Balancing Work and Wanderlust: 4 Tips for Digital Nomads

I’m recording today’s episode, sitting in our Airbnb in London. Now, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know I prefer working at co-working spaces. So why am I sitting in our Airbnb and not ata a co-working space? And why am I not out right now with my family? Who’s seen the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum? Well, because I live in reality and like it or not, even location, independent business owners have to give up some things and sightseeing as they’re traveling around because we have to work. In today’s episode, you’ll discover the best tips and tricks and advice I’ve got for you to know how to balance full time travel with work and family time. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids who I said right now are out at the British Museum seeing all kinds of amazing things, one of which is the Rosetta Stone. Now, I wish I could be there, but we’ve had a crazy couple of weeks. Just two weeks ago we were in Santiago, Chile, but we jumped up to the United States and we were there for ten days see family over Thanksgiving. And we had things every day we had to do. We downsized our storage unit. So we spend a day getting rid of some more stuff and we downsize from a ten by 20 foot unit to a ten by ten foot unit. And for those of you that are listening, that are, you know, metric users, I have no idea what that is in meters, but it’s we’re now down to a ten by ten and really we could fit all of our stuff in a five by ten, but that would mean stacking things behind each other and I would hate that. So we’re at a ten by ten, which is going to be where we stay for a while in our storage unit. So anyway, coding that where we’re here to talk about today, I in addition to that though, we had Thanksgiving, we had to see different people in the family we wanted to visit some friends with shopping to do so. We had all kinds of things happening. Then we jumped on a red eye and flew to London. And we have all the process now of getting set up here and things like that, even though we’re only going to be here for a week. So we’re not doing a lot to set up before we head on to our next location, which, by the way, we just decided this morning and booked our flight and Airbnb this morning for the next location. As I record this, it’s Wednesday afternoon and we will be flying out Sunday. We had no idea when we got here that where we going or how we’re getting there. We decided this morning after being in London for about 24 hours that we would head to Belfast, Ireland. Pretty excited about that. I’ve never been there. So it’ll be a a new country and then we’ll be there for about a month. So how do we do this? You know, how do we balance all of this stuff? And I’ll just be honest, I’ve never been a fan of the idea of work life balance, you know, and there is a really great book out there I read several years ago. The author’s name is Andy Stanley. The book is called Choosing to Cheat. It’s not on my top book list of books that I think are must read, but it’s a really good book. But the premise of the book can be summed up this I’ll give you the executive the Eric Dengler executive summary of Choosing to Cheat. You are going to have to choose to cheat. You’re either going to cheat on your family or you’re going to cheat at work. There you go. That’s the summary of the book. Obviously, he is recommending choose to cheat at work and he has some specifics on how to set up boundaries and things like that. And that’s great if you have a 9 to 5 job in a team. So if you have a 9 to 5 job and a big team to delegate things throughout, you can have an A personal assistant, great book, good things read. But if you don’t have those things, then his advice is pretty useless. So we have to take the concept and figure out how do we apply it to our lives? What’s the principle behind the practice? As you as I say now, the principle behind the practice is something I’ve talked about at the end of other podcast episodes. If you’re new to listening to the podcast, you’re going to very quickly find out that leadership is my favorite topic to talk about. It’s why I end every single episode with a leadership tip. Of the week because it’s it’s everything, to be honest. In my opinion, leadership is your business will never grow beyond your leadership capacity, your leadership abilities, your leadership skills determine the capacity that your business can reach. And so you have to constantly be developing your leadership. Even if you’re a company of one, you still have to develop your personal leadership skills. So at the end of every episode, I give a leadership tip of the week. So stick around for that in this one, because I’ve got one for today, of course, but one that I talked about in the past is that we have to wrestle with the principle behind the practice before we try copying somebody, especially somebody that’s having success. Of course. Why else would you copy anybody that’s not having success? That was a really dumb thing to say. See, this is why I should write more of my script out and not just have some bullet points. Anyway, if you’re going to copy somebody, you really want to make sure that you understand not what they’re doing. You want to know why they are doing what they’re doing. See, tactics are useless for you if you don’t love the tactic and if you don’t know what’s happening before the specific tactic and after, it’s all part of a strategy. And you have to know why that strategy is working. Otherwise, when it breaks, you won’t know what broke. You won’t know why it’s no longer working. So never sign up for a program a course that teaches what to do without very thoroughly explaining why to do it that way. In fact, my 90 day accelerator that I have where I help people go from, you know, an unhealthy or no business model to 90 days later having a profitable business model, we spend most of our time working on the why the elements work. You have that because I want everybody understand it doesn’t matter what you decide to do really. It doesn’t matter if you decide to do web design or copywriting or video editing or content creation as your business product. It doesn’t really matter which one of those you decide to do. You decide to do all kinds of things as a location, independent business. