What happens when the thing that defined you for most of your life suddenly isn't yours anymore?

Bridget Baker has reinvented herself so many times she’s started to consider herself an expert in it. Her reinvention journey spans a car accident at 21, a Las Vegas tiger show, five years in a travel trailer, and a writing group she started on a whim that’s almost two years old.

She’s a brand and website designer, a creative coach, and the host of a brand new podcast, The Deep Dig. But before all of that, she was a ballerina, and the story of how she got from there to here is anything but a straight line.

Highlights

Reinvention isn’t always a choice.

Bridget was at the peak of her dance career when a serious auto accident changed everything.

“When I was 21, I was like at the peak of my career, the peak of my physical ability and strength. And I got in a very serious auto accident... my injuries were very severe.”

She didn’t frame it as a tragedy. It was just the first in a series of reinventions.

There’s the reinvention you choose. And there’s the reinvention that chooses you. Bridget has lived both.

Losing her body taught her to see other people differently.

While Bridget was recovering from her injuries, she learned how to draw it out of others through choreography.

“It had me actually appreciate the uniqueness of each dancer more and go, what is their unique skill set? Like, what are they good at that maybe they’re sort of like the underdog and no one’s seen them do this thing on stage?”

Whenever you lose one part of yourself, you evolve in different ways.

Her shift from performing to perceiving became the throughline of everything she’s done since. Her coaching, branding, and writing all come back to the same question: what’s already in this person that the world hasn’t seen yet?

She went back. And then she left again.

After the accident, Bridget rehabbed and returned to the ballet company. People cheered. And almost immediately, she knew it wasn’t right.

“I’ve made it back. And then I thought, yeah, I don’t think this is it anymore.”

That’s something no one talks about. Sometimes you have to return to something confirm you’ve outgrown it.

She left dance. Went backstage into costumes. Worked with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. And even there, surrounded by live tigers, she felt the same pull.

This isn’t it either.

Your environment will resist your change.

Bridget’s father introduced her as “my daughter, the ballet dancer” for fifteen years after she left the stage.

“Your environment sometimes does not support your change... it affects your friendships. You have to start hanging out with new people.”

The people who were a big part of your life aren’t trying to be rude. They just identify with who you were, not who you are. Their relationship was with a previous version of you. When you change, it’s unsettling, because if you can change, so can everything.

Don’t try to convince people of who you are. Find people who are comfortable with who you want to be.

Write Shit Thursdays and the habit that came back around.

Bridget and her husband used to go to a different coffee shop every Thursday in Los Angeles. They didn’t have an agenda. They just put words to page.

“I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything to say. That’s all I’d be writing... And then at some point it would build on itself and I’d go, oh my gosh, I just wrote a thousand words.”

But that habit eventually faded. They decided to live in a 24-foot travel trailer for five years and her writing fell off.

Then one day she asked herself a simple question: can I call myself a writer if I’m not writing?

She started Write Sh*t Mondays. Invited people to write with her. It’s been almost two years. Now it’s evolved into writing coaching programs and retreats. It transformed into something she didn’t even know she was building.

Some things don’t leave you, they’re just waiting to come back.

The handshake that started everything.

When Bridget’s husband first floated the idea of living in a travel trailer, she wasn’t ready. She pushed back. The idea nearly died.

Then, months later, she came back to it.

“I put out my hand to shake his hand. And he shook my hand. I’m like, I’ve never done that in my life, let alone with my husband. We’re gonna shake hands on it. And then the rest was history.”

I’ve lived this moment too. On Valentine’s Day last year, Anita and I sat at a restaurant with chips and salsa and a notebook, and made our own version of that handshake. We were going to sell the house and move to Costa Rica. We were going to stop waiting for someday.

The handshake doesn’t mean you’re ready. It means you’re committed to figuring it out.

Keep it for yourself first.

When you’re in the middle of reinventing, the instinct is to tell everyone. To make it real by saying it out loud.

Bridget’s advice is more careful than that.

“Start writing about it for a while and seeing what comes out of that. Like keep it for you for a while. Don’t publish it. Don’t give it away.”

Other people’s expectations can shape your reinvention before you’ve had a chance to shape it yourself. Their enthusiasm can push you faster than you’re ready to go. Their doubt can stop you before you’ve had a chance to find out if you believe in it.

Write it first. Sit with it. Let it be yours before it becomes a story you tell.

Closing Reflection

Bridget has been reinventing herself for thirty years. And she’ll tell you she’s more herself now than she ever was as a ballerina.

That’s the thing about reinvention. It isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about shedding the versions of yourself that no longer fit.

“I’m still me. Probably a lot more me than I was back then.”

We don’t lose ourselves in reinvention. We grow into someone we couldn’t have imagined before.

If you’ve made a bold change: a move, a career shift, a creative leap, and you think your story could inspire others, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell us about your reinvention.

Thank you Tomesha Campbell, Dharma Paige, and many others for tuning into my live video with Bridget Baker!

Don't listen to the naysayers.

Like, there's going to be those people that are going to.

Again, it's usually coming from their own crap.

If they're saying, like, you shouldn't do that, and here's why.

They're not you.

If they don't know you, that's, you know, it's none of your business, Right?

So if you start, like, listening to the people that are inspired by what you're doing, start, like, giving those people, even if those people are, like, close to you that are naysayers, you know, say, hey, if you're not on board with this, like, please just don't say anything.

Or, like, this is what I'm doing, Right?

So seems easy to do.

It's not necessarily easy to do, but I think the more you can really, like, let go of the people that are like, here's why you shouldn't do that, and start finding your people that are doing what you're doing that will help bring you forward again, like, getting you out of your environment.

Welcome to Standout Reinventions, a space for anyone who has ever felt stuck in a life that felt good on paper but doesn't feel right.

Sometimes the reinvention attention is chosen.

Sometimes it chooses you.

Either way, this is where we talk about what it actually takes to start over and why it's never too late to try.

I'm your host, Kevin Chung, and I spent 17 years building the American dream until I realized it wasn't my dream.

So my wife and I sold our house, packed up five suitcases, and moved to Costa Rica.

This series is where I sit down with people who've done their own version of the same thing.

Some who jumped, some who were pushed, and all of them who found a way through.

Let's get into it.

Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Standout Reinventions.

Today, I'm so happy to have on Bridget Baker, my friend.

She was on my other podcast, Standout Creatives, when I restarted that, one of the first few people to join me there.

So this time I want to talk about her, her journey through many reinventions, because I know that she's gone through a whole bunch.

So, Bridget, can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are now?

Yes.

Hello there.

I feel I'm like, who should I reinvent myself as right now?

I don't know.

I'm about to be a podcaster, too.

So my podcast is launching tomorrow.

I'm Bridget Baker.

I'm a brand and website Designer and, and a creative coach.

I have had a very circuitous journey to get there.

And yeah, I love what I do.

Really.

That's the main part.

That's where I'm at now and the part of my journey where I love what I do.

Yeah.

So what was like the very first thing for those who don't know, you started off in dance.

So can you talk a little bit about that, how that evolved and how you.

Why you had to leave that?

Yeah, so I've actually been revisiting this a lot because I'm writing a memoir finally that's sort of 30 years in the making.

Meaning I left dance about 30 years ago.

I was a ballerina, so I was a ballerina growing up and then I went to do that professionally as an adult.

Actually kind of even when I was a teenager, I was really dancing.

Like I was a professional.

So it was my job and I was a choreographer and I loved it.

I didn't know anything else.

It was a very all consuming world.

You don't really get the luxury of doing much else other than that.

Similar to like Olympic athletes.

