entrepreneurship.
- Craft a business around your dream life—now, not later.
- Overcome scarcity mindset through intentional financial planning.
- Put big dreams into action, even if you have kids.
- Return to your business in a healthy and refreshed way.
For more inspiration, subscribe to Unbound Turnarounds on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
LINKS:
- Connect with Nicole
- Connect with Mallory
- Connect with Molly: https://stratejoy.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Unbound Turnarounds
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Unbound Turnarounds, a podcast all about the challenges women business owners think about constantly, but rarely voice. We're Nicole and Mallory, entrepreneurs, friends, and co-founders of Business Unbound. Our mission is simple, make business feel better. And that starts with honest conversations about the ups, downs, and turnarounds of entrepreneurship.
Time Management with Molly Mehar
00:00:26
Speaker
So whether you're just starting out or you've been your own boss for years, tune in for stories, insights, and strategies that actually make work work for life.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome back to Unbound Turnarounds. So we are here with another guest in season three, which is all about time management. So one thing to just think about is like time is our best friend and our worst enemy sometimes, and we're trying to walk that fine line. So today's guest is going to share a little bit more about both ends of that spectrum.
00:00:59
Speaker
So Mallory, who do we have with us today? Okay, so today I'm super stoked to be welcoming Molly Mehar. She's the founder of StrataJoy, a community helping women reclaim intimate, honest, and joyful relationships with themselves for the good of all. She is an entrepreneur, a mama, a writer, and an adventurer. She's obsessed with designing personal experiments that scare you, telling the truth, and her new teardrop trailer.
00:01:27
Speaker
Molly is eagerly awaiting the arrival of nectarine and burrata season. She loves mixtapes. Those are also known as playlists for our younger listeners. And she adores using exclamation marks, but she does try to use them, try to use them sparingly. You can learn more about her at StrataJoy.com. It is linked in our show notes. Now, I've personally been doing Molly's yearly holiday council program that happens every November, December.
00:01:54
Speaker
for six years, so this will be my seventh year. And I've also done two of her old offerings, a 10-month coaching program called Reclamation and her previous women's summer camp, which was one of my favorite things. And I've learned a ton from her about living intentionally and a ton about myself through her guidance.
00:02:13
Speaker
So I am a huge fan of Molly of StrataJoy and her coaching style.
Molly's Sabbatical Dream
00:02:18
Speaker
But today, Molly's actually going to talk to us about something that is a dream for many entrepreneurs. And that is how she took a sabbatical from her entrepreneurial career. So Molly, I am so grateful for all of the insights through the years. But I am also thrilled that you are here with us today. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for having me. I am excited. This is actually the first podcast where I am talking about the sabbatical.
00:02:41
Speaker
There's a few coming down the pipeline potentially, but this is number one. So you are getting it in all it's like raw glory. Perfect. So I mean, let's, let's start with all the raw stuff, right? So I want to know what it looked like in that season of life and work when you started dreaming that little dream about taking some time off. What, what was going on? Yeah. Okay. I tried to make a little timeline just to help myself because
00:03:09
Speaker
This was obviously not something that I took lightly, that my family took lightly and it required tons of planning. But the actual seed of the dream started back in 2009. So we're going to rewind like way back when I was taking myself through one of my courses called the joy equation. And at one point you're making these really like kind of long-term goals for your life.
00:03:33
Speaker
Now, 2009, I am not married. I do not have children. My life was in a completely different season. Strata Joy had just started. But one of the things that I wrote on these dreams for my life was to live abroad with my family for a year, my imaginary family that I did
Pandemic's Impact on Molly's Dreams
00:03:51
Speaker
not have. It was dating Ken that was on the docket that was happening. But I wrote that down, and I have the written proof of it.
00:04:00
Speaker
Then we moved twice, started a business, lost a business, started another business. You know, life had two kids. There was lots of, lots of lifing going on. So roll all the way forward to the pandemic. And I'm not going to blame it on the pandemic, but I don't know if my level of unrest would have been escalated so quickly without that.
00:04:26
Speaker
So I had imagined this year of, I was going to, I was actually, 2020 was going to be the year I worked at another life goal, which was to write a book based on reclamation about the program that Mallory said. And I was like, okay, I love solo trips. I love adventuring. I live within two hours of Big Sur, of Esalen. I'm like, I'm going to take myself on like a writing retreat every quarter.
00:04:47
Speaker
for three or four nights in Esalen and I'm gonna create this book with the waves crashing below me and I'm like naked in the bathtub and the bread bar is open, right? Like this is very beautiful imaginary scenario and my daughter was gonna start full-time kindergarten and like all these things were gonna happen that year.
00:05:08
Speaker
I think we went to Esalen like March 12th and school shut down March 16th or something. Yeah, I was going to say that was pretty close. Yeah. Okay. So then anyone who is, you know, trying to manage online school and working and my husband started working out of the garage and my mom luckily became part of our bubble and helped
00:05:36
Speaker
with online school from 10 to two, so I could work, and could work. So everything was going to plan? Everything was going to plan. In summary, everything was exactly as you expected. Exactly as I imagined. Actually, my work was really fulfilling during that time I worked online. Nothing I was doing had to change. People needed it. So I was really busy in that sense. I think I looked this up. The first time we made a Google document called The Plan was September of 2020.
00:06:06
Speaker
So, you know, we had been in there for a good six months, living there. Okay, that's a perfect segue. So everybody was living the shared experience of our lives being in upheaval. Okay, we all can put ourselves right back in there like very instantly. But what was the dream? What was the goal? What was the plan from the beginning? Yep, I just said, oh my gosh. I mean, I don't know how long this is gonna go on, but is what we're doing
00:06:35
Speaker
sustainable. And truly, the beginning of it was more Ken than I. He owned a marketing agency. He'd been doing email marketing for about 20 years. All of a sudden, we're stuck in our house. He's literally working in the garage surrounded by crap, basically. And I think he was the one who first hit the like, I don't think I can do this much longer. And I'm always up for an adventure. I'm like, oh, what do you mean by that?
