384 Halona Black ~ How to Change Your Life By Changing Countries

Transcript

Holly: Hello adventurers! And welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 384. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another super-exciting guest, Halona Black. She was originally a guest on this show back in April of 2016 when we talked about how to create a signature book for your business. Her life has totally changed since then, still a writer, still making a living from her writing, but she is now living in other countries. And I have been following her on Facebook ever since we did the podcast episode and I have just been really enjoying her posts about South East Asia, and now Africa, and I really wanted to get her back on the show because I have been wanting to have this conversation about being an ex-pat for a long time. I think it is an option that a lot of people don’t consider for whatever reason, or they consider it but they are afraid because it is a big leap to live in another country! So I brought Halona on to talk about how being an ex-pat has changed her life and what it has given her.

So Halona Black is a freelance writer for the tech industry, self-help book ghostwriter, and Thought Leadership Consultant who is currently living in Kigali, Rwanda. She made her exit from the US in June 2018 to seek healing from fibroids, severe adrenal fatigue, depression, and a host of other health problems. Her health was forever changed when she connected with local healers who taught her that true healing comes from self-love and expressing your soul’s desires. Halona continues her healing journey while growing her remote business from beautiful locations like Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

So in this episode we talk about how Halona made the leap to being an expat—and how it changed her life. How she decides which countries to move to, because she has lived in a few in the last couple of years. What she has learned from expat life. How to prepare for solo female travel, so that it feels safe because she has travelled obviously within the countries that she has lived in and she usually travels alone, so how does she prepare in advance to make these trips safe. Finally, her top tips for someone who might want to move abroad.

Even if this is something that you have never considered, I would love for you to continue to listen to this episode, because I think this is one of those things that is life-changing and moving abroad does not have to be forever. You can start out with something short, you can start out with doing a month-long study abroad, or two weeks, or something like that, but there is something about living in a place rather than just travelling there that makes a huge shift. You kind of become a local for that amount of time and I think that the lessons that you can learn about life and about yourself are just so much deeper than you can get from just travel. However, I am also a big fan of travel!

So let’s move straight into the interview because Halona has such great tips about ex-pat life and how to make that move and how it has changed her life. It is so, so, exciting, I could have talked to her for days, so here we go.

Holly: Hello Halona, how are you?

Halona: I am wonderful, how are you?

Holly: Good, good, I am really looking forward to our conversation today. So I have been following you, you were first on the show back in 2016, April, where we were talking about how to create your signature book for your business, and since then I have been following you on Facebook and looking at all your travels and your expat life and I have been wanting to have you back on the show now that my show has shifted to non-business things, to talk about moving abroad and living abroad and what that is like. So what made you first start thinking about moving to another country, how did that come about?

Halona: Yeah, well I have always been interested in everything international and learning about other cultures. When I was in High School I took four years of French, not that I learned to speak fluently in French in High School, but I did I took four years of French. One of the reasons I took that four years of French was because my French teacher I thought was so fascinating, she would teach regular French in the school year and then in the summers she would travel to other countries and so she would come back with these really cool stories about working on fishing boats on Alaska, or her summer in France. Whatever other cross-cultural experiences she would have, it was really important to her to pass onto her students what it means to be able to communicate with people in other cultures. And I was always really curious about living in other countries, so I went to college, graduated and wound up joining the Peace Corps.

Holly: Oh you did!

Halona: Yeah I was in the Peace Corps about a year after I graduated from college and I ended up going to Togo, a tiny country in West Africa. And then I wound up, after the Peace Corps, I worked and travelled around West Africa for several years. And then of course I came back to the United States to work and go to grad school and do all those things that I felt like I needed to do in order to have a career.

Holly: All the practical things!

Halona: Yeah those things that I felt like I needed in order to make the money that I wanted and all that stuff and I learned a lot, I went to grad school and studied international education and I worked in education, both in the United States and working on projects in other countries as well, working with adult learners. But my goal, what I always really wanted was to live overseas permanently, and not so much as an international development worker, which is part of what I had done in my career as well, to go overseas to other countries to participate in non-profit organisations or non-government organisations to be able to improve local communities. I sort of fell out of love with that and I just really wanted to travel and just sort of do my own thing. And so now what I do, I started my own business as a freelance writer and that gave me the freedom to be able to create my own schedule, to be able to live where I choose to live, as long as I have access to pretty decent internet and so that is what I do now.