Like you are immersed in what you're doing.

And then when I was 20, I'm considering myself actually an expert in reinventing myself based on things that I didn't choose, like a category of reinvention.

Right.

When I was 21, I was like at the peak of my career, the peak of my physical ability and strength and.

And I got in a very serious auto accident and a lot of people thought it wouldn't derail me.

They're like, she'll come right back.

But my injuries were very severe and so my mindset at the time was, you know, I am just going to focus on one step, literally one foot in front of the other.

I'm gonna try to get myself rehabilitated.

I was not focused on getting back to dancing.

So I think even there's something around that moment of reinvention when you know you can't go back to something.

And so what was interesting about that was when I get in this accident, I started choreographing and it changed how I was choreographing because I couldn't use my body to demonstrate.

I couldn't say, do this like me.

It had me actually appreciate the uniqueness of each dancer more and go, ooh.

What is their unique skill set?

Like what are they good at?

That maybe they're sort of like the underdog and no one's seen them do this thing on stage that they're really like, talented at, like, they might be a great turner or a great jumper or really emotive or something like that.

And so kind of I became into how do I bring this out of people without being able to show?

I had to learn how to tell and to draw out in a different way.

So through that process of choreography and still being around dance, I started rehabilitating and I started getting better and I started getting stronger.

And I got to a point where I went, wow, is it time for me to get back to dancing?

Like, what is it?

So I kind of started out slowly.

I started out doing some modern dance.

This woman in town, Ruth Rosenberg, gave me the opportunity to go on her stage, which is a little bit smaller of a company, but it was more intimate and kind of just safer for me to start out there.

Less rigorous of a company.

And I loved it.

She gave me this beautiful solo that she highlighted, and it really kind of started me thinking about dancing again.

So I chose to go back basically of my own volition, instead of letting the accident determine when my career was over.

But in this time of choosing to go, before I chose to go back, I went to college and started writing.

And my thought was I was going to be a dance critic.

Like, I'm still going to do something in dance.

And, you know, I was.

There was a dance critic at the time who was getting older.

And so the newspaper was like, oh, this is perfect.

You can be groomed to be this.

This person when he.

You can take over for him, right?

So I thought I was going on that trajectory.

So then as I get back into dance, I then went back to the ballet company I had danced at.

And it was very interesting to go back again to something I had left.

Like, I was not the same.

I was so different.

I had grown so much, not only emotionally, but I had started writing.

Like I said, I literally found my.

What I would call my voice in a particular way, because when you're dancing, you're silent.

And I had this sort of like, intuitive hit, like a non woo woo intuitive hit of like, I think I need to use my voice in the world.

I don't think this is it.

And so it was fascinating to go back and all these people were champing me.

They were, like, welcoming me.

People were cheerleading me.

And I'm like, do I tell them I want to leave?

Like, soon after I came back in, I felt like that.

And then I thought, yeah, I don't think this is it anymore.

And so I.

After a year back in, I left the dance World pretty much completely.

I wanted something new.

I was ready for something new.

And so I still stayed in theater, went into doing costumes, so I went backstage instead of being on stage.

And what I loved about that was that I.

Dancers and actors and performers could relate to me because they're like, oh, you know what it's like to be on stage?

You know what you don't.

You know, if.

If I was hovering around a particular actress, especially if there was someone famous, you know, people get all starstruck and overly helpful, and instead, I was, like, talking to them like a real person.

And that was definitely appreciated.

So I had a lot of fun doing that for a while.

That led me to keep pursuing a career in costume.

So even though I was studying to be a writer and thought I needed to use my voice, I was like, I don't know what this looks like.

I knew I didn't want to be a dance critic.

I was real clear about that.

So I kind of shelved it for a while and went into theater and performance and kept in that because it was still comfortable, it was still what I knew, and I could still easily translate that as a career.

So I kept pursuing that, but when bigger opportunities would come up, I kept going, yeah, I don't want to say yes to that.

I don't want to say yes to that.

And people were like, why not?

You could, like, go far in this as a career.

And I was like, something's just telling me that this is not it either.

And so very much just like, these moments of, like, you go for something, you leap into the pool, and then you go.

I mean, I was a. I was doing costume and wardrobe in Las Vegas for Siegfried and Roy, which was pretty crazy and pretty fun.

And, like, one of my favorite stories to tell was, you know, being there and seeing tigers every day.

When I went to work, that was, like, the first thing I saw was live animals.

And, you know, again, even at that level was like, this is not it.

And so from there, my mom was becoming a coach at the time, and she then became eventually a master certified coach and trained coaches and all this stuff.

So she's like, can you help me out with my coaching business?

I'm like, sure.

Okay.

So I started helping her out and doing sort of like, virtual assistant things like that.

Then that led to like, oh, okay, maybe there's something I can do that's.

I get to actually create my own life.

I get to create my own schedule and my own time.

So I leaned into that more.

That led to website design.

That led to branding, which then kind of brought the writing back in.

The writing kept coming back in in this particular way.

So it took, like, almost 30 years for the writing to really come in, come back in, because I couldn't, like, find my way.

And I was writing for clients, you know, I was writing my own posts.

I loved writing, but I, again, couldn't really figure out the space to do it.

So let's see, where are we in this journey?

So then at some point when I'm writing, my husband was writing with me, and we started on this minimalist journey.

We started, like, deconstructing our lives, simplifying things like that.

We were both kind of geeking out on that together.

And we had gone to see the minimalist talk in Los Angeles.

Like, I can't remember what year this was.

And we were like, okay, that's great.

And then kind of our, like, we were like, but we see it differently, right?

We really, like, notice.

We're like, okay, they're famous.

They're getting famous.

We could feel it happening.

And we're like, but we see it differently, right?

So I started writing about minimalism, and I realized I loved writing again.

And so it was, like, kind of got into the practice of writing.

And so my husband and I used to go to a coffee shop to do our writing when we lived in Los Angeles.

And he had this idea.

He goes, why don't we go every Thursday to a coffee shop?

We'll go to a different coffee shop every time.

And he called it right, shit Thursdays.

He's like, we just get there and we just write shit.

We, like, don't think about what it is.

Just get something on the page.

And I'd always be amazed that, like, oh, I don't have anything to say.

I don't have anything to say.

That's all I'd be writing.

I don't have anything to say.

I don't have anything to say.

And then at some point, it would build on itself, and I'd go, oh, my gosh.

I just wrote a thousand words.

Like, how did that happen?

Right?

And so that became kind of an addictive habit.

So we were doing that every week.

And especially living in Los Angeles, we were around a lot of creative people.

I felt, like, this magic of, like, being in the coffee shop going, I don't know what screenplay is being written next to me.

You know, I don't know what is, like, who's getting discovered?

Like, it just.

It had that vibe to it.

And so Then my husband and I left Los Angeles and went on the road in a travel trailer.

So we decided to reinvent our lives together.

You know, I had been building this business, business as a brand and website designer where I could live anywhere.

And yet I wasn't living anywhere.

We were just living in Los Angeles, where we had been for years.

So we're like, let's take this experiment on the road, dive in, literally.

And we lived in a 24 foot travel trailer for five years.

We were riding on the road, that kind of thing.

And then it kind of like the writing habit, like things do, that kind of fell off.

I think our focus around minimalism shifted as it got more popular during the pandemic.

Oddly, the voices kind of became noisy.

I didn't really want to write about that at that time.

So again, I knew there was a shift coming in, what my voice was or what I wanted to write about.

So then several years later I realized, can I call myself a writer if I'm not writing anymore?

I was like, I don't think that's how that works.