00:07:03
Speaker
I've got some more years than me, but like, what do you actually mean by that? And my husband is older than I am by 13 years. So, I think it was first sparked by him going, I want to know when to work in the garage for 10 hours a day, any longer. Cause his business was actually really busy too. And then that started the conversation of like, okay, what's not working? What would you want to do? What does it look like if you're not doing
00:07:30
Speaker
your marketing business. And at some point we trotted out this, remember when we wanted to go travel for a year with the kids? Cause we had done that for a year previously to getting married soon. So in 2008, we had backpacked around the world for 11 months. And so we had that experience together and it was something that we're like, well,
00:07:53
Speaker
Let's, I want to do a version of that with the kids. So that's where we started plotting and going, okay. I, this is what I really, what I remember, what I remember thinking is like, nothing is certain anymore. For me, that's what the pandemic like, well, and Trump
Planning and Sacrifices for Travel
00:08:06
Speaker
getting elected in 2016. Those are like the two combinations of like, nothing is certain. I know nothing about the world. Everything I thought to be true is wrong.
00:08:15
Speaker
So I might as well do what I want to do. I mean, that's kind of my whole attitude through Strata Joy, but like, what do you dream about? What are your true desires? And then I'm very practical, which is a funny thing I'm not sure people would say from the outside if they look at my life, because it looks like it's a series of wild adventures. But those have happened because I can plan them down to the level of logistics.
00:08:42
Speaker
I can take Ken's really good at like the big picture and then I'm like, okay, you want to travel abroad for the year and you don't want to be working and I don't want to be working? It's going to require some planning on the financials, on the like, how can we take the resources we have and use them towards that goal? So that's where like the plotting started in September. And then the other like little piece of the plan that got thrown in was starting in October that year.
00:09:11
Speaker
my friends who lives here in my hometown of Helena, Montana told me a couple of our high school friends had been buying houses in Helena that it was like a good time. And I was like, okay, so we turned 40 and now we buy a house in our hometown.
00:09:26
Speaker
All right, I've opened to this idea. And I said, well, you know, Mayor, it's gonna have to be something really specific, like a really interesting property that we're getting a deal on, because Ken is a deal, he only wants it to be a deal, that's probably gonna require work. So keep your eyes open, but no promises. A few weeks later, she sends me this drop box of this Swedish church built in 1890 that's also just two blocks away from the middle school and the high school.
00:09:54
Speaker
She's like, I know the people who own this and I think they're ready to get rid of it. What do you think? And I'm like, yes, oh yes, this is exactly, it's got like a stage and 26 foot ceilings. I mean, it's a ridiculous project. So we close on the church, site and scene. We bought the house. Yeah, site and scene at the end of 2020, like December or something. Okay, so that was kind of the final piece of like changes a foot.
00:10:21
Speaker
How are we gonna put it all together? And we were like, again, we're like, all right.
00:10:26
Speaker
We want to do this. I wanted to do it before my kids got that much older because I figured I wanted them to both be able to carry their own backpacks, like literally carry their own backpacks, and also be young enough that they love hanging out with us. And they would find it fun and not like a disruption from the social lives and social bonds that they need to form as developing children. I'm not going to be one of those parents who is in a full-time travel scenario. I don't want to do that.
00:10:56
Speaker
Because how old were they when you guys left or when you went? Yeah, they were 8 and 10 when we were traveling. So this was like two years before. So they were, yeah, 8 and 6 when we were starting to plan this. So I'm like, OK, I think that's good. And then there's all these calculations. OK, so what happened to go further was a couple of folds. And this is way back in that first spreadsheet. Ken was like, I'm going to sell my business. The only way that I'd be able to travel without working is if I sell my small business.
00:11:26
Speaker
I said, okay, I'm like, well, I'm not gonna sell my business because I don't think it's not sellable. At this point, it wasn't sellable. At that point, I was like, all right, I'm gonna start saving now. My business is doing really well right now, but what can I cut off? What can I pull back on in order to actually save some like large chunks of money? And so I went from having a team of help to pretty much me and my tech goddess.
00:11:52
Speaker
No offense, but I was on a good rhythm. I knew how to do things. I said, I'm going to take all that money I've been paying to free up my time and trade it. I'm going to say, I'll give StrataJoy more time so that I can put more money in the bank for this.
00:12:07
Speaker
And so this is interesting too, because what you're basically saying is if time is the main goal, like you wanted time back and you want a year, you then had to do the exact opposite and put in even more time in your business to get that done, right? Because you're, yeah, like you're backing into what needs to happen for this dream to be a reality. So was that hard to mentally shift to like, okay, all I want is time off. So what I'm going to do is spend more time on this.
00:12:36
Speaker
I don't think I was thinking about it at that point as time off because it wasn't necessarily my business that I was unhappy. It wasn't my business. My business was thriving. One of the things I love about the work that I do, which at this point has gone through four different cities. It's moved with me from a 27-year-old to now a 43-year-old. It can follow my life. I don't put a lot of boundaries between my life and my business, which I think
00:13:07
Speaker
you know, everyone will have mixed feelings about that, but that's the way that works for me. So for me, it has always very much been entwined. And so yeah, I'm gonna have to get more to my business now, which was a great place to do that because I'm preparing to not work for, turned out to be close to a year and a half fully, two years-ish.