Holly: I love it, I love it, I love it. Can we go back to Peace Corps, what was that experience like? Because that was my dream for so many years and I didn’t do it and then I got too old and now it is like the thing that I never did.

Halona: You are not too old, you are not too old! {laughing}

Holly: But it was my dream, so many of my friends did it and I was just really, really, excited about it and I remember going to the Peace Corps office at my university, actually when I was in Grad School, speaking to the Peace Corps office and we were talking about where I could go with my languages – the very few languages that I had! So what was it like? What was the experience like? Did it live up to your expectations? What did you learn?

Halona: When I joined, I don’t think I really knew what to expect, honestly I just wanted to go to some place that would be longer than the usual two weeks of vacation that you get told when you get a regular job. You know, people are like: you get a whole two weeks of vacation when you take a job and that should be plenty. I really just wanted to be able to go some place and be able to say, I really learned something about the culture in this place. Of course, I was always concerned about being able to afford away for two years and the Peace Corps paid for everything, I literally had to get a passport and show up, they took care of the rest.

Holly: What sort of work were you doing in Togo?

Halona: I was working with women’s groups and agriculture and health. And so I worked on literacy projects with women, we worked on Shea butter cooperatives, helping them to package and sell their Shea butter to local communities. We did health education projects together, teaching communities about female genital mutilation and things like that, yeah I did a variety of projects. My original project was supposed to solely be an agricultural volunteer. I didn’t know a lot about agriculture. I got assigned to be an agricultural volunteer because I had taken a few horticultural classes when I was in college, and they said, ‘oh agriculture, that’s perfect’. You learn that a lot of…whether you are an agriculture volunteer, a business volunteer, or something else, a lot of those topics sort of intersect in different ways, and so you wind up…whatever the community needs is where you wind up moving into.

Holly: So what was Togo like?

Halona: Togo was very interesting, because, even today, Togo is a very politically interesting place because, when I was there, the President that was there he had been in power at least, I want to say almost 40, maybe 50, years.

Holly: Oh wow!

Halona: He died in office and then they put his son in power. So, it was my first time living in an environment where it was clear that people were not interested in having that particular President there but there really wasn’t much that they could do about it. So, it was sort of difficult for me to be able to grasp how much of an effect that actually has on people and their ability to be able to, I guess, move forward with their lives and be able build their lives in the way that they want to. I guess as an American that was difficult to learn about, to understand, even though we have poverty in the United States, there are levels of poverty. I have learned that poverty can be absolutely devastating, absolutely devastating. There were days when I would just go home and cry, because it just felt like the poverty was so impossible. But at the same time, people are also hopeful, there is a hopefulness about them, even if they know that things are not as good as they would like it to be, they still get up every day, they go on about whatever it is that they need to do to be able to handle their lives, they still have hope that their children will grow up and be able to be certain things in life so they can help the family. I learned a lot about the power of how they mind works and how it can actually help to keep people in a positive mode to keep them going. You have to have hope, if you don’t have hope there is nothing left. Even in circumstances where you are living in places where it seems like there is nothing to have hope for, people still manage to have hope and I just thought that was a really beautiful lesson for me to learn.

Holly: And what was it like going back to the States after spending so much time in Africa?

Halona: It was the most depressing thing…

Holly: {laughing} Not surprised!

Halona: Yeah, so this was over 20 years ago, I am 43 now, so this was in my early 20s when I left. I came back home, it was right after 9/11, so for Americans it was a difficult time, just because there were no jobs, you come out of Peace Corps and you expect to get a job, and to be able to get back into life, but it was just very difficult. Even when I did, it took me almost a good year to be able to find a job and I found it difficult to be able to just get used to the weather in the United States. I had moved to Washington DC, and I remember around October-ish and coming outside of work and it was already dark and cold. You just came out of living in a place for two years where it was very tropical and sunny most to the time, so that in itself is very depressing. You know, sitting in a cubicle, with no windows, in just a very closed-off space, it was just difficult, like I couldn’t understand why people would do this to themselves on purpose.