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to do cold outreach content, referral networking, paid ads for your lead gen strategy like it doesn’t it doesn’t matter. And so we don’t get into the specifics of what to do, because if I teach you, well, here’s what to do. Do this, do this, do this, and you have a business, well, that will work and you’ll have something for a short period of time. But as things change and develop and grow, something’s going to break and you won’t know why. And you’ll just go out and try to learn a new what you have to have the why behind the what if you really want to have success long term. So it’s really, really super important that we understand the principle behind the practice of things. Okay. So that’s a a several minute tangent about that. And I know it’s not why you’re listening. You’re like, Hey, I thought we were going to talk about how to, you know, be location independent and how to balance time is something that. And that’s what we’re going get into. Now, I’ve got four things for you, four ideas that I’ve learned through three years of full time travel as a as an entrepreneur of what we’ve had to do based upon the principle behind the practice of choosing to cheat. So number one of four, you have to accept reality. And here’s what I mean by this. I love sight seeing. It’s great. It’s we’re able to see so many things as we travel around the world. But, I mean, I have responsibilities. I can’t just shrug off responsibilities because there’s something I want to go see. Business doesn’t work that way. My business doesn’t work that way. I would have loved to have seen the Rosetta Stone. I mean, the thing that was eight that people used to crack decipher different languages, you know, I mean, hieroglyphics and Latin and, you know just not Latin, but ancient Greek. And I’ll be honest, I don’t even know what the languages are. I just know that there’s three languages on the Rosetta Stone. Each language does the exact same thing. And once they figured out, Hey, wait a second, these three things are the same, they’re saying the same thing. They were able to interpret the other languages based upon the other two languages, and it opened up a world of knowledge and information in history. And it’s been significantly a significant impact for for humankind understanding the past. So it’s really great. And I would have loved to have learned more about the Rosetta Stone. I’ve heard about it. I’ve seen pictures of it. But I just couldn’t go. I mean, we we’ve been busy traveling. And while I really want to go see that, I really have to work. And so I had to say no to that opportunity so I could say yes to my responsibility of doing the things I do for the business. So I spent about 4 hours this morning catching up on email and messages and things like that. I did a couple of client projects. I scheduled some meetings with clients, I coached my team, and now I’m creating this. I’m creating a free piece of content to put out there to help other people become location independent business owners. And you might be thinking, well, wait a second. What’s the point of that? How was I was you creating this podcast episode going to help you make money? Well, to be honest, because as more people listen to this, some of you reach out to me and you ask for a consultation and we jump on Zoom. And at the end of it, you decide to pay me for coaching. And so that’s why I do this. It’s part of my lead gen strategy for digital nomad entrepreneur. And so I’ve got to record podcast episodes and edit them and put them out there and, and, and I enjoy doing it. I would have enjoyed, I’ll be honest, I would have enjoyed going to see the Rosetta Stone more, but. I had to make the choice. And then my wife messaged a little bit ago, which is, hey, we’re going to go to this Christmas market. You are you to a point where you can come and meet up with us. And I had to say no. And it hurt to say no. I felt that I wanted to say yes, but I just couldn’t do that. So number one is you have to accept reality. There are times my family gets to go out and have experiences and I don’t and I don’t resent them for that. I love the fact they get to do that, do it, and it’s why we live this lifestyle now. I get to do a lot of them, but got to get through all of them. So number one is just accept reality. You’re not going to get to do everything just because you have location independence. One day you may build your business up to the point where you have time independence and you can do that. But to get to that, that, you know, it’s kind of the trifecta of of what we’re all aiming for. We want to have financial independence, location independence and time independence. But time independence comes at the end. It’s the last thing you get it. I’m working towards that, but we’re all working towards that. And so, you know, the reality is I have location independence now building to financial independence, which will give me then time independence, but we’re not there yet. So number one, accept reality of where you are and be responsible and say no to things that give you space to say yes to things you have to say yes to. All right. Number two, here’s one way we balance this. As my wife and the kids, we’re getting ready to leave. I tasked my kids. I did air quotes with tasks. I task my kids. I asked my kids to take a couple of pictures and specifically said, hey, I want to know about the Rosetta Stone, I want to know about it. And so come back ready to share with me