00:13:26
Speaker
And then we had this resource of homes. We had this darling little home that we had finished in California in Pismo Beach. And we had a hard to come by rental pass. I don't know what they're called. Like we were one of the few houses that could be an Airbnb. Now you have to be living in your house full time. So there was lots of these little, you know, one of the things I just have to say is so much of this was just,
00:13:52
Speaker
It was planning, but it was also luck. It was just luck. I imagined it to be this one way and it actually worked. There could have been so many things that didn't. One of our parents could have got really, really sick. Our house could have not rented out. Ken could not have sold his business. But we made this plan and then there was two years of
00:14:19
Speaker
Okay, we're not gonna have enough money to do this unless we leave California. So we have a tiny little cabin up in Washington state where Ken grew up.
00:14:27
Speaker
in a town of 150 people in the middle of nowhere, like the rainforest. I did not want to do this. All of the early plans say, move to Washington, but live in Seattle, which is where we had been before California. Like, put your kids in the fridge. Please don't live in this cabin. Yeah, I know. There was no, let's go live in the cabin for nine months through the winter. Yeah, spoiler alert. That is what she did. She lived in the cabin, folks.
00:14:51
Speaker
Oh, that's not the dream. Yes, yes. Right? So there was that, and this again, Ken, Ken love this, but he's much, he's less social than I am. He, those were the nine months when he worked his ass off to get the business sold. And it required, I mean, he was crammed in our little tiny bedroom for more longer work days than he had been working for a while to make this happen.
00:15:12
Speaker
So we moved our kids, we put them in this like two room school house, which was not a great scenario. I said, well, we're gonna be leaving at some point during this year. So this was, I mean, this wasn't till 2022. So yeah, started in 2020, we moved to Washington.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, December of 2021, right before holiday council, and then lived in our cabin so that we could rent out our house in California, again, to secure funds. Save money. Yep, or this thing, the kids.
00:15:47
Speaker
took them out of their school and their friends and the only home they had ever known, but they're pretty resilient. We did this, we cabined for the winter and it was the first winter my kids had ever experienced. Luckily we got lots of snow and lots of rain and just baked bread and hot tubbed. And I did a three month program instead of my 10 month program. So normally I would be launching a 10 month program.
00:16:11
Speaker
And I said, well, we're going to be leaving in August for our travels, so I can't do a year-long program. Let's shorten it. I needed to pull summer camp off before we left, the one that had been canceled three times because of COVID. And it was just lots of, like, backwards planning of if we are leaving on August 3rd. It turned out to be of 2022.
00:16:37
Speaker
you know, what needs to happen before it. And the very last thing that happened was Ken's business sold on July 4th. So a month before we were taken off. Yeah. And he was out. Like it was, it was done. It was over. He handed off staff and systems and clients and you know, that money needed to be, that money wasn't the money that we used to travel. That money was for him reestablishing.
00:17:00
Speaker
his life now basically, but the sale of his business bought him time and no clients and no calls, no work. And so it would have been a very different scenario had that not happened. But again, we'd been working on it for two and a half years.
00:17:19
Speaker
So then what all happened after it before? Cause then there were other things happen. And then when did you actually go? And you said you, you August 3rd, and then where did you go? What did you guys do after that? Are we to that point or did we skip anything? No, I mean, there's, you know, lots of little things, but no, we made it. We packed up our little backpacks.
00:17:38
Speaker
And again, you know, I'm having lots of freakouts, of course, along the way.
Financial Fears and Overcoming Them
00:17:42
Speaker
I remember being at camp when we were like releasing something, like I was having very acute money fears, abundance fears, like for someone who had done so much work on scarcity versus abundance mindset. And then to, I mean, once that three month program ended, I had no money coming in. And that hadn't happened to me in seven years. I mean, where there was literally no Stripe emails populating my folder.
00:18:07
Speaker
That was very uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. And I knew, I mean logically I knew like we're okay. We have reduced our cost of living to as bare as it could possibly be. I had already booked the first four months of travel, paid for the Airbnb, paid for the rental car, paid for the sailboat. Like it wasn't a logical freak out, but I remember at camp dancing with that feeling of I am not okay. Like I am not okay. I am not providing for myself.
00:18:35
Speaker
Well, so so I'm curious about this specifically because I think this is what holds a lot of people back from taking time and For me to write so big-time safety officer over here Who thinks she needs? I don't know to pay for her entire life right now at 41. I'm not sure like you said, it's not logical but I worry about
00:19:01
Speaker
tainting time off with the worries of money, right? So I'm wondering how you like had this big dream. Like I can get that far. I could do the big dream. I could back into the logistics. No problem. Got it. I could probably go. But then how were you preparing to be like, okay, I don't want to ruin this with my own brain.