Holly: {laughing} And yet there you were doing that to yourself on purpose.

Halona: Yeah! Because what else are you going to do? You have got to go to work.

Holly: Yeah.

Halona: And then even during lunch breaks, like lunch break just wasn’t enough. I didn’t care how cold it was, I just needed to go outside and to be able to get air. I would just sit outside in the park, in the dead of winter, just so I could get some sunshine and fresh air for a few minutes and it was very difficult to explain to people why I needed that time and that space, and I don’t even think I even knew at the time. I have grown a lot over 20 years, as most people do, so I understand why I would do it now, but back then I just needed to breathe, I always felt confined.

Holly: Yeah, it is like you are craving the air and the space to yourself.

Halona: Yeah.

Holly: So how did you eventually make the leap to moving abroad and being an expat. What was going on in your mind? What was going on in your life? What were the decisions that led you to make that shift?

Halona: Well, when I came home from the Peace Corps, I had gotten married while I was overseas. So I was married to a Togolese gentleman and we moved back to the States. I moved back to the States first and then six months later he joined me and we were married for eight years and it didn’t work. One of the things that we wanted to do was to be able to travel while we were married and for various reasons that just never worked out. Then I was single for a while and then I got involved in another longer term relationship for about five or six years, and we said that we wanted to travel and that didn’t work out. So by then time I got to about 40 years old I had just felt like I just kept putting off this dream to be able to live overseas for way too long. And at that point I had gotten very, very, sick. I had figured out over time, over the last couple of years, that were all sorts of things that felt imbalanced in my body, so I had things like uterine fibroids, my thyroid wasn’t working properly, my hormones were imbalanced, my adrenal glands weren’t working properly, it was just a bunch of stuff that made me feel absolutely fatigued all the time. Now I understand it to be that all of these things were out of balance because I wasn’t living the life that I wanted to live. I was trying to force a life that wasn’t fitting for me and sort of wondering why it wasn’t working out. I don’t know there is something about the age of 40 where people are just like, ‘you know what? if I don’t do this now, I am never going to be able to do it’. So I wound up, I had already had my business as a freelance writer for maybe three years by then, two-and-a-half years. So I decided, I knew how to keep a client and I felt comfortable enough saying, ‘if I leave the States, I know how to be able to go and find clients should I need more to be able to make money while I am overseas’. So I was living in Florida at the time, I needed to pay off a few things as well as save a few dollars, so my dad and my stepmother allowed me to move in with them for seven months in Delaware, which was really nice of them.

Holly: Cold! Back to the cold from Florida! {laughing}

Halona: Yes it was cold.

Holly: But that’s lovely.

Halona: But I am glad that they allowed me to be able to do that and offered me the support that I needed to be able to do that and then after seven months I moved to Thailand. My body was sick and horribly exhausted but I said that I would go to Thailand for three months, and of course I said that if I didn’t like it I could always go home or make other plans or whatever but I went to Thailand and I absolutely loved it and honestly I have been abroad for the last two-and-a-half-years and haven’t been back to the States since.

Holly: Oh wow, you haven’t even gone back to visit?

Halona: No.

Holly: {laughing} How interesting! So Thailand, what did you love about it? Had you been to Asia before or was it just, ‘here’s where I am going to start and see what happens’?

Halona: Yeah, I had never been to Asia before, I chose Asia because it just felt like a faraway place. I felt like okay, well I have already been to West Africa which was great and I figured I would wind up going back to Africa at some point, which is where I am now. Asia just felt like a really faraway place and I felt like if I was ever going to do something that was just totally out of my element then Asia would be a great place. And Thailand in particular, from all the research that I had done through watching videos of other people who go to Thailand, it was safe and it was cheap, to be honest: you can spend $100 to $300 a month on your rent. I just felt like I could sustain myself on the money I was making from my business without feeling restrained.

Holly: Right and give you a good standard of living and a lifestyle that made you happy.

Halona: Absolutely.

Holly: So how long were you in Thailand?