what it is, who found it, how long ago, what was the impact? And so I’ve given my kids a home school assignment. It’s part of our concept of world schooling with our kids. And my wife already told me they’ve got all kinds of pictures and some video and I’ve got shows this off. And then where they were at the British Museum, they went to the Greek area and my wife is like our 14 year old daughter was telling me all kinds of things. She’s been studying art history and she studied a lot. And this last semester, if you will, this last period of time about Greek art, and she’s like, she was able to tell me a lot of stuff. And so she’s got some pictures of things that she’s going to show me. So one way to balance this out is if you can’t go and you’ve got kids with you, well, tell them to come back ready to show you about it, to give you experience. It’s going to help you still learn the things you want to learn, not to see pictures of the things you want to see. And that’s okay. But you’re going to be teaching your kids and it’s this is one way to get them to learn without it being school. And it’s one tactic that we use to help our kids learn, to help them get more out of their experiences. They come back and share with me about their experience through pictures and facts and things that they learn and I will enjoy, or at least pretend to enjoy listening to all of it. Some of it I really enjoy and some of it I’ll be honest, I’ll just be setting them on. Yeah, that’s really cool. Wow, buddy, that’s. That’s great. I’ll move on. All right. So, number one, accept reality. Number two, task your kids with learning about what you want to see and having them share it. Share about it when they come back to see you. All right. So I’ve got two more to share with you. But real quickly, before I do that, I do want to invite you to make sure you head over to the website, go to Dani podcast, Dani Digital Nomad, Entrepreneur D and E podcast dot com for slash score card. If you put in that new URL or click on it in the show notes, you’re going to come to a four minute assessment that you’re going to answer some questions and at the end of it, you’re going to see exactly how your business is stacking up. As far as your business model and your five core business systems, which one of these you’ve got nailed and where you need to focus on next. So if your business isn’t quite making the revenue you want it to be or you think it’s not making the profit margin, you’ve got your experience, at least in famine, where you’ve got periods where there’s lots of revenue coming in and periods where there’s no revenue coming in. If you just feel like. This isn’t working, and I’m a little lost on what to work on next. Like, what do I work on to move the needle forward the fastest? If you would love to know that, then that’s why I created the assessment. Danny Podcast dot com forward slash score card. I used to help people figure this out by getting on coaching calls with people just one on one roadmap calls. And I’ve gotten rid of most of those because I just found myself answering. But having people pay me to answer the same questions I would ask everybody, and then at the end help them see, see some things. And I thought, there’s got to be I can do this. That is, that saves people time or saves you money, saves me time and really helps people out the same way. And that is why I created the assessment. So head over to Danny podcast dot com slash scorecard. All right. So back to the list here of things that I’ve got talking about today, how to balance full time travel, location, independence with being a business owner. All right. So number one was just accept reality. You’re not going to have everything you want. Build a bridge, get over it. And if you’re right. Well, but I want everything. Well, one day you can. Right now, though, your reality is your reality. And only an idiot would ignore reality to their own detriment. So accept reality. You can’t do everything that you want to do. You’re still going to have to work even when you’re location independent. Number two, ask your kids with learning about what you want to see and have them come back and teach you about it. All right. So number three, what we have found works really, really well is we build in longer periods of stay between fast periods of travel. So by this will take like we’ve been in a fast period of travel the last really two months. And so next stop come Sunday will be a longer period of stay now longer for us. We need to really be park somewhere for four, maybe six weeks. And we just we sit there for a while and I’m all out working, working, working. Marissa and the kids are school, school, school. And then we’ll jump into a fast period of travel or we’ll jump more frequently, we’ll have more sightseeing, I’ll work less hours and do more sightseeing, but I kind of have to make up for that with periods of longer stay some place. So for us we have found this rhythm of longer periods of stay between fast periods of travel. Now I know a lot of single digital nomads that are just fast travel, fashionable fast travel. That’s great. I know families that well. They’ll do a gap year and they’ll travel around the world and one year moving every week, you know, sometimes even even faster. And that’s fine, but they’re doing it for just a year. Well, we could do that for just a year if we wanted to, but that’s our goal, isn’t it, to do a gap year? So what works for a gap year? Family doesn’t work for us. And so, you know, we’re just we’re doing it doing a different and that’s one of the great things about this lifestyle is there’s lots of ways to do it. And so if you’re interested in that side of it, if you’re interested in the lifestyle side, you know how we’re doing schooling, where we’re at, where we’re traveling, what we’re seeing in the world. If you just want to see some of the things we’re seeing in the world, then follow us on our