00:19:25
Speaker
constantly worry about, like this is my chance to live this dream for a year. So how did you mentally come to terms with that to say, you know what, I need to make a shift here? I mean, there was many things I did, but on that specific fear, I remember we call it swamping, like dancing with it basically and like yelling and stomping about. I said, this is what I'm going to work on. I just want to release it. And there was some magic that happened at camp because I really did come out of it feeling
00:19:52
Speaker
purged is maybe the word and I think because it wasn't my first rodeo like I had been with this fear it and I have danced several times together and so I knew it was it was made up it was it was scarcity coming after me of like you'll never be able to make that kind of money again or blah blah blah blah blah but I had to keep calming myself down like the facts that were in front of me which was
00:20:18
Speaker
I mean, like truly, you know, whatever the personal finance people say, like figure out your nuts, like what you, what you need to pay. And like, this is how much our traveling health insurance is. Here's what all the mortgages look like. Here's how the rents are covering those mortgages. Here's how our savings are parsed out on a monthly budget. Again, I traveled like this before, obviously not with children. So this was slightly different, but because I had planned this first four months of the trip in advance,
00:20:42
Speaker
There was no part of me that could say, you are not ready. Like you don't have the money. No, I actually had the money. Okay. So once you, so you kind of, you went like full black and white mode. Like I'm going to, when I feel this way, like I'm going to open that spreadsheet and be like, girl, you're covered. It's okay. Yeah. Look at that. You're okay. This is covered. The Airbnb payments has happened. You've got a place to go. It's,
00:21:07
Speaker
There was a couple of times when we almost crashed the sailboat and I was like, Ken, do we pay for the extra insurance? Because I think we're going to die and we're going to ruin these people's boats that we were renting for a month. Should we get a supplemental policy, Ken? Ken. There was slight moments, but in general, one of the things I think people forget about traveling like that is you don't have, in my opinion,
00:21:36
Speaker
nearly as many costs of living. The kids are doing no activities. We're not buying clothes and massages and gym memberships. Again, I'd cut out everything. We don't need Netflix. All of those bills had gone away. All we needed to do was basically feed ourselves and use public transportation to get around because so much of travel is
00:21:58
Speaker
The experience, and there's so many ways to experience things for free, like one of my favorite things to do in the different countries is go to the grocery store. I mean, the grocery store is an adventure. Can I read what this item is? Can I find the thing? And I'm looking for artichoke hearts, like what the hell do artichoke hearts look like in this country? Like how are they padded? What's gonna be the picture? Yeah, we had many things that I brought home that I'm like, this is not what I thought it was. Even with like Google translate stuff on my phone. You're like, oh gosh, okay, all right.
00:22:29
Speaker
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00:22:59
Speaker
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Preparing Kids for Travel
00:23:07
Speaker
So I want to talk about the kids. We've brought them up and you said they're resilient, but I think that's another thing. So Nicole's, I could, I could do all that too. I think I can do the logistics. That's, that's the name of my game, but okay. The kids as other moms might be listening, they're probably thinking, well, how the hell do you do that with two little people? So talk to us about what those conversations were like with the kids to prepare them how they did. And then like, what about school? Tell us what you did there. Yes. That is always the first question I get when people like, yeah,
00:23:37
Speaker
Did you homeschool? No one can see me putting this in quotes. I would say that we world schools, but I'll tell you what that means, quote unquote. Again, because of how the pandemic lined up with this planning, I think, so what were my kids in like first grade and third grade for the majority of that homeschool year? They had already
00:24:01
Speaker
bonded in a way that I don't think siblings normally get at that age. They were each other's playmates for this whole extended probably two years. Actually, we had done big road trips both of the summers before we left. One to come visit the church we bought in Helena, one to go confirm some connections at the cabin. There are some kids who are homeschooled in that town that my children know. We tried to familiarize them.
00:24:28
Speaker
with some of the things that would be happening before we told them the plan. We knew this was happening probably a good year before we told them. Because at that point, their brains didn't need that information. They need to know what they're doing today and whose play date is happening. Are we going on a play date on Monday kind of thing? We were working on the background and taking these trips over the summer, these big trips like being gone for two months from our house to test out how that felt.
00:24:59
Speaker
And then when we finally came back to California and we had, we were going to do the semester, we were going to do the first half of the year before we left to go to index to our cabin for the second half of the year. And that's when we finally told them maybe a few months into that. And they were surprisingly un, un-ruffled maybe is the word.
00:25:20
Speaker
Unphased by it entirely. Yeah. Yeah. Mom and dad do this kind of stuff all the time. Yeah. It just seemed like the next adventure. And again, because they have really like positive memories of the cabin and that they were very excited about the idea of snow. And I said, we would learn how to snowboard because there's a ski hill pretty close by. And can we play with Mimi and Will? Yes. We can play with Mimi and Will.
00:25:40
Speaker
Right? Like, what are their concerns? And they knew what the bedroom was going to be like, and they knew that Grandma and Grandma's house was, they could go there any time. And so I think it made it a little bit more manageable. As far as the travel part, yeah, we just, we just said, this is, this is an adventure. This, here's, we had been sailing in Croatia when they were small. Juliet was three. I look at the pictures and she's like barely out of diapers. We had been sailing for a couple of weeks before, and Max had some memories of being five and being in Croatia, or at least he had the pictures to remind him.
00:26:11
Speaker
And so they seemed to just roll with it. And again, we'd already kind of had this bond family bonding time. And so I think that that helped extend it a little further.
00:26:28
Speaker
So there was a couple of things. Again, there's, this is like, nobody can replicate this, but here's the pieces that we were thinking of. My son had skipped first grade and gone from kindergarten to second grade. And so he was already very young for his age and he's got a May birthday. So he was very young for his grade. And I said, okay, if we travel for this, for this particular year, it would be when he is supposed to be in sixth grade. But because he's already ahead age wise, what if we just like let him chill for the year?
00:26:57
Speaker
And when we move to Helena, upon our return, he can start sixth grade and he'll be the appropriate age. And in Montana, middle school starts at sixth grade, it goes sixth, seventh, eighth, which is different in different states. But it's like, it's the perfect time to kind of reenter, you know, all these different elementary schools come together in this big middle school. So it won't feel like, you know. Yeah, he's doing just early gap year.
00:27:19
Speaker
Totally, it's like a middle school gap here, exactly. And on my side, I didn't have to worry about schooling sixth grade, which I'm not sure I would have been capable of. Okay, now, do not ask me if this is legal. No one take this as legal advice.
00:27:34
Speaker
Disclaimer, disclaimer. But in my head, this was the perfect year for him to be out of school. Makes sense to me. We kept him going. They kept travel journals. They did Khan Academy. We were doing Duolingo to prepare for our six months in Mexico. There was all sorts of things happening. And then my daughter needed to get through third grade. And academically, my kids are fine. So I was really not worried about it. Other people, AKA my mother, were very freaked out about this.
