SPI 467: What Going on Sabbatical Can REALLY Do for Mental Health and Clarity with Kristen Bor

SPI 467: What Going on Sabbatical Can REALLY Do for Mental Health and Clarity with Kristen Bor

Pat Flynn:
Okay, so I want you to imagine this, no matter what kind of business you have, even if you’re just working a nine to five, it doesn’t really matter, but just imagine this: Taking an entire month off, literally disconnecting, getting away from even wifi, just completely removing yourself from, not the grid because you still want power maybe, but just from the connection to the internet, to social networks, to listening to information on overload, but just having a month to yourself to think, to be present, to try something new. Now, does that make you feel like, “Wow, I would love that. That would be amazing. I probably need that right now,” or does that make you feel more on the side of, “There is no way in the world that’s ever going to happen. I mean, I’m just getting anxiety, thinking about all the things that I would need to think about and kind of the fires I’d need to put out and the emails I’d have to answer and all those kinds of things”? Which one are you?

Well today we’re interviewing a great friend of mine, Kristen Bor, from BearfootTheory.com. She is an outdoor and travel blogger, very big on Instagram, amazing YouTube channel, a lot of van life-type stuff. That’s what a lot of people know her for, but also she’s very connected to nature and blogs about this, and most of her revenue comes from her blog. We’re going to talk about some of those things that she does for business and whatnot, but also how it was impacted this year by COVID, and then what she did at the end of the year that might surprise you after having business maybe not do so well at the start the year: She took a month long sabbatical.

What that means is she disconnected, she got away. Today we’re going to talk about how she did that, because she has a business to run, but she was still able to do it. We’re going to talk about all the things that have unlocked for her as a result of this. I promise you, the results are kind of going to surprise you, because they were surprising to me too. Kristen, like I said, is a good friend of mine. She was also a member of our accelerator program in 2020, and just an amazing human being. I’m excited to introduce her to you. Kristen, from BearfootTheory.com. Let’s cue the intro, and we’ll get into it.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host – he thinks hate is a strong word, but he actually hates the Comic Sans font – Pat Flynn!

Pat:
Hey, it’s Pat here. Thanks so much for joining me today. This is episode 467 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. Now, we talk about business a lot here, right? We talk about things like funnels, email marketing, podcasting, YouTube content creation, hiring a team, removing yourself from the process as much as possible to usually do different kinds of things in your business, but today we’re talking about removing yourself from the process to fully remove yourself from all the things that have been bogging you down, all the overwhelm, just to escape and still let the business run. Let’s hear from Kristen Bor, from BearfootTheory.com. Here she is.

Kristen, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. I’m so excited you’re here. Thank you for taking the time today.

Kristen Bor:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait.

Pat:
Before we get into the big thing, which I think everybody who’s listening at this point already knows, because I already talked about it in the intro, as far as your sabbatical and what that was like – I want to learn everything there is about that, and I know it’s going to inspire a lot of people, but for those who don’t know what Bearfoot Theory is and who you are, tell us a little bit about the brand and the website and how you got into it.

Kristen:
Sure. Bearfoot Theory is an outdoor blog where we inspire and empower people to get outside and give them the skills that they need to do so with confidence. Our goal is to just help people live happier, healthier lives by connecting with nature. I started in 2014, after a three year stint working in Washington, DC. Wanted to do something else and sort of stumbled on some travel blogs that talked about travel blogging as a career. That really sparked my interest, and I decided to go for it.

Pat:
That’s so cool. I’m curious, travel blogger, you’re not at home, and you’re not working a nine to five and sort of doing this afterwards: What is a typical day like for you? Just so we can get some perspective on what’s it like to be a travel blogger exactly.

Kristen:
Sure. This year has been a little bit different, obviously. There really is no normal or no routine, and that’s one of the challenges is trying to separate work and play. I spent half my year traveling in my Sprinter van. We converted our Sprinter van into a camper that we can live out of full time. We spend half the year traveling, living in that, and then the other half we spent living at our house in Salt Lake. Usually the winter we’re home. In the winter, I’m catching up on a lot of bigger projects that I can’t really crank out when I’m traveling full time, so a lot more time on the computer.

When we’re on the road in the summer, it really just depends. When we have wifi, that’s when I schedule my calls, when I do my emails, when I do the things that require an internet connection. Then when I’m not – when there is no service, then I’ll edit my photos, and we go on hikes, and we gather the content and kind of process that when we don’t have any service.

Pat:
That’s amazing, a different lifestyle for sure. I know you’ve talked about this a lot, not just on your blog at BearfootTheory.com, but also your YouTube channel, your YouTube channel is pretty big and you’ve just come out with a recent series on what van life is like and how to convert your van and all this stuff. If this lifestyle sounds interesting to you, definitely check out Kristen. I know personally, several people who have been inspired by Kristen’s work and are actually now doing the van life or are about to do van life stuff.