I think you have to be writing to be a writer.

Right.

So I started writing and I asked my husband if he wanted to write shit Thursdays again.

He was like, no, I don't think I want to do that.

I'm like, okay, fine.

So then I thought, well, I'm going to start something called Write Ship Mondays and I'm going to invite people that I know online to write with me.

Other business owners, other coaches, other authors.

You know, I didn't, I didn't even know who would come out of this.

So I just started this free group, which I still have, which Kevin, you've been a part of.

I'm trying to think how long it's almost been two years of doing Write Ship Mondays.

And then that became so fun for me that it has evolved into hosting writing coaching programs.

And I'm going to actually do an in person writing retreat.

I've done just a bunch of different things.

Yeah, yeah.

It's kind of like this thing that's been building on itself.

And it's just funny that it is.

It's like part of reinvention, I think even is coming back to yourself.

Right.

So you see these milestones, you see these moments where like something needs to change, but like, I don't know what it is.

And then that something is even like the something is like, I need to do something I did before that I like, wasn't the right time.

I loved it.

There's no real reason why it stopped happening.

Just, you know, like, it needs to come back around.

There's no shame around it.

Like, again, even the writer thing was kind of funny.

It was like, oh, I can't say this if I'm not doing it, so maybe we should start doing it and see how that feels and just experiment.

And I think there's something just in reinvention in general, where you give yourself permission to change something, and then the minute you tell someone and it becomes real.

I'm sure you know about this.

Yes, I know.

You tell someone, they're like, oh, tell me more.

And you're like, okay, somebody leaned in.

I think that means I'm on the right track.

I think they're also picking up on that.

I'm excited about it.

So that's why they're supportive.

Right.

So, yeah, now I host writing programs and I do brand and website design.

So that's.

That's where I'm at in my reinvention journey.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of different parts of the journey, but hearing it all out in one go, like, that is interesting because you can see, like, connections in the way it, like, moves.

It doesn't move linearly.

I think that's the first time I've said it all together.

Yeah, reinventions.

It's like one moment happened and you just change.

But sometimes it takes, like, a lot of different things to occur to realize, oh, I should be doing this.

What was.

What were some of the harder parts of reinventing yourself so many times in so many different ways?

I think it's environment, really.

So again, like, you go to.

Again, what I was saying, you tell yourself, you tell someone something new is happening, and sometimes you're like, what the hell?

You know, like, excuse me.

Like, that's not you, you know, or they know you in some way, some fixed way, and they have wrapped their support of you around what that fixed way is.

So.

So being a ballet dancer was completely my identity, Yet I fought against that my whole life.

Like, when I was in high school, I wanted.

I hung out with all the, like, punks and cool kids and whatever.

I didn't want to hang out with, like, the nerdy theater kids.

I mean, no offense, nerdy theater kids, but, you know, I wanted to hang out with, like, the cool kids.

And even though I couldn't be that cool because I was a ballerina, I wanted to.

I kept, like, trying to rebel against it all the time.

So I never really identified with the lifestyle of it.

And my dad, my parents did so much to support me financially with being a dancer.

And I was always very grateful for what I was privileged enough to be able to do with that.

And so when I left, I felt like, oh, God, did I disappoint them.

They've put all this time, money and energy into this career for me.

And my dad really kind of never got over me shifting.

He would say things to me like, well, that's not a real job, or you can't really do that, or, you know, yet was funny.

Like, being a ballerina somehow is a real job.

When it was really hard, that's the.

First time I've heard that.

I know it was really hard to make money, but, like, his identity was wrapped around me being a dancer, so it was hard to fight against that.

Like, he would even introduce me, like, 10, 15 years later.

Oh, this is my daughter, the ballet dancer.

I'm like, dad, I haven't done that in, like, 15 years.

You know, but it was.

So your environment sometimes does not support your change.

And so sometimes it affects your friendships.

You have to start hanging out with new people or, you know, you have to find your people that support those changes.

And it's.

That's the tricky part, because other people will go, you're crazy.

You're gonna live in a trailer.

What are you doing?

You know, just things like that.

Right?

Yeah.

And it's usually their own crap that is going on in their head.

So I think.

Yeah, so I think that environment is really like, find, Find your people.

You know, if you're wanting to reinvent yourself and change something, start having conversations with people who are already doing that.

Yeah, that's.

It's so interesting.

On my side of the journey, it's very difficult for me because I don't.

I'm living in Costa Rica now, and I don't speak enough Spanish to be able to have good conversations.

I can, like, understand people, but responding to them takes, like, extra effort.

I have to know what to say.

I have to remember what the words for this.

And the only way to break through it is to continue to practice it over and over and not be embarrassed by it.

But when you take forever to think of what to say, it's like, ah, it's so hard to be able to.

To make your conversion like that.

But I can imagine that, well, communication and, like, feeling safe and, you know, we use words to connect with people and to not have access to all of that would be challenging.

But I bet there's those people that are in the same place as you, you know, so it's like finding those people that are learning Spanish that are not quite there yet, that want to be there yet.

Like, that's actually your people right now.

You know, it's.

Yeah, that or I need to go take classes and like myself.

That too.

Yeah.

Which is also an option.

Yeah.

So what changes did you make in your environment?

I know you said in the minimalism, you, you had the trailer, but did you find parks to go to?

Were they also doing the similar things and those sorts of things?

Oddly, like, a lot of people went out during the pandemic and we stopped because so many people were coming out.

We were like, this is exhausting to try all the.

When you're traveling around, like the bookings, the planning, the weather, it's very specific what you're following.

And then let alone like, my husband was working at the time and would that work for him and all of these things.

So.

And WI Fi, some of these beautiful places you go to, you're like, this is beautiful.

But there was no Starlink back then.

Like, you couldn't get WI fi access without phone service.

So that was a real problem.

But, you know, I think a lot of people in the trailer world are like retirees and they're not working and they're not minimalists.

They've got like five houses.

Right.

So.

So there was some people.

We didn't ever do any, like, meetups.

We had intended to do like tiny house people meetups and things like that, but we met some, like, along the way.

But I think it was more like online people that we were connecting with and, oh, maybe we'll meet up somewhere, or, hey, I just spotted your trailer.

Like, we had some of those moments, but we're like, oh my gosh, I just saw you at this park and hey, now over here.

And that was kind of fun to connect with other people in that way.

Yeah.

When you started really going deep into the branding and writing stuff, can you talk about how did you find your communities in that space?

I know you do a lot of in person stuff locally, but I know you also do a lot of online stuff.

So how do you balance that and figure out.

Yeah, you know, it's fascinating.

I don't.

I'm trying to think of how.

So I think this is where again, how I've mentioned sometimes you need to shift people.

And then sometimes there's people in your world that will go on the journey with you.

And I think there's people that I had met, like, in a whole other version of myself, in community, in person, and things like that that then I stayed connected with online that eventually, like, hired me to do their websites, which then introduced me to other people.

So I started, like, doing online networking.

Not in a very formal sense.

And I was like, do you know that I live in a trailer and I'm on the road?

And, like, that's.

I don't even know how I'm going to.

Like, I'm going to meet people and then leave.

Like, this is weird.

So I didn't do that.

So I realized that I needed to connect with more people online.

So really, honestly, Instagram and building there was helpful.

And then the pandemic, when that happened, there was other minimalists that I found.

Break the Twitch actually was a community that I was a part of that was really great and connected me with some people.

I joined Wandering Aimfully, which.

This is how I met you, Kevin, which is crazy.

We were living right near them, and so we were able to meet them in person, the coaches, and it just.

That led to meeting a lot of people.