00:28:04
Speaker
But I wasn't, I was like, she's already had, what is she really gonna miss? What actually fine? And so in Washington state to homeschool your kids, you literally just have to file a letter with their current school and you have to be a college educated adult. And that was pretty much it, period. Not every state is the same. And I think had we gone longer, they would have needed to be broadened for testing once a year.
00:28:34
Speaker
There was a little bit of like, I'm not going to worry about it until someone comes after me. Why would they A, but B, like, I filed the letter? Right. Which of these 150 people in this town is going to come after you?
00:28:46
Speaker
They're all following my adventure on Facebook. I know, I know. The principal totally knew what we were doing. It was fun. Yeah, I think you're fine. And we got my daughter through. Again, it was mainly journaling. We were doing Khan Academy online for math. When my mom came to visit us in Oaxaca down the road, she brought the third grade math book from
00:29:07
Speaker
our school in california because she's still been she loves she's still been volunteering and she's still been volunteering at the school even though my kids were there she's like i borrowed this from dina so i'm just gonna take juliet through
Parenting Adventures on the Road
00:29:18
Speaker
Third grade math in the three weeks that I'm here, and she got through the whole book. I was like, see? No big deal. She just gave her the end chapter test. I'm like, she's fine then. So that was not something I was worried about. They're going to let me think of them. They're going to learn. They're going to learn different money. They're going to learn different language. They're going to learn just different customs. They're going to learn how to navigate airports and train stations. And I have this very clear vision. We were on the sailboat in Croatia.
00:29:46
Speaker
I had thrown my back out because I was just being really stupid trying to like grab the mooring ball. It's just a dumb story, but like I could not move. I was on as heavy drugs as we had. Where's Ken? I think Ken and we're not even on shore. We're like on a mooring ball in this like bay where you can see the little the village. It's right there, but it was like a good distance, like a good swim.
00:30:11
Speaker
maybe two or three football, two football fields away. I don't know how big that is. Two football fields. Yeah, my kids had become great swimmers in this time that we'd been living on this boat, but they were like, we want our gelato, because they'd have a gelato every day, it's like a dollar. We went home like, I cannot go anywhere, but we're going to swim to shore and get the gelato. And they had not been to this village, like they don't know where the gelato, they know there's going to be gelato, but they don't know where the gelato is. And I said, well,
00:30:40
Speaker
Okay, like I can see you and I guess I could jump in the dinghy if I needed, or I could swim after you if I had to. I think maybe Canada had already taken the dinghy to shore. So we take the kuna, the Croatian money of these little coins and put them in their zippered pocket in their swimsuit and Max's swim trunks and they have their little like swim shoes on. And they're like, we're just going to swim to shore and go find some gelato. I said, okay.
00:31:06
Speaker
And then I watched them with my eagle eyes, and then they disappeared into the streets to go find Gelato. And of course, I was staring at the spot waiting for them to come back 45 minutes later.
00:31:16
Speaker
Ken and I definitely have a free range parenting inclination. And so traveling with kids was a chance to really test that and trust that. And I can't always say that I was really chill about it. There were definitely times because my kids don't have cell phones. I'm not giving them Apple watches. I don't want any of that to be part of their experience as a kid of this age. But I understand why parents do. I totally get it.
00:31:43
Speaker
We were at Lake Bled and Max was like, I want to go fishing. And we'd been there for several days that I knew exactly where he was going to go. And it was a fine walk and I was like, okay, great. Be back at a certain time. And of course he's not. And now I'm like, well, I'm going to go try to find him and somehow.
00:31:59
Speaker
Like I had gone this big circular walking path, maybe four miles long, three and a half miles long, a lot along around Lake Bled. And I had gone one way and he had gone the other way or something. So we just like missed each other. So this is hours in and I'm like, my 10 year old child is missing. And I know logically he's fine. He was catching fish. He made a friend. He was having fun. Like nothing.
00:32:21
Speaker
Truly that was going to happen. Oh, but there were some, there were some times where I really had to like mentally calm myself down and just sit in the discomfort of like, okay, how long will it go before I go figure out how to find a police in this town? Okay. What will I do? So there were definitely some of that, but that's going to happen anywhere. And it was just an extra level of practice of trusting them and letting them trust themselves.
00:32:52
Speaker
What were some of the other insecurities that you found come up during this
Career Reflection and Future Plans
00:32:59
Speaker
trip? You mentioned there's some abundance mindset deal that rears its head sometimes. You've got potentially dead children in a town. You don't know where they are eating gelato. 100 percent. They've drowned. They've been eaten by the dying carp. I don't know if the strange man is taking it.
00:33:17
Speaker
sugar co-mud and fallen into the ocean. What else was coming up for you in relation to your career? Because I think if you said correctly, you had your business since you were 27, and that becomes a big piece of your identity. Like you said, it's very intertwined between business and life. And so as you're on this trip and you've planned for it and you've done all the things, was there anything in the back of your mind that was like,
00:33:43
Speaker
am I going to have a career to come back to? How do I restart a business that I've just up and left? So what was going through your mind about that? I mean, you basically nailed all of it. But I think once we got to the point where we were taking off, at that point, I was burnt out.
00:34:01
Speaker
So I wasn't in the, when we were beginning to imagine this trip, but by the time we had done all those logistics of, I mean, I had left the house three different times, went to eat, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, gotten through the pandemic, hosted the summer camp with COVID still online. Oh, we can talk about the stress of that. I think by the time I actually left in August, I just needed a break.