Instagram. Family of dishes, family of dishes. And over there, you can also get connected to my wife’s podcast, Digital Nomad Family podcast. You’re listening to Digital Nomad Entrepreneur, and you can also listen to Digital Nomad Family. That’s my wife’s podcast again on the family travel side of things. And in this podcast I focus on the business money making management kind of a side of, of this lifestyle. So where are we at? We’re getting ready. Go on. Number four, number one, except reality. Number two, task your kids with learning about what you want to see share with you. Number three, build in longer periods of stay between fast periods of travel. And number four is alternate places with lots to see and do with places with less to see and do so. Here’s how this kind of works out for us when we got on the plane. So this is Wednesday. We got on the plane Monday evening in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And we flew through the night and got into London about 930 in the morning, about 40 minutes faster than was estimated for our flight, because we had some really solid tailwinds. And so that was exciting. So we made it across the ocean in a real quick time and we landed. And we at that point and for several days thought for sure on this coming Saturday, we’d be heading to Greece for the rest of the year. We thought we would go to Greece for 4 to 6 weeks and then possibly to Morocco after that. And as we were on the underground tube heading from the airport into, we were headed from Heathrow over to the North Kensington stop. A lady sat across from us and she had been she had her luggage with her. So she had been traveling as well. And I just I asked her, are you coming back to the United Kingdom? Is this where you live? You passing through? And she was like, Nope, she lives here. She was just visiting her son in Belfast, Ireland. I said, Oh, we’ve thought about going to Belfast. And I kind of gestured down the road to my if it was me and all of our our four kids and and my wife and she goes, You’re available of all the family. And I’m like, Yeah, there’s six of us. And she was like, Oh, my goodness. And what do you do for a living that you can travel like this? And I guess that’s the first question we almost always get and after we talk about that. Then she said, Well, she says, I don’t know about going to Belfast for a month. She goes, There’s plenty to do for a week. But I don’t know, about a month and to start laughing because I know I shouldn’t be saying that. My son works for the tourism ministry there and in Northern Ireland in Belfast. And she goes. So you probably want to be doing a better commercial. And I was like, Nope. That’s actually a great commercial for us because we’ve been going fast, fast, fast, fast. We were about to head to Greece, Athens, with all kinds of things to see in Athens. I mean, come on, there’s so much to see there that I had been feeling a little like, oh, my goodness, oh, this is going to be hard. I’ve got you know, it’s the beginning of the year coming. You know, I’ve got we’re ending the year up. And so we’ve got a lot of stuff to do to wrap up the year. And then, you know that January is a really busy time for us and I was just starting to feel a little overwhelmed with that And after she shared that, my wife and I talked last night and we were like, maybe that’s the perfect place to go. And so my wife did some research on Airbnb, found some great prices on airline tickets, and we just decided that the next place we’re going, we’ll be able to hit up Greece in the future. But for now, we’re going to go to Belfast because we wanted a place to go. That’s it’s a new country. It’s a it’s a neat place. But we wanted a place with less to see and do because we can be there for several weeks since there’s less to see and do, we can spread out the things overall that that time on Saturdays and Sundays. And I can work Monday to Friday and really cram in some hours plus have plenty of time in the evening for family time and things like that and really keep a nice balance but get things done. So it takes a little bit of planning on the travel side. You’ve got to think through and be ready to to pivot your plans. And now again, why why we’re able to do this because we’re not fitting in and trying to fit in a gap year, gap year, completely different story. But for us, the way we’ve chosen to travel, alternating places with lots to see, with places with less to see, is, is really, really great. And so we and we kind of mix that with three a little bit alternating the longer periods of stay between past periods of travel and mixing in places less to see with places with more to see. All right. So there you go. Those are my four tips and tricks for you today on how to balance location independence with that that freedom of full time travel. If you choose to be a full time traveler, how do you balance full time travel and running a business with family time? Those are my top tips right there. Now this week’s leadership tip of the week before I share this. Real quickly, if you’ve made it to this part and if even just one of those four you found that helpful, I would ask you if you could do me a favor. If you felt you got something out of me from one of those four, then I’m asking for something in return. And that is a review. If you could leave a review of the podcast wherever you listen to podcast, I really would appreciate it. So make sure you subscribe right now. Make sure you subscribe so you get notifications the next episode, but but also leave a review that way that is so helpful and lets people see that people are listening, helps you find the podcast and it means a great deal to me. So leave a review if you’ve got some constructive criticism. If you want to go, Eric, you really should skip this a little bit because you had some tangents in this one. Well, email that to me. All right. Email me constructive