So I just kind of started, you know, meandering and finding these different online communities.

And that's what, ultimately, partially with the writing, it's like, now I'm creating my own communities, so I'm gathering people from places and bringing them into community together.

Yeah, I think when we think of reinvention, it feels like a sudden move, but I think, I mean, obviously there are a lot of times when that can happen.

Like, for you in specific, when you have an injury like that that completely disrupts everything.

But finding your way into the new version of you takes a long time.

The moment that changes you can be very instant.

But figuring out how to adapt to any change is where I think the reinvention matters.

Because it's not going to be instant.

You feel like you want to change.

I want to be this new person right now, but I think we have to give ourselves.

It's that little spark.

And then it's like, are you going to listen to that spark or are you going to go, yeah, that's too impulsive.

That's crazy.

And then even, like, if you have a little spark.

So, for example, living on the road, part of living in the trailer was we were leaving Los Angeles.

My husband had been there for a very long time.

I'd been there, I think, 10 years at that stretch.

And we were just super burned out in Los Angeles.

There was a lot of people that we love, but we were just kind of over it.

It's big, it's craz, crowded, it's loud, it's polluted.

It's a lot of things, and it's amazing and creative and wonderful, but we were just done and wanted something new and didn't know where we wanted to move.

And so the trailer adventure was like, let's go explore places that we know people already we think we might want to move to.

And the irony was we ended up back in my hometown of Sacramento, which is crazy that we ended up there, but, you know, it was good to explore and see.

And so even places that I had, like, dreamed of, like, oh, I love the redwoods.

And I'm like, we're gonna go live in Humboldt County, Northern California.

This beautiful.

And we're like, actually, that doesn't quite tick all the boxes as a place to live.

You know, I don't drive, so I need someplace that's more of a city where I can walk to stores and things like that, or take a lift or whatever.

That did not exist there at the time.

So I was like, even though this is beautiful, it's a lovely place to visit, but not where I'm gonna live.

Right?

And so I think those practical considerations start to come into your.

Which can turn into naysaying, which can turn into like, here's my reinvention, and, oh, I can't do that because of.

And once you start having conversations, though, those.

That Those moments of making it real, like I was saying, other people start checking in on you and going, oh, how's that trailer life move going?

And you're like, I guess we are doing this okay, or, wow, you know what?

We hit a roadblock.

We learned something along the way.

So sometimes that.

That you thinking you want something also is, like, not necessarily what you want.

You just want something different.

Yeah.

Interesting, because when my wife came here for the first time, I think it was 20, 22 or 23.

She came for a bachelor trip, and she's like, oh, this is amazing.

You should come back with me the next time.

So we went the next year, and I'm like, oh, this is amazing.

And while we're here, I'M talking about this.

All the substack series I wrote.

And in the book that I'm writing, we're like, wouldn't it be nice to live here someday?

And then it's just, like, in the back of our minds, like, coming back to coming back.

And we tried to visit as many times as we could.

We came back the following year with my parents.

I brought my parents with us to the same spot.

Oh, I love that.

So we came three years in a row.

And then that makes it really rich.

Once you bring your parents, right?

Yeah.

Election year happened.

Costa Rica, meet the parents.

Right?

Yeah.

I love that.

That really accelerated our thoughts.

Oh, why can't we just do it now?

It's something that lingered.

And then it was only when we said, okay, we're going to do it, like, on Valentine's Day of last year, we were like, okay, we've been thinking about it.

We've done a little bit of work to start doing it.

But if we say it now, we make a list of the things we want to do.

We create a vision board of what that would look like, and we just take steps to get to that new point where we want to be.

That's the only way it was going to happen.

I love that.

So romantic.

You did that on Bell.

You know, it's funny that now that you think, well, because doing it with a partner, like, some people think reinvention is like, okay, well, if you're solo, it's easier because you don't have, you know, you don't have a kid, you don't have a partner, you don't have whatever.

You don't have a dog, you don't have something.

It's, like, easier to be.

Be flexible about your life.

Which is partially true.

But when you have, like, someone partnering with you, then you can kind of pick up the slack where the other person is, like, falling off in it.

Like, you know, I'm sure you two.

The way that you two collaborated on your journey together, similar to my husband and I, he actually wanted to leave and do the trailer thing way before I did.

And then he's like, hey, so next steps.

He's like, well, I've already had a kid.

We're not gonna have kids.

You know, we know that.

We're not gonna buy a house.

We both lived in owned houses.

We don't Want to do that?

Like, what's the next step?

You know, he's like, I've been thinking of it.

And so, like, literally the day after a wedding, he reveals this to me.

So I'm thinking we, like, move to another country or do something like that.

And I'm like, what?

I remember being just so.

I remember literally where we were sitting this restaurant, and I was, like, so upset going wasn't all this good.

Why do you want to leave?

You know?

And so it was just kind of like.

Then the idea.

I knew he wanted something different.

So then somewhere along the line, it started into.

Because I thought, I don't.

Well, also my family and I was really close to my mom.

I thought the thought of being that far away, you know, in Europe, many, many, many hours away from my mom, just was not right for me.

So then he started talking about a trailer, and we had this fantasy of, like, he's a carpenter.

So he was like, oh, we can remodel a trailer and do this whole thing.

And again, you start getting into the reality of what that actually takes to remodel.

An Airstream is a lot of money, a lot of work.

You need space to do it in.

We lived in an apartment.

We didn't have, like, a whole lot warehouse we could build in.

I'm sure we could have figured that out.

But, you know, so the idea kind of just started fizzling, and he was getting really irritated about it because he's like, forget it.

I don't even talk about it.

You're not into it.

And I was like, no, no, no.

Like, my first thing was all the logistics.

My first thing was like, well, how do we get mail?

What about jury duty?

What do we do about this?

You know, all the things, right, that some of my sensible friends would ask too, like, what about this?

And so it seemed like the idea was dying.

And then several months later, I go, can we, like, talk about this again?

He goes, well, you're not into it.

And I said, well, that's not it.

It just felt like a lot.

It felt like I wasn't ready yet, but now I'm ready to talk about it.

So then when we started talking about it, we had this moment, and I put out my hand to shake his hand, and he shook my hand.

I'm like, I've never done that in my life, let alone with my husband.

We're going to shake hands on it.

And, like, the rest was history.

Then it was like, forward motion toward living in a travel trailer.

That's so interesting that we Both had a similar experience with that.

Yeah, it's like a.

This is the moment.

And then, like, you know, we talk.

We wrote about it years ago.

Fortunately, like, I got rid of all those blogs that we talked about all these things.

I don't know why, but yeah, we were talking about, like, the first thing we sold, you know, we like, sold.

We had these pieces of art and once those went, it was like, oh, wow.

Everything else, we're just gonna, like, give it away or.

This is so easy to.

Once I think, like you said that vision board, or that moment where you're going, we know what's next, and then it's like, what doesn't fit into that just goes away, you know?

Yeah.

I don't know if it was like that for you, but it was like that for me.

Yeah.

I think any part of reinvention requires examining all parts of your current life.

Looking at, does this make sense to still do or have or whatever it might be, and can I carry it with me into this new version of me?

And a lot of times you cannot.

Like, when we move, we're like, we have so much stuff.

Because we were the opposite of you.

We were maximalists with our house.

We had a whole bunch of stuff decorating our house.

And we're like, we really have to get rid of all of this stuff if we want to move.

So, like, how do we do that?

How do we go from here to here?

And it's only through like, like a bunch of different avenues that we were able to do that.

Yeah.

When you just, I mean, whether you're a minimalist or not, I think stuff definitely keeps you from moving forward, you know?

