Why Defying Convention Is Good For You

This blog is a personal one, so settle in with a cuppa.

I very much hope it serves as motivation to be exactly who you are and live life in your own dazzlingly unique way. I wrote this note on my birthday in 2019 (oh. pre-pandemic life, how I miss you), while exploring Hoi Ann before venturing back to my home base in Bali (how I miss it!).

My business was 6 months old and I felt like I finally found something that fit me and I knew it was considered 'brave', which I thought was ridiculous because why should working for yourself be brave? Not enough people realise it's so achieveable and especially now as the world has lept forward into all things virtual, the online service provider space is continuing to explode.

So...dive in and let's...

Defy Convention.

Here I am, beginning my thirty-seventh year, riding a bicycle through rice fields and villages of Hoi An, Vietnam. Swapping the office for my laptop and cafes, my heels for flip flops and switching London for Bali.

There’s no great science behind swimming upstream when the current is going the other way, you just have to do it. Find your courage, take a deep breath, turn and swim like hell.

Society has a lot to say about a woman of my age. I’m mature - technically (I’m still in fits of giggles over a fart and mentally I’m on the same page as my best travel friend who’s 23, so that’s up for debate) and I’m unmarried, I have no children, no mortgage and technically let’s see - I live nowhere right now. But let’s say Bali, it’s where I’m home. For now.

I’m supposed to be a lot of things, but you know what? Who says life has to run down this straight path?

Go to school, college, university, get a degree, a job, a boyfriend, then a husband, a house with 2 kids, and a cat. Maybe one big holiday once a year.

If that sounds good to you, then you probably don’t need to hear the rest of what I’m about to say. For the record, respect to you, if that’s where your happiness is. There’s no judgment here.

It’s not the stone age anymore, a woman’s path has changed so much. We can do anything, though we have a long way to go on certain things - I’m not here to get into women’s rights and politics so I won’t go down the rabbit hole - but all the strides we have made matter now more than ever to our future generations Let’s not slip back in time and let’s not tell our girls and our women where or what they should be when they’re rounding out their thirties.

We need to be our women’s champions.

Don’t think that I’m having a pre-mid-life crisis because I live in Bali, work off a laptop, own what I can carry and work on shedding 20 years of working in London, like a skin that no longer fits. Far from it, this is how life looks when you take a chance and live it on your terms.

I’m not an expert at swimming upstream but I could tell you a thing or two about it.

I got comfortable with being uncomfortable a long time ago, the best things have happened to me when I’ve taken that utter heart-stopping leap from my comfortable snug existence into something big, life changing and terrifying. You know that feeling right? When you’ve got a big choice to make and every fibre of your body is screaming at you that this chance might not work, what if it goes wrong? But darling what if it works?

Just jump.

The current journey I am on is nothing new and I celebrate the freedom and the guts it took to change up life. I love the questions that come, they pop up frequently because people on the regular life treadmill cannot imagine crossing the other side of their fear of change to see what’s on the other side, so I get it and I welcome it.

Maybe if I tell you about this great, crazy thing I did then you too might have a little faith in doing more of what you want, not what you think you should be doing.

Sometimes magic happens when you do it differently. Standing under a canopy of pine trees, leaning against a motorbike with a dusty face turned towards the sun, looking over a lake in the highlands of Vietnam. All I could think was damn, I made it work. I’m here. I survived.

The day job is now digital, I’m out here exploring and it’s glorious. Sure some days are painfully sh*t, it’s not all rainbows and happy crap, but the majority are pretty bloody amazing.

So, defy convention if you want to. If you want your life to be well lived without regrets and wondering, do it differently. Courage my friend, it starts there.

Note from Vietnam written in 2019

Want to find out more about starting your own business? Head over here.