28 "I Wasn't Expecting It" and "We're Not A Family"

Guest 1: [00:00:00] I fell in love with it. I really enjoy plumbing. It has to fit like a puzzle. Which I think is what I really fell in love with, because I've always loved puzzles and fitting everything into a tiny little space as a puzzle. So it worked out really well. So now I do that remotely, which is kind of weird because I don't have to go to sites, so sometimes I have to rely on my coworkers to go to a site, visit and get photos and kind of document what's there so that I can design properly. It's working. Definitely. I like the remote aspect of it, but I do miss going on site and bossing contractors around a little bit. [00:00:34][34.2]

[00:00:39] I originally wanted to go into architecture and the leader of the architectural engineering program at my college that I was going to attend anyway. We were talking and she was like, you should really consider this different degree than what you're thinking of doing. So I started looking into it. It was a combined bachelor's and master's, and it's basically the systems that make a building function. It's not just architecture, it's plumbing, the heating, the ventilation, the energy efficiency, the structural systems, the electrical systems, everything that makes a building a building aside from the envelope. From there, I started interning for a company when I was, I guess, a sophomore, I think, and the mentor that I had for that, I actually worked for. [00:01:27][47.9]

Ten years by now, I think, and being him have just kind of jumped companies to companies. So when we decided to leave, we told our companies expecting them to work with us because we were kind of in the higher leadership roles, I would say. So like, we kind of expected them to be a little more accommodating than they were. And my job literally was like, okay, your last day is in two weeks. Even though I gave them three months to like, work with me on it. I was like, okay, well, I guess I don't mean anything. So at that point we were redoing our house to Airbnb, so it was fine. But when we left we didn't actually have jobs. And then through my network I got called probably, I think it was like two months into our travels and they were like, hey, what are you up to? Would you be willing to work? I was like, okay, well, I need to work 30 hours. I only want to overlap three hours. This is my pay rate. And if you can do it, I'll do it. So that's how it happened. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't looking for it. I am glad it happened, because now we can save and afford a little bit better accommodation and we can continue it. Whereas before we were going to basically just live off our savings for a year and then come back and live our life normally again.

For the last ten months, we've been nomadic. We took a cruise ship across the Atlantic and we landed in the UK, and then we worked our way down south to Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, back up to Scotland, back down to Hungary, through Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, then to Turkey, then to Thailand. And then where did we go after Thailand? Vietnam and then Malaysia, Singapore, and then to Sri Lanka and then now to Japan and Bali. Oh yeah. We hit up Bali for a couple of weeks, but Japan was always on our list, and we actually booked our flights out of Japan back to Mexico again, the US. So we had to get to Japan at some point. It's always been on our list and we had to do it now because we're on the side of the world. We're not staying long enough to require a visa and we're we're working remote from our own country. So it's not you don't have to get a visa per se. We've just been living month to month or even a couple weeks. Like, we've only stayed two weeks in Bali, a couple weeks in Singapore, a couple weeks in Malaysia. So for the most part, we're on tourist visas. I overlap with Eastern Time zone for three hours Monday through Thursday, so I don't necessarily have to be on their schedule completely, which makes it really flexible for us because we can go out during the morning and afternoon. And then I come back and I work.

So in Japan specifically, I work their hours from nine until midnight, which makes it really rough to wake up in the morning. But we've been doing it. So next week is going to be much more relaxing than this past week has been. And we're in like, it's kind of like a hostel, but not it's like more of a guesthouse. So there's multiple rooms and then there's a common space with the common kitchen. So we've just been working in the common space for the most part, and it's pretty, pretty chill. But sometimes we work out of co-working spots, like in Sri Lanka, the WiFi is not very good. So we had to go to co-working spots for probably 90% of the time, and luckily the time zone worked a lot better there so that we'd end up at 930. And they closed at ten, so it worked out perfectly. But it just kind of depends, depends on the location. Sometimes we're in coffee shops, sometimes we're in our Airbnb, sometimes we're in the. Common areas of hostels. Who knows? Wherever I work, I work. Sometimes it's an airport. We don't actually know when we're going to come back to the real world, if you will. We still have a house in the States. We have a few rental properties. We have a boat that's sitting in storage.