Halona: I was in Thailand for nine months and while I was in Thailand I worked on all of my health issues. I kind of stumbled upon working with two different Shamans, which was totally unexpected, and I was looking for something that would help me but I figured maybe I can find acupuncture or something, to be able to help me. I went down this whole rabbit hole of working with Shamans and then Herbalists to be able to help me to detox my body, but also to be able to work on a lot of mind shifts that I needed to make to be able to prioritise my own wellness and to be able to stand independently in, you know, what it is that I wanted for my life. To be able to move from there instead of trying to shift and mould myself into what I thought other people wanted for me.

Holly: Yeah that makes sense. So where did you go after Thailand?

Halona: Well even while I was in Thailand I was still travelling, because when you go to Thailand you go on a tourist visa and generally every two to three months you have to leave the country and come back in order to continue to stay in the country on a tourist visa. So I would be able to travel to the countries of Laos, Myanmar, I was in Cambodia for three months.

Holly: Ooh!

Halona: Yeah! I did a first stint in Vietnam for three months and then I went to Cambodia and then I came back to Vietnam, then I did about nine months in Vietnam as well.

Holly: Okay, so how did those countries compare? What was your favourite out of all the countries that you were in in Asia?

Halona: My favourite, I would probably say…my favourite place to visit is probably Cambodia, hands down. Just because I went to Angkor Wat to visit all the ancient temples there and it just felt like the most foreign thing that I could do every do in my life. While I was in Thailand, of course being around Buddhists and things like that, this was the first time that I had ever really been exposed to Buddhism and going to Buddhist temples and things like that and I actually got a lot into meditation because of it. But when you go to Cambodia and you get to visit these temples that were once Hindu and then eventually became Buddhist temples over the course of history, it just feels ancient. Being an American, the United States is just such a new place that you don’t really have a sense of the ancient in American culture, so it was beautiful for me to be able to connect with cultures that were this ancient and to be able to experience it, so I appreciated that. It was a great place to visit, but not necessarily to stay as a business person, because the internet in Cambodia isn’t the greatest!

Holly: Oh! {laughing} That makes sense.

Halona: So Thailand and Vietnam were my two favourite places to live, you know, like as a home base, just because you can still get all the Buddhist temples and things like that, but also the infrastructure of the countries are also quite good, so you get good internet in most places that you go around in those countries and you know you can stay in an apartment that is probably better than most of the South Eastern Asian countries and still be able to do so for very cheap. It is very cheap to get good organic food that you can buy on the street or you can make it yourself, so it was a lot more convenient to live, at least the life that I was looking to live.

Holly: And what would you say were the biggest ways your lifestyle changed moving from the United States to South East Asia, how did your lifestyle improve?

Halona: I am a lot more slow and I don’t feel bad about it.

Holly: Yeah.

Halona: I have always wanted [to live] more slowly in the States but of course people people make you feel guilty for it. If I wanted to spend the entire 60 minutes enjoying my lunch at work,, but you know your boss would call you back at minute 55, asking you where you are, and saying that you are late; there is just a whole work culture that I don’t appreciate in the United States. So I don’t feel guilty about taking time for myself and being able to rest, the fact that I have my own business makes it very easy for me to be able to organise my work schedule around how I feel. So if I wake up very early in the morning and do some things for myself like meditating or exercising or just walking outside, then I will work for a few hours and if by noon I feel as if I need to take a nap that’s what I do. As beforehand in the United States I always felt like I must be lazy, something is wrong with me if I can’t push through the entire day without needing to rest. You know, I need to have coffee in order to stay up, all these things that we do to ourselves to sort of pull ourselves in a direction that is not natural for us.

Holly: Yeah, drug ourselves to be more productive!

Halona: Yeah, you know and we are not doing it, the systems that we are doing it for don’t really care about our own personal welfare, we have to really take the initiative to really are about that for ourselves and I have learned to really organise a life that works for me, instead of so that someone else can make money off of my sickness.

Holly: Exactly, oh I love that. So, this year – in the middle of a Coronavirus epidemic – you changed countries and continents! So tell us about that.