00:34:27
Speaker
There was lots of questions I was coming to about the industry that I operate in as well, especially coming out of all this time spent online and all this time dealing with different opinions and different levels of safety. I needed just a break.
00:34:47
Speaker
absent from my business before. Like I am not someone who is a consistent person. I am a loyal person, but I'm not consistent, which that's an interesting thing to explore on another date. I just, I don't have a bill. It's not part of my build. And so there, I, I have dropped off of social media for huge chunks of time. I have not emailed my list for huge chunks of time. I have only been communicating to the people within my programs because that's where I have the most fun and ignoring
00:35:12
Speaker
I don't know, audience in favor of community, I guess. And so those things didn't feel different to me, but I did make the pretty conscious choice that I was not going to be emailing my list, nor was I going to be posting on strategy or social media. Okay. Well, those are intentional moves. Yeah. Yes. I did not want to, I mean, I didn't want to logistically from the sailboat. Did I even travel with my lap? I did travel with my laptop, which broke like three different times. But what I decided was,
00:35:41
Speaker
Since StrataJoy is based on the idea of this personal intimacy of knowing and trusting and loving yourself and also like having an adventurous spirit to just do whatever you want to do with your life, because I think that's how lives should be run, that me doing this was an example of me living out StrataJoy values.
00:35:59
Speaker
And so I didn't have to do anything else. And I was committed to posting on my personal Instagram, basically just like a travel blog because I wanted those memories for myself. So I think the people who were following me in that way didn't feel like I disappeared. Like they knew where I was, whether it was Croatia or Italy or Thailand.
00:36:19
Speaker
The one thing that I, that I wasn't sure if I was going to do, which Mallory referenced at the beginning was holiday council. So I've been teaching this same program for 12 years every December. That's a long time. Like that's a ritual and it's something that people come back to. Like the return rate is very, very strong. And so when we left in August, I wasn't sure if I was going to do the holiday council, but as it got, as it got closer to the timing, when I had to make a decision, which was basically like October,
00:36:48
Speaker
We were in Italy, we were having, I was hiking at the Dolomites, and then I was swimming from Positano on my birthday, and it was just like this glorious time. But I wasn't missing work, but I was, what was the feeling? I think the feeling was, gosh, by the time I would have to start working on this,
00:37:09
Speaker
I think I will feel refreshed. Like I was worried that it was gonna feel like a burden, and I don't like to shit on myself, if at all possible. And so when I left, the feeling was I should do holiday council. But about halfway through those first four months of travel, I was like, you know what, I think I want to do it. And again, the logistics part of me had kept the opportunity open. I knew that we were gonna be in Thailand over the course of
00:37:39
Speaker
when I would both be planning and selling holiday council and then actually running holiday council. And so I had set it up where we were going to go to Chiang Mai for two weeks, which is a very famous digital nomad city. Like there's tons of co-working spaces and fast internet and print, like anything you would possibly need that you could find there. And so at that point, I was like, all right, Ken, I need you to take over kid duty because if I'm going to get all the work done that normally takes me two months done
00:38:08
Speaker
10 days, 10 days, like all the prep for holiday council. Like I could do it, but I can't do anything else. So. Well, and you could only do it cause you've done it 12 times. Yep. I wasn't gonna, I was like, okay, I need to make a book. I need to record these calls. I need to get it on schedule. I need to send these emails to sell it. Yeah. I didn't do anything new. I was trying to print my own personal books so that I could take it with me. And there's pictures of me in front of this, like,
00:38:35
Speaker
high print shop that it was just it was like hilarious on many levels. I'm like I'm pretty sure this is a print shop. It looks like a print shop. How do I get my book printed? 90 degree heat but and then I you know I had worked out backup so that people were
00:38:54
Speaker
in case I didn't have enough internet to do the live parts of holiday council, someone was ready to cover for me. And so it was actually pretty seamless and really fun to be on these calls during the three weeks that we were island hopping in Thailand. And it felt lovely to be back working. I mean, that's a huge testament. Yeah. I was reading from like the cafe and the fancy Maya mall in Chiang Mai. Like I had this nice break from cooking because in Thailand it didn't make any sense to cook.
00:39:25
Speaker
we could find street food for so cheap that it's like, I'm not going to make food. We're just going to go out every meal. It's A-OK here. It's going to be better also. Not the same in Italy, yeah. Oh, yeah. God, it's so good. I could have get a $5 massage every other day. Yeah. If anyone ever wants to disappear and just work, go to Chiang Mai. That's my advice. OK, so we have to skip forward a little bit. You guys had this amazing adventure. You were back in the States for a little bit. And you went to Mexico for par.
00:39:54
Speaker
But anyway, you end up back in Helena, Montana, in the church.
Settling in Helena
00:39:58
Speaker
Of course, you had to make it livable. I remember stories about that. So what has it been like then? Just give us some insight. What was it like coming back? What was it like for Ken? Now he has no business. What's it like for you trying to get the business going again? How are the kids adjusting? Just give us some insight into post-adventure.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. I'm going to back up a little bit before we got to Helena because that last four months, yeah, we came home to the cabin to do the holidays, to repack, to go through three months worth of mail.
00:40:30
Speaker
which the, oh my God, the only bad thing that happened when we were traveling was our mortgage got sold twice. So we're getting all these letters from like a Mr. Charlie or something. I'm like, what is this? Yeah, luckily we figured it out pretty quickly, but we were like not in a good scenario. We didn't know. And so our kids were going to like two times the mortgage, not the, it had been sold twice when we were gone. Anyway, we figured it out, but yeah, that was not fun. My father-in-law had collected all of our mail and like these giant grocery bags for us.
00:41:00
Speaker
took us about two months to get through that at our door taxes. But anyway, next to COVID, we were traveling a little more slowly. We were in towns for a month, basically. So there was a lot more downtime. And I would say about halfway through that four months of the travel, I started to feel pointless.