We have a bunch of stuff, and we're living out of four backpacks right now, and we feel free at some point. But also, it's quite a lonely life. Like, we haven't really found the community yet, and I think we need to stay longer in digital nomad communities to really feel that. But at this point in our lives, we want to continue the adventure quicker than, you know, staying multiple months in one spot. And we really don't know. We've been struggling with that a lot is trying to figure out that balance of how long do we want to stay to build a community versus what do we actually want to accomplish with our travels, and are we willing to travel a little faster to see what we want to see, and then come back to a home base and have our life that we expected to have and have kids and do all the normal things. We don't know. We're really, really struggling with that. But yeah, that's that's been our discussion over the last six months is how long do we want to do this for? Because now it's like, well, if we really, really, really loved this lifestyle, yeah, we could have kids overseas. Yeah, we could do nomad life with children. Like it's totally doable. People do it all the time. But is that what we want? We're not. [00:06:35][306.7]

Naty: [00:06:39] Hey, folks, it's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break. [00:06:43][4.1]

Guest 2: So holiday party. And, there was some, like, inappropriate touching. That was a little bit uncomfortable. Nothing crazy, but it was more like I had to say something as an HR person. Like, I couldn't, like, not let that go. [00:07:05][15.8]

(00:07:11] Yeah. Just having to talk to a coworker about that was super awkward. So I, I really empathize with employees who, like, don't look forward to talking to HR because it is weird. And anything you say in an HR office, like they're going to look into it, right? It's almost like if you tell your teacher that something's going on at home, like they have to look into it. There's like a sense of responsibility for sure, but it's definitely awkward. And usually it ends with like a mediation session where you have to, like, face this person and like, have a discussion around that. So that's that's awkward. But at the same time, I do appreciate like being the HR person in those moments because I get to see like, adults grow like adults once they like leave school. Right? There's there's not a lot of opportunities to really have educational moments. And I think that HR has like a really special role in that. Right. Like, we can help adults, like, grow as people grow professionally.

But then there's also moments where you're really growing as a person and like raising your fears of conflict avoidance, facing your fears of like public speaking, like HR really does play a role in like helping a lot of people up. In that sense. I think there's something really weird that you see in a lot of companies who say they care about culture, which to me is a huge red flag. And it's when they say, we're a family, we're not a family, right? Like some people's families are, have no boundaries, right? Like some people have really unhealthy family dynamics. So we don't want to bring that into the workplace. So I look at my role as, how can I make this a community of people who want to help each other, right. Like I think especially in America, we live in a very individualistic society. And I think corporate America has a huge opportunity to kind of shift that a little bit and say, if we live under a capitalist society, we can't control that, but we can at least control what happens in these four walls. So how can we create programs where there's, you know, groups of working moms, right, like sharing tips on child care, right. That's the kind of communities that I want to build. Right? So I used to work in house and so like for, for like in the HR department of a company. And I ended up leaving an in-house job to start my own firm. Now, now that I am self-employed, I walk to work every day along a very beautiful boardwalk in Fort Lauderdale in a co-working space. I personally time block my day. I'm also very divergent, which is really fun in HR.

So I try to, not really schedule my day and just say I want to work on X for three hours today, and I want to work on Z for six hours day, whatever that might look like for me. I have a business partner who is super supportive, and she's actually an IO psychologist. So, a lot of what we do really comes from that psychology of, like, how do you build a community that cares about each other? We've done it in-house for companies, and we've actually seen the companies kind of fall apart once we leave. So we know it definitely works. It's just how do you make it sound sexy enough where the private equity firm is going to sign off on actually giving us the money to do these things? What I'm dealing with now is small business owners. How do I make that something that companies want to buy into? Right?

Like, how do I show that there's an ROI to that? And it's like really simple. It's as simple as like looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? So if you have like your basic needs met, that's pretty much what corporate America gives you. Like barely, right. Like they pay you what you need to live. They give you health insurance, right? Like that's your bottom bottom layer, the bare minimum. If that's all you're providing, that's all you're going to get back from people, right? They're just going to be working to survive, to meet that. If you build upon that and you actually give them fulfillment, give them access to a community of peers that they can lean on for support beyond, you know, their nuclear family, they're going to probably want to do more, not because they think they need to to survive, but because they want to because they're fulfilled, because they're working on something that they're passionate about and because they care about the people around them. Right. Like, I want to show up on time because I care about Sally, and I don't want her to have to work, you know, on this alone. Right? Like I want to be there on time. I've never worked at a company in Florida where there wasn't, like, at least bare minimum health insurance. I think post pandemic, a lot has changed, where corporations are seeing that people can boycott them and have a voice in how they treat their employees. I think that's been a huge shift. And you've seen companies start to raise their minimum wage before the federal law is going to affect the federal law here in Florida's 15. But most places around here already at 20, $22 an hour for the minimum wage, which is still with cost of living, it's not matching up. But you've seen that change come a lot faster post pandemic for sure. [00:11:43][272.3]

Naty: [00:11:44] Hope you liked the episode. Please help us out by rating us, sharing with your friends, or buying us a coffee. Buy me a coffee.com slash. What the hell is my job? It costs money and time to be here for you at the start of every single week, so please consider supporting us. See you next time. [00:11:44][0.0]

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