Halona: So, living in Vietnam when the pandemic hit, and we were hit quite early, December of last year was pretty much when we started to feel the effects of the Coronavirus because we are so close to China. So things started to lock down slowly but surely a lot earlier than probably a lot of the rest of the world and certainly the United States. And so I started to see a lot of things change as far as how visa arrangements for tourists were starting to work, and how other countries around me were starting to close their borders and so I actually wanted to stay in Asia for at least another year, because there were several countries that I hadn’t been to, like Bali, or Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. There were just a few other countries that I wanted to be able to visit but didn’t get to because it felt like countries were making it difficult for me to be able to do that on a tourist visa and trying to get a different type of visa to be able to stay longer in the country, it was just very expensive and complicated to be able to apply for it. So I figured maybe it is time for me to be able to create some sort of a home base for myself. And, for the last few years of my life, I just sort of very quietly had been looking at the country of Rwanda in East Africa and I had kind of quietly been impressed by the way that this country has moved past the genocide in 1994 and how much development they have experienced since then. I am here now and just to be able to see just how clean the country is, they take a lot of pride in keeping the streets clean and people are just so wonderful here. They have a very big emphasis on creating business, so that it will be a welcoming place for the world to be able to come to, to be able to create income for people who live here. There is a strong sense of the government being able to want to take care of Rwandese and other people who come to the country to be able to participate in its development. It just felt like a really great place.

Holly: So what was it like moving there? Did you go on a tourist visa or did you have to get some other kind of visa?

Halona: Yes so I am here on a tourist visa, I literally just got here, this is like my second week.  

Holly: Oh my I thought you had been there for longer, I thought it had been like a month. Oh wow.

Halona: No, I have only been here for two weeks. You get a visa on arrival, a tourist visa for 30 days, and what I am doing is, in the next 10 days or so, you have to go to an office and I am going to apply for what is called a business survey visa. It gives you three months to be able to just give you some time to be able to think what sort of business you want to be able to to create while you are here in the country. Which is really nice, I don’t think I have ever really heard of that in probably any other country that I have looked at, at all. It shows the level of seriousness in which they really want people to be able to come here and start businesses and really invest in the development of the country. So if I can have a whole three months to just be able to start that process and figure out what sorts of opportunities are here and what makes sense for me to be able to create in this country. So that is basically where I am at the moment.

Holly: So what are loving about Rwanda so far? Is it what you expected? It is different?

Halona: It is what I expected but even a lot more. I had watched videos of Rwanda and it looks beautiful, Rwanda is called ‘the land of 1000 hills’ and it actually is, everything is a hill, either you are walking up hill or down hill…

Holly: {laughing} Good for exercise!

Halona: Yes, it is like being on a stair master all day! {laughing} And it is absolutely beautiful, it is an absolutely beautiful country, there is no bad view anywhere you can go. At least the city of Kigali where I am, in the capital city, there are no bad views anywhere. You are always either looking up or down, just to be able to see all types of rolling hills and green trees and mountains and at night everything is lit up,  it looks like you are living in the Hollywood Hills but you are in East Africa. It is such an amazingly beautiful country and I can’t wait to explore the northern parts. I have recently found there is a national park with five volcanoes in it, which is just crazy! How are there five volcanoes in one place? That is just a miracle! {laughing}

Holly: {laughing} That sounds exciting! You have got a whole new country to explore!

Halona: Yes, yes, and life is just so exciting, I am just so excited!

Holly: I love it, I love it! So do you get much opportunity to travel in all the countries that you have lived? I know you have mentioned some travel as you were working and running your business, so how do you balance that?

Halona: Yeah, well it depends on what it is that I am doing. So of course in the city that I am, wherever I am living, there is always, there is plenty to explore in the city that I am living in but I do also take time to be able to pack up and travel for a week or two, to other parts of the country that I am living in, when I get tired of staying in a place that I am staying in. At least in Asia it was always very easy to be able to pack up and find another AirBNB, take a flight to $20 to Hanoi or to Ho Ch , take a flight to $20 to Hanoi or to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, to be able to stay and spend an extra $100 to be able to stay week in a place and still be able to work and explore the city or the countryside of some place else while I am still working a few hours a day on my business.

Holly: So do you ever worry about safety? I know a lot of women are so afraid to travel alone, because they think, ‘oh it is not safe’, so how do you deal with that?