And the biggest thing, when we were on the road, living in the trailer, people just, Their eyes would just like, light up.

Like, I wish I could do that.

And I'm like, you could, you know, and they're like, but.

And they would explain how much stuff they have.

Well, I have this house and I have this thing and I have.

I'm like, like, yeah, you know, like, like you're clearly not willing or ready.

You have to, you have to get to that point where you're actually willing to go, okay, I've got to, like, deal with my three bedroom house.

Do I keep that?

Do I rent that out?

Do I sell?

Like, what.

How all in am I going here?

You know, whether it's finances or just what you want to do with your life, you know, I think those, those choices, again, there's, there's that gap.

Like, I was wondering, like, for you, that Costa Rica spark.

Like, you clearly, like, you went to this place and you kept falling in love with it.

I think it was like Costa Rica almost, like, made you come there, it sounds like, because you're like, all right.

Because, well, your wife's probably going, like, you know, thanks to that.

Whoever had that bachelorette party, by the way, because that sounds amazing, you know, like, your wife goes.

And then she's like, okay, I love this so much.

Now you need to come back with me.

And then you guys are like, I love this so much.

Let's bring the family, right?

So that starts making this place, like, almost like a living, breathing entity for you in your life.

You get a relationship with the place, you know.

Yeah.

This is not something I thought of before, but definitely because we were thinking of other places that we might want to go, like Colombia or Mexico or any of these other places.

And we're like, this is this.

We've been there.

We loved it already.

We can meet the requirements.

A lot of people cannot.

So you have to be looking at every aspect of a change like this and determining whether or not you can actually do it.

Because if there are constraints on it, obviously, you either have to work to rectify that or you pick a different avenue.

So we were just making the decision based on a bunch of different factors.

And it's not right for everybody, but.

But for this moment in time for us, it was the place that we wanted to be.

Yeah.

And then there's that moment, like, on the other side of Reinvention where you're, like, sort of looking at your life in the rearview mirror like, I can't really go back there.

Like, that's.

I am changed.

You know, there's.

That some.

Something shifts where it's like.

And even that's what was so interesting about coming back to my hometown after all of the changes where a town where I was a child, I'm like, in the same neighborhood where I walked to school.

So that's like.

I have memories of all these things on a daily basis.

Right.

And I didn't like it before.

And I think because I changed from leaving and change and doing all these different things with my life.

I came back and I liked it more, and I'm like, maybe it's me that's changed.

You know, like, same with.

We went to Thailand many years ago, and Thailand was definitely like, a place of, you know, there's.

There's a lot of expats there, especially back.

I was like, I don't want to just be like, another expat.

Just, like, taking from Thailand.

That's not really.

At the time, what.

How it felt.

Right.

And another white lotus situation.

And seriously, the amount of, like, old white dudes in that place at the time was crazy.

Yeah.

You know, so thinking of that as, like, well, it's cool to see yourself in another culture.

It's cool to immerse yourself in something so different than your daily reality and see how you are.

And when we went there, we came back to Los Angeles, and we're like, everything's so pretty.

Everything's so clean.

And I'm like, oh, it's because we've changed from being in this place where people are nicer.

Everything is, like, chaotic, especially Bangkok.

It's like the pollution is nuts.

And, you know, you come, you're like, oh, I guess the California Clean Air act actually does something right.

Like, it just.

It makes you appreciate where you're from.

So any of those journeys, even if you, like, can't kind of go back, it might change you in a.

To a way where you can actually enjoy things you didn't before.

That's so interesting because when we went to Thailand a few years ago, it was like the complete opposite experience, because we're.

We were living in Florida, and Florida is obviously Florida, so.

Yeah.

Experience or any of that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

And, yeah.

You know, it's just.

It is what it is.

Even Orlando is nice, but it's still Florida.

Yeah.

And we had, like, this depression for, like, a few weeks after we came back.

So it's like, everyone's experience is obviously different, but we did.

We only spent, like, a couple of days in Bangkok, and I could definitely feel what you were feeling from Bangkok, for sure.

The other places were.

Were beautiful and, like, very relaxing and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think just taking.

I think it's good to take, like, to do.

If you're thinking of reinventing, do, like, a small adventure.

That's why the trailer was so great.

Because, first of all, in the trailer, you're living in your own house all the time.

You're not having to navigate Airbnbs.

New pillows, new closets.

Do they have enough pans?

Like, you're not having to navigate any of those things.

It's your bed, your pillow, your towels, always.

Right.

And so those were.

Things were the same, but everything else is different.

My husband would say it's like, you know, even you go to Trader Joe, you go to the grocery store.

And you're like, I don't know where anything is in this particular location.

This is like work.

You know, every little thing you do.

How do I get to the gas station?

How do I, you know, it's all just like work for a while.

It's not easy to just do daily life and.

But like, if you're wanting to, we would do like a month at a time so we could feel like we really lived in a place, not like just being tourists.

We wouldn't even go to tourist place.

We'd try to hunt out the kind of less, less Instagramable, less trendy places and see like, where do locals actually go hang out?

Where do they go on a Friday night?

What do they do?

Where do they have coffee?

And so like, we did fall in love with several places on.

On the road from that sense, you know, it was like, oh, we could live in this place.

We could live in this place.

But the funny thing about being in a trailer is you can only go like at good when the weather's a particular type of weather.

So, like, we didn't experience winter anywhere really.

Except we had a crazy snowstorm in Texas.

But yeah, we didn't.

We were always like in the idyllic, you know, 70 degree weather wherever we were going.

So we didn't get to see a place when it was like covered in snow or blazing hot or whatever.

Yeah, that's.

That's like, if you're gonna reinvent and move, go at like the worst weather time possible, go like the rainy season or go with the.

Because you'll see.

Like, like, okay, I still love this, right?

Yeah.

Do I want to belong here in this?

Do it.

Yeah.

For the rest of however long that next thing is gonna be.

How did you go from being a van traveler to like settling down in your hometown?

And what was it like to make that transition?

Yeah, that wasn't totally similar to what I talked about with the car accident.

It wasn't totally my choice.

So the trailer, we didn't have like this.

We're gonna go see all the 50 states.

We didn't have like a bucket list thing with that.

We, the agreement was we were gonna go explore some places.

We started revisiting places and then it was like, we're gonna keep doing this.

As long as this is fun.

That was the handshake agreement.

Part of the handshake agreement.

As long as it's fun, we're gonna keep doing it.

And so there was.

I think the pandemic really did slow things down.

We stayed in one place for almost for over a year.

We stayed in Austin, Texas, where I was from.

I had lived there before.

I had friends there, but we couldn't really see them because they were in a different pod, all that Covid stuff.

And so then when we left, we got vaccinated and got back on the road.

We were, like, excited to do these things.

And again, we, like, started doing it.

We came back to my hometown, and I just had this feeling of, I want to be near my mom.

Like, she.

You know, she was probably 72 at the time or something.

And I was like, I think I need to be here.

And actually, my dad had gotten.

My dad was not well, and he got really sick during COVID as well.

So, like, just kind of the need to come back for family created that.

It was kind of anticlimactic.

Honestly, when we ended it, we weren't really sure we were moving here.

At first.

It was just my family needed me.

That was kind of the impetus.

And then we leaned into it and said, okay, you know what?

It's pretty great here.

Like, let's just build a life here.

Let's stay here.

And then, actually, my stepdaughter came and moved here even.

So, like, the life started.

More people started coming to where we were, and I started.

What's funny, some of my online friends.

I met people through a podcast.

Someone through a podcast who lives in Sacramento.

