
Hi! We are still in NZ. I know right? We've been here for nearly a month now and we still have a couple of weeks to go before we head back to Japan in time to start school again.
Don't worry I'm not sending my kids from one school to the next constantly! We do have a break each side. We will be heading to my old home town to visit friends and have fun before heading back to Japan and regular life again.
This is the second time now I have brought the kids out to New Zealand and put them in school. They are really loving it here. Back in Japan 6 months ago I was a mess wondering how it would all pan out.
Let me show you my thought process:
Goal: Children need to have a good command of both Japanese and English which means we need to spend more time in New Zealand and with my own family.
My Idea: Buy a house right away, to live in only a couple of months a year somehow... (I know right). Or rent a holiday home to stay in this time because we will hate staying at my mother's place and my son will run out onto the busy road and get flattened surely. There is no garden for the kids to run around in and my mother will be over us in about 5 minutes.
Slightly over the top but these are some of the thoughts I had the first time round.
In the end, my mother and sister were like: "Why don't you just give it a trial run and see what happens?"
.......
.......
What? Not have everything planned out exactly as it should be?!?!
I really struggled with this. As it turned out, staying at my mother's place worked out just fine. We were a bit noisy and horrible sometimes but we did make use of the nearby parks, rivers and beaches that we just don't have in Japan.
When I look back at my initial plans and thoughts in Japan, I was way off track, trying to recreate our life from Japan in New Zealand, when it wasn't really necessary.
I thought I needed our own house and wasted many hours looking at properties we could maybe, somehow buy...
When you have an idea or a dream, planning and perfecting it may mean you end up with something you don't need or actually want. The only way you will know is if you actually take ACTION.
Action brings clarity
When you take a step and then another in the direction you want to go, you start to see what you really want, what is really necessary.
So by taking that first step and coming to New Zealand and just staying at my mother's house, I realised that this does work for us. This minimum viable effort method is just fine! Now we know we don't need to buy a house here or even rent our own place for the time we are here and we can be perfectly happy. That might sound like it should have been so from the start, but it certainly wasn't.
How about your own dream? Do you fantasise about living in Portugal 6 months of the year? Why not give it a go for a month before you commit to doing it for real.
Do you dream of doing a different job? Why not give it a go as a side hustle or volunteer your time for a few days before launching into it full time.
These small trials will give you the clarity you need to know if your dream job/lifestyle is going to actually work for you and what tweaks or changes might make it work even better than you imgained.
I'd love to hear your ideas for what might be your dream lifestyle or job that you haven't achieved just yet.
between te