Halona: I will say that I never go some place that I don’t feel safe going to. I usually, what I will usually do, I am a solo traveller and so before I go to some place new I will try to find connections with people who are already there on the ground, or talk to people who have already been there and passed through and loved the place and maybe they have some sort of a connection that they want to share with me. I feel like, if the place wasn’t safe, or there were certain spaces that weren’t safe within the country they would tell me ‘maybe you should avoid this space, but over in this over in this other area here, it is totally fine’. So, if I don’t feel like it is a safe space I don’t go and always connecting with people is really important and Facebook makes it really easy to be able to do that nowadays, there is a group for everybody doing everything, you know. So that is a good way for me to be able to feel more safe about the place that I am going to. I don’t like to do a whole lot of research, I am not one of those big planners where I have to plan out every step o my trip.  I kind of like to show up and figure out that whatever shows up is what I am meant to explore. But to just have a general idea of where I am going is good enough for me. I have learned to sort of go by feeling, if there is nothing about the place that is really interesting or exciting, or if I am not excited about it then it is probably a place that I am not supposed to be.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense. So out of all the places that you have travelled, and places you have lived, what are some of your favourite places? (It could be countries or cities.)

Halona: I loved living in Da Nang in Vietnam which was a real surprise. When I first left Thailand and I went to Da Nang in Vietnam I was a little bit disappointed being there because it felt really different from Thailand, it felt like you know maybe the people were a little bit closed off than the people in Thailand, when I actually found the opposite to be true. Vietnamese people are like some of the funniest, most open people, that I have ever met, whether they speak English or not, but it was nice to be able to live in a beach town, and Da Nang is a small beach town, and it was just nice to be able to be in a beach every day where I could literally just walk. I live on the river side of the city but it was very easy to take a motorbike which was five or ten minutes to the other side of town, to be on the beach and be able to see beautiful green mountains. And that was really nice, particularly after I had gone through working with my herbalist and the shamans that I was working with in Thailand on my healing process,  being on the ocean is such a healing experience. When I first got there for the first three months, that I was in Vietnam the first go round, like every morning I would get up and make sure that I was literally in the water for the first twenty minutes and then just hang around and get some sun for the remainder of the hour, and then it just got so hot that I just needed to leave! But yeah, you know, Vietnam I think just living on a beach has always been one of my dreams and so living in Da Nang has just been one of my favourite places, at least to live long term.

Holly: So what about language? I know obviously you had your High School French, but how do you navigate these countries where English is not the native language?

Halona: Well, I go to places where English is. Not the native language but there is always somebody that does [speak English] and just learning a few basic phrase like ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ or ‘thank you’ is often enough for you to be able to get by. I am a proponent of learning the language if you can, you know I don’t want to make it seem like it is totally okay to just disregard people’s language and culture everywhere you go. But at the same time you have to choose how it is that you spend your time, especially if you are running a business. And so, unfortunately I didn’t prioritise taking in enough Vietnamese language as I would have liked. However now that I am in Rwanda, you can find people who speak English. The place that I am living at for the month of November, it is sort of like in more of a village like area. So there is really nobody there that speaks any English and since I am looking at Rwanda as more of a long term home base, and I can certainly travel from here to other countries, the local language is called Kinyarwanda. And so I am looking for people who can at least help me with just some basic conversational Kinyarwanda, to be able to speak to local people and to be able to go into markets and understand cultural cues that I would not be able to pick up on my own.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense! So what would be your top tips for someone who might be thinking about moving abroad, because a lot of people fantasise about the expat life but they don’t know how to start and they afraid. It is a huge life change, what would be your top tips?