My friend Tracy, who, you know, it was like, oh, there's somebody local that I've met online.

How cool is this?

Right?

So started just building, actually, community here with new people.

Yeah.

So you can find the people wherever you are.

It's not.

No one's.

Especially when you're an adult.

It's very difficult to meet.

Yeah.

New people to become friends with, especially when everybody there has their established friend circles and all this other stuff.

Yeah.

And very.

Yeah, I'm very extroverted.

I got, you know, I'm the person.

Like, I should have been a bartender or something.

Like, I can talk to anybody about anything.

I go to a coffee shop, and I start talking to somebody in line, and then we end up becoming friends, you know, Like, I'm.

I'm that person.

So I know that's, like, a skill set that I have.

But, yeah, it is.

The hard part is I'm jumping into these different friend groups that already exist, and they're in very different stages of their life.

So it's hard sometimes to meet people that are in the same stage of life as me.

You know, I'm turning 54.

I don't have biological children.

I have an adult stepchild, so I don't even have, like, kids in school or.

But I have that experience of parenting in a particular way.

So I'll forget, like, oh, yeah, school's happening.

Or, oh, yeah, school's out.

Where are these people?

You know, where are my buddies?

So similar to the trailer and that reinvention, I have to go, like, okay, I can reinvent myself.

Can I reach out to this person that I maybe don't know as well?

Like, someone else isn't available to me and sort of just like, I think I'm constantly looking for the, like, what's available to me.

I think that's the amount of times I've reinvented my life.

I'm like, instead of getting fixated on what's not working, which I used to do a lot of in my life, it's sort of like, all right, what can I do now?

Where can I go now?

Okay, I could go sit outside.

That's beautiful.

Okay, I don't have anything to do.

I'll just call a friend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think resourcefulness and living in the present moment are probably two of the biggest things, like, that you have control over.

As far as, like, being able to adapt to a new place or a new scenario.

It doesn't even have to be a new place.

You could be changing jobs.

You could be going from corporate to your own business owner, vice versa.

And everything that you're doing to reinvent yourself has its own set of quirks that you need to adapt to.

Yeah, and what.

I mean, what I do with branding is reinvention.

It's, you know, people are starting something new, or they may have something they created 10 years ago, and they're not really connected to it anymore.

And so when you lean into branding, you know, visual messaging, all those things, you kind of restore your.

Your love of it, your passion for it, so that you actually want to share it.

Or in that process, sometimes people, when I'm rebranding, they're like, is this actually two brands?

Am I now actually doing something different?

I was like, maybe.

You know, so even the branding process, like.

Like, it opens people up to that reinvention.

Because I'll.

I'll devil's advocate people.

I'm like, let's imagine, like, what if you shared this version of yourself online?

Like, what would that be like?

They're like, I don't know if I could do that.

You know?

And I'm like, well, let's experiment with it.

Let's see how it feels.

And.

And, you know, and then sometimes people aren't ready and they're like, cool.

Well, I'll make a substack about that, and I'll start, like, building that out gradually, you know.

But it's.

It's that spark.

I think there's definitely something in, like, listening to that spark.

And you don't have to blow your whole life up.

You can just try some things out and see how it feels.

Because you might think you want to reinvent yourself.

This is the biggest part about being a dancer, for me, is.

And leaving it for a while.

From the car accident, I no longer liked the lifestyle of it.

So even though I love dancing, it was, you know, you never have a weekend available.

You're dancing till the evening, so you can't even go out in the evenings.

You have, like, Monday off or something, which is fine.

But, like, I wanted to experience what it was like to have weekends off for a change, you know?

So I think those are some of the things that really shape some of the things we think we want to do.

And then what the lifestyle is actually like, that goes with that.

Like, what is the lifestyle of an expat where you are.

Right.

There's.

There's a lot of different things that you're dealing with.

Yeah, there's so much that.

That can be different that it gets overwhelming.

So I think the best way to handle it is probably, like, bit by bit, as you encounter things, obviously you have to make some changes.

Everything is its own issue to tackle.

So instead of trying to run a marathon, you're taking the first few steps of the marathon, and you're like, okay, what do I need to do next now that I've done that instead of letting it all pile on top of you?

Obviously sometimes there are things that you can't control, but control the things that you can and don't let the things that you can't control control you, because that just leads to more stress and, you know, all that.

There's so much you can't control.

I made a video earlier today, and, like, it just hit me when I was making this video about branding, because I was saying, you know, people ask me this all the time.

They're like, well, what if I spend all this money on my brand?

What if I do all this stuff and then I, like, change my mind?

Right?

I'm like.

Like, you might.

I don't know.

We don't know what's happening tomorrow.

You know, you don't know if you're going to be alive tomorrow.

We don't know these things.

So you have to play the game as if you know, and then see what happens.

Right?

And because certain success stories we'll hear, we're like, wow, this person didn't even.

There's someone who started Creative Mornings.

Swiss Miss is her handle because she's literally, like, the owner of her family's related to Swiss Miss.

Anyway, anyway, she started, accidentally, a temporary tattoo company that is now closed down called Tatli.

But it, like, it became huge, and she was like, I just thought I was, like, making some tattoos for my kid or something.

It just turned into this, like, whole thing, you know?

So sometimes you might have this idea that goes.

That gets, like, bigger than you, you know, and then you have to decide, like, do I still want to do that?

Like, do I want to sell that off?

Is that really me?

Has it grown beyond where I want to be involved with it anymore?

Good problem to have, I'm sure.

But, yeah, it's.

I think it's just that anything that you choose to do at this moment in time doesn't define you for the rest of your life or for however long.

You can make the decision at any point to consider a change or make the change or start the path towards change.

People get stuck on the idea of, oh, it needs to be instant, or, I want it to happen quickly, or, what if I don't do it whenever.

But you have the capacity for the most part in most circumstances to change.

Yeah, I want that.

That.

Well, on that instant thing is there are ways to get instant gratification.

Like, there is the moment of, like, what's a drink you could drink that's like.

Tastes like Costa Rica.

You know what I mean?

Like, what's the way that you could, like, bring yourself back there right now?

Is there.

You know, can you watch a movie?

Can you.

Sometimes I'll do that.

I call it, like, you know, armchair traveling or whatever.

I'm like.

Like, oh, I want to go on vacation to Italy, but I'm not going to go to Italy right now.

So is there a movie about Italy I can watch that has Italian music in it?

Just immerse myself in that feeling, you know, and it's.

I think there are things that we have access to in that way that can.

That.

That can create that in the moment for you, that can create that sort of inspiration, you know, I've been doing a thing lately with my own creativity that I used to do when I was choreographing, and I don't know Why I didn't do this for the longest time, but, like, I will watch a movie or a show, and then I'll listen to, like, the soundtrack and, like, watch.

Listen to the podcast.

Like, I'll kind of immerse myself in something.

So I just recently did this with heated rivalry, which I've reheated, as they call it, several times, and, you know, listen to the music, listen to certain, like, Instagram accounts that, like, go deep into the psychology of the show and the cinematography of the show, and, like, like, just immersing yourself in something you enjoy, I think is.

Is amazing.

Instead of just going, oh, that's sad.

I watched that movie, and now that's not my life.

It's like, how can you bring more of that into your life?

Yeah.

It's like tricking your brain into thinking it's experiencing the thing that you want to experience, and that's however little or much of that thing that you can do.

And obviously, taking a trip to Italy is not that easy.

Obviously, you can plan ahead and do it and get the funds or whatever and plan your trip.

You can also go instantly if you wanted to.