criticism Eric at D and E podcast dot com or DM it to me follow me on LinkedIn send me a message there at LinkedIn. So I’d love to get constructive criticism back that way. Review’s not really the place to leave constructive criticism because I’ll just be annoyed and will ignore it, to be honest. So leave a review of positive things and but also feel free to send me constructive criticism. If you’ve got constructive criticism, you send it to me a DeAnn or email. I’ll definitely listen to it. Taken under advisement. All right. So this week’s leadership tip of the week, one thing that helps me out a great deal, living this lifestyle and keeping more balance and giving me more time to do things with my family is having the T now when you have a team, you’re going to start out with employees, but you eventually want to transition to having leaders on your team. And here’s the big difference between having employees and having leaders. It’s what you delegate to them. So employees, we have some employees on our team, of course. And I started out with just employees. Employees. They we give an employee what, how and when we say, okay, Mr. or Mrs. Employee, this is this is what we want you to do. This is how we want you to do it. And this is what it needs to be done. All right. So we’ve got an employee that is our number one tech support. He’s our number one and number two and three. He’s the entire text. 14. When we’ve got one full time employee that provides customer tech support and we say, okay, here’s what we want you to do. We want you to check this email three times a day. We want you to fix client’s support issues. Here’s how you’re going to fix them. Here are standard operating procedures. You’re going to look in the standard operating procedures. You’re going to look for the problem. You fix it. If there isn’t a documented process to fix it, you’re going to create a documented process as you’re fixing it so that we build out our SOPs over time And when you’re going to have this done is you can have it done by the end of the next business day. The here’s what I want you to do. Here’s how I want you to do it and here’s what you want it to be. Here’s what I want it done by. So that’s what an employee is given leaders, different leaders, they get where and why. So when I sit down with one of our leaders, director of Web Services or director of marketing, I’ll say, okay, here’s where I’m wanting to see us get to as a company. I want to see us get to the point where we have a documented process for handling all of our tech support issues that come in. And the reason is, as we grow and add more team members, their life is easier because they have all these things they can look at. And our first value for our customers is first class quality experience. And first class experiences are created with predictable experiences. We, you know, and we want to communicate on a cadence. And so our tech team needs to know what to communicate and when and and we want to understand our client’s point of view. And so for them, a tech support issue is a big deal, even if we don’t see it as a big deal. And and so we got to have all of this process documented. So this is where we’re headed. This is why it’s important. And now I need you to come back to me with what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and when it’s going to be done by. And so with leaders, I meet with my leaders one on one, and I am regularly giving my leaders what we call a tip. And then for the tip, I give them a here’s where we’re wanting to go, here’s why I want us to get there. So there you go. It’s in your hands. From there, out they come up with what, how and when I reserve the right to give some coaching, they come back with questions and things like that. That’s that’s me leading them, coaching them. But we would never do that with an employee. With an employee, we always say, here’s what I want you to do, how I want to do it, and when I want it done. By now what happens is you can get stuck thinking, well, what, how and when is faster. You know, if I just give what happened? When was just a lot it just a lot faster. Well, that may be true, but it’s not scalable. Because if you have to give everybody in your team what, how and when, as your team grows, you’re gonna find yourself doing that all the time. And if you ever stop, nothing is getting done. So I’m able to tell my leaders, Hey, here’s where I want you to go and here’s why I want to get it there And then you got to have why I talked about that at the beginning of this episode. You got to you always have to start with why they have to know why we’re doing it. And here’s where we’re wanting to go. And then I can be off, I can be gone. And they’re getting this done and they’re creating the system and then they’re figuring out what, how and when and they’re implementing it. And they’re creating feedback loops and making sure that that is growing and working and getting better because those are all core values that we constantly do and they know that that’s their responsibility. So in leadership, employees are given what, how and when, and then nothing else happens until you give the next what, how and when leaders are given where and why. And they keep things moving forward because they’re constantly working on moving the company to that direction, because you’ve told them why it’s important and you’ve painted that picture of the preferred future, which is vision, by the way. So there you go. That’s this week’s leadership tip of the week. I look forward to reading your review or Spotify comments and connecting with you and email LinkedIn, seeing your scorecard results just I’m so excited, so appreciative of having you as a podcast listener and know that I am here to help you achieve location independence. So if you have any questions about that, make sure you let me know. Until next time, chase the big dream lead with courage and safe travels.