Halona: My top tips would be to get excited about the place that you are most excited about going to. You know, really immerse yourself in the country or at least the region of the world you know. So before I went to Thailand I watched a lot of YouTube videos where you get to see the place, you know video is really powerful. Read other people’s blog posts about their experiences in their particular country just to really immerse yourself. If you can find travel magazines that talk about off-the-beat paths, things you can do to immerse yourself into the country before you get there and envision yourself in the place. See yourself in your mind being able to make friends with people. Have a positive outlook on all the great things that could happen for you as opposed to thinking about, if you watch the news thinking about all the things that could go wrong when you leave the comfort of home. Allow yourself to get lost in the possibility of all the great things that could happen for you, how much your life will open up as a result of doing this experience. Whether you choose to do it for a couple of weeks, or you choose to make this a lifetime change, I get questions from people who ask me a lot, ‘what do you regret about leaving the United States?’, and I am like ‘absolutely nothing’, I don’t understand that basis of that question. What sort of fears…where does that come from? What sort of fears about leaving the United States I could go back if I wanted to, I have choices, you have choices in life. I don’t know I just get the feeling that some people think if they make the choice to go some place they will never be able to return back. Life is just so open and full of possibilities and I wish that more women understood that they had choices, you don’t have to only deal with whatever it is that is handed to you. You can quite literally make your life whatever it is that you want to make it.

Holly: Absolutely and if you are not happy with what you have got, focus on what you have got instead, rather than focussing on what you have not got.

Halona: Yeah, it is a much more enjoyable process. We focus on the negatives so much, life doesn’t have to be so hard, it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. Even if you are going through a difficult time you can choose to switch your mindset to make it a more pleasant learning experience for you.

Holly: Absolutely, absolutely. So do you have any final words for someone who is thinking about making the leap or anything you would like to say that we haven’t covered so far?

Halona: I would simply say to just do whatever it is that you need to do to just get clear on what it is that you want in your life. I remember that I used to listen to so many podcasts, your podcast included, where I would listen to people who really just sounded like they were living great lives, and at the time I felt so stuck in what it was that I was doing. And so, they are doing the right thing by wanting to surround themselves with other resources that people create, like your podcast, anything else that they can find to be able to find that sense of positive reinforcement that the things that they want to create are actually possible, you may not know how to get there but just listening to things like this is actually a step in the right direction. Just to be able to feel good about doing those things and to be able to move forward towards the things that you want to create and no matter what other people say about your interest in travelling abroad, or moving abroad permanently, or just wanting to be able to expand your horizons, if that is how you feel about what you want to be able to do you should make sure you go for it and you should find people who support you in making those decisions as opposed to holding back your own development by listening to people who don’t support you. 

Holly: And that’s the thing I think we also need to keep our plans to ourselves if we know we are surrounded by people who won’t be supportive, because those people can drum up more fears and make it even more difficult.

Halona: Yeah and I will tell you something personal, when I was a kid – my mum absolutely loved me, let me first say that, she has passed on now – when I was kid I used to lovingly call her ‘the dream-pisser-oner’ {laughing} because I would say things about my life and she would find a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t do that, or anything else, but that was really a reflection about how she felt about her life, the limitations that she felt in her life and I totally understand that at 43 now, the limitations that she felt in her life, and I totally understand that at 43 now, where she was in her life and I understand where that thinking came from and that is why I work so hard to be able to get out of that sort of thinking and even share with anyone who is interested in listening, things that they can do to get out of that thinking or that other people can do to get out of that thinking for themselves.

Holly: And do you have any plans to write a book about your expat life?

Halona: Yes I do.

Holly: Yay!

Halona: About my healing process in Thailand, I have been working on a memoir for the last couple of months, just because I feel I just have to.

Holly: Yeah you do, it is a great…

Halona: I have learned so many lessons and just trying to be able to create a language around the things I have experienced and just how for a lot of people this information is really earth shattering. They don’t know that they can change your life and the steps they can do to be out of the moulds that they are not happy in, so yeah, I am writing a book at the moment.

Holly: Oh good I will look forward to reading it! Well, I could talk to you all day long, but I am mindful of time. So thank you so much for joining us today, I cannot wait to put this on the podcast and have people listen to it and think about new possibilities for themselves and for their lives, this is such a huge life change to move countries but I think it definitely is the right decision for a lot of people and I think more people might be considering it now. So thank you.

Halona: Thank you so much Holly, I had a great time talking to you.

Holly: Me too, thanks.

Holly: Thank you for listening, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode. You can email me at [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. Thank you so much for listening and remember to visit hollyworton.com/384 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.