So it all depends on your circumstances, like, what you're willing to do, what you're willing not to do, and all these other things.

So reimagine is it's like a constant evaluation and change and, like, dealing with it as things come.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You know, I was telling, like, that dopamine hit whatever when you're like, I don't know, change your lipstick color, Change something.

Like, just give yourself a little bit of a different perspective in some way, shape or form.

I move my desk around all the time because I'm like, I want to see what life's like.

If I look out that window versus this window.

Oh, wow.

I'm so much more productive now that might.

A month later, I might need to switch directions because the light's changing or the plants are changing or something.

But how can you keep switching your perspective?

And that is something that came from living in a travel trailer, because even though our house stayed the same, it was parked in all these different places.

So sometimes we'd have a view of someone else next to us and all their junk, you know, all their, like, travel stuff.

Sometimes we'd have this beautiful, like, mountain vista right out the window, and it would.

It would be interesting to be in the same place and then be experiencing these different cues.

Yeah.

I mean, any small change can make a huge difference.

Like, do instead of doing this, can I do this?

So instead of watching Instagram, scrolling through Instagram and watching TikTok, and I go walk outside and see what I notice.

Can I, you know, eat something different than I would normally eat and experience maybe a culture that I haven't thought about before?

There's so many different ways to, even in very small bursts, to reinvent yourself every day.

Yeah, yeah.

Can you talk about the impetus for writing a memoir?

Because I'm in the process myself.

Where are you in this process?

Gosh.

Okay.

Yeah.

So where I'm in the process of writing a memoir is I'm about to start a new substack for.

Took me years.

I wanted to write it.

When I got in the car accident 30 years ago, I was written about in the newspaper here in Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee.

A story was written because I was a ballet dancer.

I was kind of a local celebrity.

And so someone wrote this feature article about me.

And then he even said to me, he goes kind of jokingly, but he's like, well, when you come back to dance, I'll write another article about like, ha ha ha.

Well, two years later I started to come back to dance and he wrote a follow up article about me.

And so I actually went and revisited some of that.

And it was so.

It was like at the time I was like, this isn't really the full story I want to tell or the way that it's perceived isn't quite it.

Right.

And people were like asking me, like, you should write that.

You should write that in stores like that.

I don't know something about.

That's not it.

And so then I, like, over the course of my life, I started noticing that these defining moments came externally, like, you know, death, divorce, car accident, like jarring things happening.

And I started noticing the similarity.

And it really happened, honestly, when my mom died last year, because my mom was writing with me a lot also.

We would do writing challenges together.

Like.

Like we were both passionate about writing.

And when she died, I had this like very immediate moment.

Like, I'm like, oh, it's not a memoir.

It's about grief.

And so it's like a grief story.

And so I'm going to create it more around being like sort of all like the different, the different experiences that I had, like telling these different stories of, you know, devastation.

And then what.

How I reorganized around that, what I.

How I emerged.

Like, I have multiple tattoos that are like resurrection symbols.

I'm not religious, I'm an atheist.

But I've realized that I have these symbols because they're sort of like rising from the ashes, they're, like, taking destruction and then, like, creating something new.

And so the book, the memoir is going to be that combined with, like, writing prompts.

So it's gonna be like part workbook, part memoir with a focus on grieving and change.

Like, all kinds of change.

Have a loss.

Loss element involved in them.

And then, like, what comes out of that loss is oftentimes surprising.

When you.

When you do reinvent yourself.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

I think almost every reinvention that I know of, like you said, came from an external output.

Because usually when we're constantly in our life, we're like, oh, I can put off something or I can do that.

I can consider that later, like when we were here, and we're like, oh, maybe one day we can open a bnb.

Obviously we can wait.

Or something external happens.

Oh, this changes my whole perspective on my.

What I'm doing with my life, where I am in my life, what I am able to do, and whether or not I want to make a change.

So I think sometimes we need that to force us to make the change.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, it's fun because you, like, people say it's always better to, like, leave someone than to be left if you know it's not working.

How crappy people feel when someone leaves them are like, yeah, I would.

I should have left him before anyway, because I was like, I wasn't satisfied either or something.

Right.

But we're waiting for that.

We're waiting for that external shoe to drop or something to happen to us to affect a change.

We get fired.

You know, something like that.

Have someone dies, something happens.

So, yeah, to be at the.

To kind of notice when things are changing.

Also for me, what's tricky around that is because I've gotten.

I've had so many things like that happen that I have a little bit of a hyper vigilance around, like, oh, let me change something before it.

It changes for me, you know, And I have to remind myself, like, things are going to change all the time.

I can't control things.

Like, I don't know what's going to happen next.

Right.

And you just have to keep, like, keep reinventing yourself.

Really use that.

Use that as an invitation to reinvent yourself.

When something is destroyed, there is like this space that opens up, similar to minimalism.

Like when you get rid of things and you start seeing, like, what's actually important for you.

When the things are out of your way, you see, like, who you really are and what you really want next.

Yeah.

Is There any specific thing that people can do in the process of reinvention to help them through it?

Well, writing it out, that's, I think, the main.

The main thing, honestly, that I have again, me coming back and falling in love with writing and the spaces that I create for writing are spaces of self reflection.

So if you're going through something, like I said, the minute you say it to someone else, it starts to become like, expectations or, what are you gonna do?

Or when are you gonna do that?

Or whatever.

Like, if you're experimenting with reinventing, start writing about it for a while and seeing, like, what comes out of that.

Like, keep it for you for a while.

Don't, like, give it away.

Don't publish it.

Don't, you know, let it just.

Just be kind of your own thing.

And.

And that keeps.

That keeps it from other people's expectations and opinions, because that can sway you.

That can, like, okay, cool.

Yeah, I'm getting all these yeses.

I'm gonna go do that.

And you're not really necessarily ready to maybe.

Or you don't.

You're just kind of experimenting, right.

You're like, let me just.

And then you have to even say things like that, like, I'm kind of just experimenting with this.

I'm not ready to buy a house yet, or whatever that thing is.

Right.

Like, I'm just still working on my vision board.

I'm still getting clear on is.

So let yourself kind of marinate in that.

In that process.

We can oftentimes rush things, especially in the moments of change.

We can rush it.

Yeah.

And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad.

But the only way to know whether or not the thing that you're thinking about is right is like you said to put it all down because otherwise it'll stay just scrambled up in here.

And your thoughts and it's like, there's too many things in here.

Yeah.

That you cannot decipher because you have not, like, given them the space or any of that stuff to figure out whether or not it makes sense.

It's interesting what you say about the.

People want to rush to it too fast.

Right.

Because there's.

It's.

I'm going to mess it all up.

But there's something in, like, neuroscience, like, our brains crave certainty, so we don't.

Uncertainty is very uncomfortable.

And so even if we picture, like, the worst case scenario, we'd rather picture the worst case scenario because at least it's certain.

And especially if we've had traumatic experiences.

I have ptsd.

So it's like, especially if you've had traumatic experiences, your brain is going to immediately settle on the most certain thing is the worst thing.

Right.

And so that's at least better than not knowing.

And so there's something about, like, letting your.

Giving yourself permission to go, it's okay to not know right now.

What happens if I don't know the answer?

What if I didn't know what was happening next?

Like, to just sort of ask yourself those questions and, like, go, why am I thinking about calling this person?

Maybe I should have a conversation and, like, see what comes out of that.

Or.

I remember reading this one article, let me go, like, explore that more or, you know, something like that.

I think it.

Letting yourself sit in the uncomfortableness is not easy, but it.

That's where you don't just go with, like, impulse and erratic behavior and blowing your life up when you don't really need to and things like that, you know?

