Hey there my fellow wandering souls! AWC turned Digital Nomad Coach here. If you’re finding yourself here, you probably want to travel the world, have the freedom to live wherever the heck you want, and flourish in your career while doing it. I mean…why WOULDN’T you want that?! Can I get an AMEN!
After helping countless digital nomads start successful remote businesses and land remote jobs that enabled them to fly, I want to share the wealth in this article to help you make your digital nomad dreams REAL. Like, you’re quitting your job and buying a one-way plane ticket real.
Seatbelts on, chairs upright and laptops under your seat. Prepare for take off!
6 Steps to Launch Your Digital Nomad Career this year:
1. Commit to making it happen. Like, I mean really commit.
Put a date on your calendar that says in big, fat, shiny letters “DEPARTURE DATE”. Start telling people that you are outie. I know this might seem backward, like it should be the last step. But I beg to differ. When there is a sense of urgency and a deadline, you figure out how to make sh*t happen. On the flip side, when there’s no clear deadline and instead you focus on “figuring it out first,” your perfectionist tendencies kick in which leads you to never feeling “ready”. As a result, this leads you to never doing the damn thing. Once you have your date on your calendar, take a big, deep, “holy !?&%# I’m making this happen” breath, and move on to step 2.
Action: Put that date on your calendar!
2. Get clear on what you want your dream digital nomad career – and life – to look like.
So, it’s really happening. Wait a minute… what the heck is “IT”?!? Often, we have this idea that we want something, but we haven’t really thought through the details. And when there’s no details, there’s no clarity, and when there’s no clarity, there’s no direction.
Imagine you’re walking around aimlessly in a new city trying to find a place to eat that’s open (and delicious, ofc), but you actually have no idea what that place is and how to find it: What’s the name of your destination? Address? Business hours? Type of food? Where in the city is it? The more you search without your clear destination, the more hangry you get, the more desperate you are, the closer you are to giving up and just settling for a McDonalds Burger. In this case, that McDonalds Burger is your mundane, lackluster life.
If you don’t know the nitty gritty deets of where you want to go, good luck getting there. On the flip side, when you’ve got all the details you need, you simply pop it into your GPS and follow the kind robot lady’s step-by-step directions. See what I’m getting at here, friends? In case you don’t, I’ll spell it out: the clearer your destination is, the easier it is to get there.
Action time!
Action: Get clear on those details! Spend 10-20 minutes free writing what your dream career and life as a digital nomad looks like. And I repeat, dream life. Think outside of the realm of what you think is “possible”, to what you could have if you were to wave a magic wand. Ask yourself some really specific questions, like:
- What am I doing to make money?
- How many hours a day am I working?
- What’s my work schedule like?
- How much money am I making? (Whatever your first answer is, double it.)
- Where am I working from usually? My home? Airbnb? A beach? A co-working space?
- What country am I in? Spain? Vietnam?
- What am I known for?
- What am I most excited about every day?
- What kind of life is my work giving me?
- How exactly does my work give me freedom?
- How am I using that freedom?
3. Map out your remote career: Part 1, THE WHAT.
Ok, let’s address the elephant in the room. How the heck are you going to work remotely, love the work you’re doing, and make oodles of money while doing it? First, we have to find where your true badassery is hiding. Once we know that, we can design your career and/or business around it. In my coaching, I do an incredibly powerful exercise with my clients called the “Zone of Genius”. YES. You have a Zone of Genius too! What this magical exercise does, is it dives deep into the hallowy-depths of your life and professional experience to get super clear on three things: your passions, talents, and purpose. We then find the overlap, which points us in the direction of the kind of work you will excel doing.
Action: On a piece of paper, draw 3 columns and list out your passions, talents, and purpose. Aim to get at least 10 of each, and then:
- Where are the overlaps? Bold those.
- Take a pen and draw a line that connects your bolded qualities. What could a career look like if you combine those? Play around with it! This will spark ideas.
Real client example: “My passion is writing books. My talent is turning an idea into a story that people love, and doing it quickly. My purpose is helping other people who are stuck in their book writing. IDEA! What if I became a Book Coach, and help others who dream of writing a book do it?!”
My client, Pat is his name, is now running a successful Book Coaching business doing just that (check it out!), and it came from this very exercise we did together!