00:41:18
Speaker
Mm, interesting. What is the point of this? Like what are, I mean, yes, I'm eating amazing food in Oaxaca and I'm taking pictures of every mural that I come across and I'm yet again on another beach. Yay! But I definitely, and I think it was both hitting what I would call, I call dips, but basically like depression light. Like I think I was having an episode and I was also so used to
00:41:46
Speaker
Not only working, but my work is so intimate that I really get up close and personal to people's lives and their stories. And that is one thing when you're traveling the way we were traveling. I was making plenty, I was meeting plenty of people, but they weren't sustained relationships. It wasn't somewhere long enough that I was going to make a friend. Nobody wants to invest. It's not the deep connections. Yeah, because you're gone in a month. They're like, yeah, maybe I'll see you a couple of times at the taco stand.
00:42:13
Speaker
You know, and so I was feeling a lack of depth and I was feeling a little pointless. My mom came to visit and that solved a lot of the depression problems. You know, your mom is always so good for you, or at least mine is. Just like lifted as soon as she arrived for her three weeks. You're like, mom, do you still want to be friends with me? Mama, you're just holding me. Thank you, mom.
00:42:32
Speaker
I remember Ken said when my mom arrived, he's like, thank God you're here, Sue. I don't know what to do. This is like a typical pattern we get in. I just needed my mom. Mom fix it. It was great. It was great. But by the end of the Mexico, I would say until that very last month, any part of me that tried to plan forward for Strata Joy, like how was I going to reenter work? What was that going to look like? Am I going to go back to a program that I was doing the right mission? Is camp going to come back? I could make no progress.
00:43:01
Speaker
Like it just, more questions would come and no clarity. So I was on a very extended pause, like we call it, I was, it wasn't really destructive. I mean, it did destroy a bunch of my life, but it was almost just this like purposeful pause where I wasn't making decisions. And as someone who moves through life just by making a bunch of fast decisions and then, and then doing the work to make them happen, like that's how I operate. And I could not get myself to a place where I felt confident or comfortable about
00:43:29
Speaker
anything. Other than I knew we were moving to Helena, we'd already rented our house out. Nothing else could happen. That was happening. By that last month, literally the month before we came back to the States, I finally started to feel an ease in creative power. I don't know if it was just because coming home was becoming real,
00:43:52
Speaker
or some, you know, the stars aligned. I can't tell you, but I finally felt that like creative business spark, you know, when you have so many ideas and you're just, I couldn't do anything about them. So I was just journaling about them and taking long walks and talking to Ken about them and occasionally calling someone and telling them like, so that gave me a good boost of confidence of, okay, I don't know exactly how it's going to look like, but at least
00:44:15
Speaker
I think it's going to be Strata Joy. And there was a question as I was traveling of like, do I even want to revive it at all? Or is this just the natural, lovely end to that season of life and business? I went through lots of different scenarios in my head of
00:44:30
Speaker
Do I just want to go back to school? Do I want to be a teacher? Do I want to start a brick and mortar business in Helena? And I couldn't come up with anything that gave me more excitement or more spacious freedom than the playground of Strata Joy. So I finally decided, OK, Strata Joy is still going to be the playground. I will figure out what that looks like. Coming home, blah, blah, blah, lots of logistics. Had to go to California, pack our house, go to Washington, get the cars. We eventually ended up in Helena.
00:45:02
Speaker
mid-July, and then I would say the first couple of months, Mallory, honestly, was more logistics. Gee, are you getting, like, if anyone's dreaming of this, let me just tell you, if you are not a logistics person, do not do this.
00:45:15
Speaker
If you're not a detailed scale, it's not going to work out. Or at least in the family. Maybe if you were by yourself, you could fly by the seat of your pants a little easier. But things like we hadn't seen the doctors in two years. So I needed to establish all the care. I needed to get my kids registered for school. The one thing, since I was moving to a place where I already knew people, God, thank God for this. And some of it were from growing up and some of it was from strategy. I had friends.
00:45:42
Speaker
And I had friends to send text messages to that said, okay, kids dentist, kids doctor, I need a dermatologist. Where would you when the soccer signups happens? That that piece of moving to a new place was way reduced because I had
00:46:00
Speaker
I had people to come help me paint. I had neighbors to throw parties to go to, like that part felt easier.
Restarting Business Post-Sabbatical
00:46:07
Speaker
But the first piece was really about getting the kids, I was most worried about the kids, getting them settled in, ready for new schools and new experiences. And I wasn't sure how I was going to come back to StratoJoy.
00:46:23
Speaker
but after being gone so long and my bank account slowly dwindling, I'm being honest here, I was like, I think what I'm gonna do is not overthink it and we're just gonna do. So I said, what am I, you know, like what is, what do I feel like I could teach without a moment of hesitation? And I said, one, I'm gonna teach a course in destruction, because I literally just went through two years of it. And then two, I'm gonna teach a course on joy because that is my end all, be all bread and butter.
00:46:49
Speaker
So I spent about two weeks being like, here we go, we're doing new courses this fall. They started pretty much when my kids started school, right? So I had those work hours carved out and that was perfect. That like forced me back into business in a way that I think I just would have hemmed and hawed and half-assed things behind the scenes if I didn't have to show up.
00:47:09
Speaker
That was, I think, my past sulfur. And then you felt better getting that first Stripe payment email back. You're like, oh my gosh, I missed you. I missed you so much. I missed you. It was a level of feel good. But I will have to say, we're in this giant building that needs so much work.
00:47:27
Speaker
I don't feel like doing it. And I don't know if I don't feel like doing it on the money front because it would require a totally different level of work that I'm doing right now. Or if I just am tired of moving boxes of my own crap around.