Yeah, just figure it out.

That's.

I think the only thing that we can really do is, like, determine whether or not it actually is something that makes sense.

And there's so many ways to do that.

There's no one way to figure it out.

But I think internally, we all know whether or not something is right for us or not.

Our intuition tells us there's nothing that we can do to prepare our intuition for it just says, okay, this is what you need to do.

And I think the only way to figure that out is to.

To give it, like, the thought and the care that every big decision like that needs.

Yeah, we often know what's wrong first thing for us, too.

I think there's that.

There's that moment of, like, ugh, I don't like this.

This is not good.

This is not for me.

We don't necessarily know what we want yet.

But then it's like, sometimes there's that, like, how do you get that out of the way?

Like, same with minimalism or organizing or things like that.

It's like when you make space for something, you can allow new things to come in when you're still in your old environment and having the old conversations and doing all these things.

It's like, it's hard to reinvent in that place.

I just.

I went to a memorial and I saw many people that I hadn't seen in many years that knew me as a ballet dancer.

And.

And there wasn't really a lot of conversation about, like, who are you now?

What are you doing?

Some of them may see me on Instagram, but not all of them.

And it was kind of funny to notice we were all still relating to each other, like 30 years ago.

Like a reunion might happen.

We weren't like, who are you now?

What have you become?

Like that.

It was so weird that that didn't come into the conversation.

And I remember just leaving that experience.

Like, these people still only know me as that thing from 30 years ago.

And I don't know that.

That I don't.

Like, some will I'll take into my life.

Right.

But others, I'm like, it's okay if they just know me as that, you know, like, that's fine.

Yeah.

Not everyone needs to.

To be up.

Not everyone needs to be up to date or be in my life still or any of those things.

Yeah.

Sometimes we just evolve beyond what.

What we were before.

Yeah.

It's fine to be what it is.

Obviously you can go back, and if you want to reconnect with people, you can.

But I guess up to every person to decide whether or not it makes sense.

Yeah.

And sometimes, you know, if you've, like.

I've reinvented myself so many times, people are like, kind of like, I don't even know who you are anymore.

But on the.

On the other side, I'm still like, my personality is still there.

I'm still me.

I'm probably a lot more me than I was back then, you know, Unless, hopefully, as I get older too, I think we become more of ourselves.

So that's the reinvention as we're, like, shedding all these.

These shoulds.

Shedding the shoulds.

There's a workshop.

Yeah, we're like.

Especially for women, people socialize female.

There's a lot of people pleasing.

There's a lot of, like, you know, what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to act.

And.

And I think getting yourself free of that is.

Is huge for reinvention.

Yeah.

You talk about this all the time when we.

You have us.

Right.

Like, what are the expectations of us.

Us.

And does it actually need to be that way or can we think of it differently?

Yeah, there's so many ways to think of what we've been conditioned to believe, especially considering everything is literally made up.

Like the whole world completely made up.

So there's so many things that we let bother us or get to us or defeat us or whatever it is, but everything is literally just made up.

We came from.

It's all right.

We're literally living in a time right now where it feels like things are so.

I mean, AI.

Especially things are literally made up.

Right.

There's this, like, is this real?

Is that real?

There's very.

The ground feels very thin underneath our feet or something.

There's sort of this, like, everything's changing on a dime.

Everything's just happening really fast.

I mean, technology in general, as it moves, as it's moved faster and faster in life.

Yeah.

It's just so unsettling.

And so to find your ways to steady yourself amidst the unsettling, I think is what's important.

Important, especially like.

Especially if you're in the midst of a reinvention.

Like, what are your touch points?

What are your, you know, if you're moving to a new country, do you want to fully immerse yourself in reinvention at that moment or do you want to go, I'm going to go have my usual coffee beverage that I have because that's like a thing that's just me or something, you know, I'm not.

I don't have to experiment with everything at once, you know?

Yeah.

So we can just choose what parts we want to change at what time.

So I think that's.

That's a good way to end our advice portion.

Yeah.

You have any other examples of people that, you know, have reinvented themselves, that you have enjoyed their story or you think it's interesting?

Yeah, actually, my client is on subsect right now.

Dr. Nadia, her name is.

She just moved.

She started writing about her journey.

They just moved to Mauritius from Arizona in the States.

And I didn't even know what happened.

I was like, why are you in Mauritius?

What happened?

So I'm glad that she's telling the story on Substack.

And she even did sort of a piece on like, here's what I should have done or here's what I wish I would have done different, which I love that she already had that awareness of.

And most of them were around, like, I wish I would have spent more time with people.

I wish I wouldn't have made this so stressful.

I could have planned this in a better way to not, like, panic all at the last minute and things like that.

She's definitely someone.

And then, you know, of course I'm inspired by you and cozy Costa Rica.

I'm like, I. I haven't been to Costa Rica yet.

I feel like if I go there, I'll probably move there in a way.

I'm like, I'm not ready to move there yet.

I can't visit.

It's just possible.

It's great here.

Yeah, that's so Amazing.

What advice would you.

What final advice would you give to people on their reinvention journeys?

What final advice?

You know, don't listen to the naysayers.

Like, there's going to be those people that are going to.

Again, it's usually coming from their own crap.

If they're saying, like, you shouldn't do that, and here's why.

They're not you.

They don't know you.

You know, it's none of your business.

Right.

So if you start, like, listening to the people that are inspired by what you're doing, start, like, giving those people, even if those people are, like, close to you that are naysayers, you know, say, hey, if you're not on board with this, like, please just don't say anything.

Or, like, this is what I'm doing.

Right.

So seems easy to do.

It's not necessarily easy to do, but I think the more you can really, like, let go of the people that are, like, here's why you shouldn't do that, and start finding your people that are doing what you're doing that will help bring you forward again, like, getting you out of your environment.

Yeah.

I think a lot of times it's just like, switching negativity positively can make a huge difference, because if you let other people dissuade you, you could be resentful of them.

So it's better not to hear anything.

Yeah.

And the last piece on that, too, is that this I learned from my therapist.

Have a great therapist.

She was like, other people are afraid of you changing, because the people in your life, if you change, you might leave them.

You might not be in their life anymore.

You might not.

And so you'd think they'd want to be on board, but instead what happens to them is like, oh, I feel less than, because you're doing something different now.

And so you can invite ways to bring them along.

You can start like, let me show you pictures of where I'm going.

Let me.

Like, you can invite them along and invite them on the journey even though they're not going with you.

Oh, amazing advice.

Well, Bridget, this has been a lot of fun.

Yeah.

We've talked about forever.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

We could go on like, like this forever, but where can people keep up to date with you and all your reinventions?

Yes.

When is my podcast episode coming out?

I know, right?

So, yeah, my.

My podcast is launching tomorrow, the Deep Dig, which will be on substack, and then your episode is coming out.

I haven't.

I haven't timelined it in yet.

How I'm exactly how I'm ordering this.

But there's going to be one a week and then one guest a week and one of me per week so on substack and then I'm on Instagram a lot at Bridget Baker Branding and my website is bridgetbakerbranding.com.

Yeah.

Well, thanks again for coming on and thanks for everyone who's tuning in or who is watching the replay.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, bye, everyone.

Bye.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're thinking about reinventing yourself or you're already in the middle of it, you're in the right place to follow along.

As I write my memoir and read about our move to Costa rica, head to thestandoutcreatives.com if this episode resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear that starting over is possible.

You might be the reason they take the first step.

If you want to chat about your reinvention, send me a message on Instagram at standoutcreativebusiness.

Until next time, keep reinventing.