Slow rolling it before becoming remote or nomadic

Here’s what we got for you today:

• Pei’s advice on slow rolling it when transitioning to becoming remote and nomadic

• Podcast episode 1: How AWW cofounders Ivy and Emily met in a night club in San Francisco, which became the start of their beautiful friendship and a hilarious story to remember

• Jianing Yang, a Canadian living in France, shares her life abroad in an intimate fireside chat detailing how she navigates the French work culture

You know, you can slow roll it before becoming remote or nomadic 🚂

Thanks to Pei Liao for sharing her personal advice.

I'll throw this out there: the nomad stories on YouTube all sound like "We decided to quit our jobs and make an instant life change!"

When in reality it's possible to slow roll it. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to career, saving, and investing, but here are the baby steps I took:

• I took a full time, non-remote job and moved across the country. But it was my first job that involved travel and working with a distributed team.
  

• I switched to a job with even more travel, and used the opportunity to explore different parts of the country.
  

• Eventually, that made me comfortable with remote work to take a fully remote job that would allow me to work up to 3 months a year from anywhere in the world. This worked out a lot better, financially and emotionally, than moving to Europe and taking a job there.

The above decisions eventually meant I was making enough to invest in foreign property—this would not have been possible if I'd redirected my career to work in Europe or be a freelance nomad. So instead of being a "traditional" nomad jumping from country to country, I have a home base in Europe. I work from there a few times a year and take short side trips with my vacation days. It satisfies my need to see different places without completely uprooting my life, redirecting my career, or feeling like nomad life is a black and white decision.

The path outlined above happened over almost ten years. It was a series of small decisions that led to this big shift in my life where I consider myself a very international citizen without having to be on the move all the time. Everyone's path is different, just remember you can make little decisions along the way if "all or nothing" isn't your style!

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Our Podcast Episode 1: How AWW Cofounders Ivy and Emily Actually Met in San Francisco

Hint: It was at Emily’s favorite club/bar in San Francisco that played 90s music and served lychee martinis.

This episode covers the first night Ivy met Emily at a nightclub through a mutual, how they reconnected again in person at an event, what prejudices they had to overcome in the Ivy leagued studded Bay Area, and how men in a Reddit thread were talking about Asian Wander Women, wishing that they had something for men as well.

Jay in Paris Spill it All

One of our AWWs Jianing (Jay) is a Beauty Marketing Manager at L'Oréal—she did an internal transfer from Canada to France and we got the opportunity to learn about her experiences.

Here are some key takeaways from the discussion:

🇫🇷 The French culture of doing things includes a lot of coffees and lunches to get to know your local counterparts. Things are not always done the “efficient way,” but for good business reasoning—getting things done is widely driven by relationships.

🏗️ If you work in marketing for an international brand, depending on where you’re working, you’re not always part of the building phase. That was something Jay learned as an intern in Canada. For example, a lot of the R&D, inception, and building a 360 plan is done in France, whereas in Canada, a lot of the marketing on-the-job was just purely adaptation and localizing it. Now that Jay works in France, she witnesses and is part of the creation phase herself.

🐼 A lot of the Asians in France are generally Chinese on international exchange, like grad school. There’s not a strong Asian American/Canadian presence in Europe.

👉 Hi! AWW community! My name is Lisa and I’m a self-love coach, inner child guide, and EFT practitioner.

🍃 What lights me up the most in life and what I know to be my dharma is empowering millennial women to live aligned with their inner truth through conscious and somatic approaches in healing their inner child wounds, releasing their false selves, and transcending their self- sabotaging patterns. I do a lot of work with self-confidence, self-worth, and self-love, and everything I do is influenced by my own path.

👩‍🏫 Right now, I offer 1:1 coaching and I’m building community and exploring with more in-person events facilitating workshops, sacred women’s circles, cacao ceremonies, and soon Tantra Yoga.