00:47:44
Speaker
I'm like, you know what? This is fine. This is fine for now. I would like to work on other things, creatively, family, friends, work. So when you're ready, it'll come. I'm going to trust that it will come when I'm like, all right, I want to work on this. I don't want to work on this right now. I'm working on re-entering strategy and kind of looking forward to this next season of life. I mean, truly.
00:48:10
Speaker
and thinking of it as the next eight years, which might sound weird. This is kind of my brain works in these big, big chunks. I mean, I don't know all the details, but in eight years, my daughter, my youngest will have graduated from high school. So there'll be new adventures afoot in eight years. But until then, like we've, we've committed to them. We wanted to give it, you know, basically a school year to make sure everybody likes being here. But
00:48:38
Speaker
All signs are a go over here. Ken's made his first friend on his own. Which is very funny talking about a 45-year-old man that way. Good job, Ken. Good job, Ken. He's done them on the mandate. They're totally doing that. And he's figuring out what his new interests and businesses are going to be. And yeah, we're going to be here for the next.
00:49:00
Speaker
It's the next eight years. Well, I think the cool thing that you said that I just want to reiterate at the end of that was that you chose, this is a phrase that I've stolen from my resilience coach, but you chose the step when you got back that had the most ease and impact, right? So you said, okay, I'm getting back into this business after a long time off. And what, instead of like all the things I journaled about on the beach in Mexico, they were new and fun and shiny. Like probably what my brain needs is to do
00:49:30
Speaker
the easiest thing with the most impact. I need to build my bank account back in the way that feels the easiest to me. And that's exactly what I do. I think that was so smart. I mean, I knew I had to get in front of the people. Mallory knows this about me. Marketing, not my thing. Until someone says, well, marketing is just a form of connection. I said, OK, well, I love connecting. Connecting is my thing. But where I want to do it is already within the course, or the camp, or the events.
00:49:57
Speaker
getting people in, just put them all in the room and let us do, let us work our magic. So it's like, how can I get there as quickly as possible? Because I knew that's the momentum that would force me to sit down at my computer after 10 months of not.
00:50:12
Speaker
See? Like, it's not going to be working on backend systems. It's not even going to be sending newsletters. None of that's going to force me to sit down and do it. I'm going to have to sell something so that I have to make it and have to show up. And I was like, again, I know myself pretty well. So that is what worked. Yeah. And it was, and it was, and it felt fun.
00:50:32
Speaker
Hello, my Enneagram 7 is showing, like, I like things to feel fun. I want them to be fun. But I don't judge myself for that, right? I think that we all should do that.
Advice on Taking Time Off
00:50:43
Speaker
To wrap us up here, this is our time, our time season. Just keeping that in mind, what advice would you give anyone else who wants, maybe it's not a year or two year sabbatical, but is considering a break, a break from working, a break from entrepreneurship working.
00:51:00
Speaker
What do you think would sum up your biggest piece of advice for people if they're considering doing something like this?
00:51:09
Speaker
Gonna sound so strategy-like cliche, but that's because I really believe it that there's no right way to do things. And so if your break is going down to a four-day work week, if your break is understanding that your brain doesn't come online until about noon, it's giving yourself mornings off and working from noon until six, great. One of the places we can get stuck is thinking it's supposed to be a certain way and forgetting that
00:51:35
Speaker
because we've already made the choice to be an entrepreneur, we are like blowing up expectations left and right. And one of the cool parts, at least in our small, you know, flexible businesses, is that we get to decide how it goes.
00:51:48
Speaker
And so if you feel stuck, you painted yourself into that corner. Like you can unstick yourself. Time wise, you know, time responds to you. How do you like your time? Is it spacious? Is it scheduled? Is it what I call structured spontaneity? That's how I like to think about my time. You get to make those decisions and there's
00:52:11
Speaker
very little that is impossible. So I know that a lot of things in my life, someone would say, I couldn't do that. I said, well, maybe, and maybe not, but will you let yourself even consider the possibility that you, like when we travel for a long time, we rent our house out. People are like, oh, I could never do that. I'm like, well, that's what pays for me to go travel for two months is because there are strangers living in my home while I'm gone.
00:52:36
Speaker
Okay, so that's a, I don't love that. And not my favorite thing, but I sacrifice that. And then there's bonuses of it. It makes me keep my, you know, things you shove under the bathroom sink very low. Cause I'm gonna have to clean them up every six months, pretty much. Like, there are ways to imagine that. Or like the school things. I can never take my kids out of school. Maybe. And maybe you could. Like, why? What part feels impossible to you? So,
00:53:05
Speaker
I think it's getting on board with possibility and remembering that you control the creative choices of your life. Like you do have control there. Time is a resource. You get to decide how to spend it just like money, just like attention, right? You're the commodity of attention. You get to decide, yeah. I think that's perfect.
00:53:27
Speaker
Well, that's a great way to wrap up, Molly. Thank you so much for reliving that experience, the big adventure with us, that kind of sharing how you did each of the pieces, just giving people permission to dream. And like you said, it's a living example of how to live your life intentionally, which is really what I've learned so much from you. And so I really appreciate you sharing that with our listeners. So thanks again for being here. Thanks for the invitation and for letting me
00:53:56
Speaker
Share that. It was fun. Oh, yeah, it was fun. Perfect. Check, check. Awesome. Well, that wraps us up for today. You guys will see you here next week. Thanks. Take care. Thanks for listening. Visit UnboundBoss.com to download free resources, browse our courses, or leave us a voice memo for the podcast. And if you like the show, please subscribe, leave us an Apple review, and share your favorite episodes with other women entrepreneurs. Talk to you soon.