4. Map out your remote career: Part 1, THE HOW.
Once you’ve figured out the what, now it’s time for the how. There’s a few different remote-friendly routes we can take here:
1. Get a remote full-time job.
The pro to this is stability; a stable paycheck, that you know is dancing its way into your bank account every two weeks! However, the con is you might have less flexibility with the hours your work and where you can go. Also, different companies have different rules about where you can be and how they will regulate it. For example, larger companies might have a strict “US-only” remote work policy, where smaller startups might not give a flying fudgesicle where you are. Check out my coaching homepage for my free training guide on how to land a remote job!
2. Freelance, Consulting or Contract work.
The pro to this is you are your own boss, baby! You choose your projects, make your hours, determine your rate, and ain’t NOBODY gonna try and tell you where or how you have to work. However, the obvious con here is less stability (which doesn’t mean you can’t get stability!) and you have to build up your client base. If you are a self-driven go-getter that knows you will do the work to get clients, this could be a great option for you!
3. Start your own virtual business.
Where my visionaries at?! If you have an idea of a business you want to start, let me tell you that THERE IS NO BETTER TIME THAN NOW. Get that app going. Start that marketing agency. Launch that travel agency. Your genius business idea is going to take up free rent in your head until you act on it.
On a personal level, I’ve done all three, and successfully, if I might (very humbly) add! I built a freelance writing career working with Spain’s national newspaper and the Spain Tourism Board, I climbed the corporate ladder in tech for 5 years leading a Community Growth & Engagement team, and now I’m here with my dream coaching business that is paying the bills and allowing me to save. I am here to help you be successful in whichever of the three options you choose my friends, so please pretty please let me help you and let’s chat to explore what’s possible for you!
5. Get out of your own damn way.
Here’s the hardest, and arguably the most important part of it all: check yo’ mindset. If you have the perfect plan to launch your digital nomad career & life, but you’re stuck in a dark, smelly pit of “I won’t be successful,” “I can’t”, “I’m not good enough”, “I’m afraid” or “what ifs” – my friends, I hate to tell you this but – you’re right. By believing those things, you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to STOP those thoughts in their tracks, re-write them, and then do everything in your (very powerful) power to internalize your new “I CAN DO F*CKING ANYTHING” thoughts. Once you truly believe you can do it, it will be done.
Action: Every time one of those pesty thoughts creep into that pretty little head of yours, do this:
Write it!
- When you notice an unhelpful, self-degrading thought (ie; “limiting belief” in coach lingo) write it down. Awareness is the key to changing pretty much, well, anything. Got a squeaky wheel? Gotta know it’s there before you can oil that bad boy up.
- Ex: “If I start a business, I’ll never make enough money for me to live the life I want.”
- Rewrite it! Write quite literally the opposite.
- Ex: “When I start a business, I’m going to make so much money I’m not gonna know what to do with it all”!
- Give it some logic (aka ammo). Complete the sentence: “This is true because….”
- Ex: “This is true because I am an incredible writer, I’m a hard worker, and my skill combined with my dedication literally guarantees my success!”
- Read it every damn day with your coffee (or tea, or kombucha, or whatever the kids are drinking these days). I mean it. The way you drink your morning caffeine to power up your body, read this little reminder to power up your mind. Coffee with a side of I-CAN-DO-ANYTHING, anyone?
Real client example: I had a client who started his own consulting business, but was paralyzed by fear. He was going through all the right actions of “how to build a successful business “, but not seeing any results. His problem? He didn’t actually believe that anyone would pay him for his expertise. And guess what? Nobody was! Once we figured out the problem (awareness, hi!), we then dove deep into his mind and totally reframed how he thought about himself. He started to realize “holy guacamole I have everything I need to be really successful at this!”. And guess what? The minute we did the work and he started to actually believe it, the clients and money started flowin’ in.
6. Action time!
Lights, camera – it’s GO time baby! You’ve got the clarity in what you want to be doing and how, the mindset to get you there, and now it’s time for acción! Here’s a little hint: if the action you’re taking isn’t scaring you, you’re not stretching yourself far enough. Buy that plane ticket. Register that business name. Start that website. Send your first outreach email telling people about your awesome talents and services. Invest in yourself and get a Digital Nomad Career Coach (cough cough, hi!). JUST DO IT (thank you Nike).
Seriously. If you are READY to commit to making your digital nomad dreams a reality, let’s chat. I want to help you travel the world, work from a hammock if you want, make oodles of money, and love what you do every damn day.