That’s pretty cool, but I also know you, Kristen, because you were a student of mine for awhile, a year. One of the things I’ve gotten to know about you is just your incredible work ethic and how hard you work and how many great ideas you have and how you want to do all of them. This could be a great thing, to have a lot of ideas, but I also know, and I want to hear from you, there’s a struggle there sometimes, especially when it comes to getting overwhelmed. Tell us about sort of beginning 2020, what your mindset was like related to work and sort of how much you were working.

Kristen:
Oh boy. Yes. At the beginning of 2020, we had a lot of different, big projects going on. I was deep into the middle of a rebrand, which ended up taking a year and a half, but that was a huge project. We launched a whole new version of our website. We were in the beginning stages of planning our annual van life festival called Open Roads Fest, which got canceled because of COVID, but tickets were on sale and all that earlier in the year. We also released, sort of alluded to it, a free online course all about van life, which we filmed over 50 videos and blog posts to kind of walk people through the entire process of starting van life from start to finish.

Then COVID hit and I had to make some adjustments to my team. I had to learn how to work more efficiently, and so I just had a lot on my plate. Luckily, I discovered meditation in 2020, and have been doing that as a practice every day, and that sort of helped me, like when my brain starts to fire off and all these ideas, and I get kind of impatient, wanting to do them all at once, but it’s not actually physically possible. That’s been a really helpful tool in calming the mind and really helping me figure out what to prioritize on.

Pat:
That’s great. Yeah. I know that part of what we’re talking about today or the major thing we’re talking about today had stemmed from a lot of the stuff that was happening in 2020. I want to know what was going through your head, and what made you make the decision to go on this three to four month break, this sabbatical, this “I need to just step away from everything right now.” What led you to that decision?

Kristen:
Yeah. It’s kind of funny, because my partner Ryan and I were spending a lot of time walking around our neighborhood. We were going on like seven mile walks every day, just around our neighborhood, because we weren’t really doing anything else. A lot of my ideas come to me when I’m outside walking or hiking. I just, one day just came up with this idea, what if I take a break? I was feeling kind of burnt out from work and from social media in particular. I was starting to see my screen time was at an all time high. I was starting to feel some negative impacts from that and just kind of constantly comparing myself to what everybody else was doing during this past year, and making me feel like maybe I wasn’t doing enough or I could be doing this better or that better.

All of a sudden my brain just felt like it was going to explode, because it’s just not possible to do that all. I had these ideas about bringing on new writers and this and that, but after I finished my rebrand, I realized that if I just sort of launched into this next chapter without taking some time for myself, there would be no time, because if I’m hiring new people and doing this and that, there was no gap for any sort of recovery from eight months of nonstop work, basically.

Yeah, so we were just on a walk one day, and I kind of came up with the idea. I said, “Gosh, what if I just took three or four months off social media, like off work, what would happen?” Yeah, so that’s sort of how it started. It was just a random thought one day on a walk. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Pat:
I’ve heard from other people, people who have actually baked this into their yearly plan. Michael Hyatt does this every year for a few months. I know a guy named Shawn West who’s going off a year long sabbatical, so this isn’t a new thing. I don’t know necessarily where the idea came from, but oftentimes when we have these ideas like this, especially for an entrepreneur, the idea of just pausing everything for that long almost seems impossible. What was your initial reaction to the idea? Was it like, “Yes, let’s do it,” or was it like, “How am I even going to …?” Where do you even begin? I’d love to know, when you had this idea, what was your mindset, and then how did you move forward with it, no matter what?

Kristen:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I went back and forth and back and forth. I think I had a lot of questions about, would my audience just forget about me, what would happen to my traffic if I wasn’t posting on social three, four, or five times a week, would it affect my bottom line, would I be able to keep my employees employed. At first, I, still kind of recovering – so March and April were, I think, tough months for a lot of online entrepreneurs, where a good chunk of my money comes from advertising for outdoor companies and also banner ads on my site. March and April were tough months and made me question, and if this keeps going, I’m going to have to make some long-term adjustments. At first, my idea was that we’re just going to close our doors for four months. We’re all going to go on vacations.

I have a small team. I have my partner in crime, Linda who’s kind of, basically is like a second me. She can basically do everything. Then we have a part-time writer, and I thought, well, maybe during my break, we’ll all just go on vacation and we’ll regroup after the new year. But then I started to think, well, it’s like, the business needs to be able to operate when I go on vacation. It’s like, I can’t just close the doors indefinitely and not post on the blog, not post anywhere, just make my audience think that I don’t care. I started to shift my thinking, that, okay, maybe Linda will work part-time. Then as we got closer and we realized that, well, there’s actually a lot of projects we could do in my absence that are important, maybe she could just work full-time.

That’s what ended up happening, is Linda worked full time while I was gone. Becky, our writer, she stayed on. She works 10 or 15 hours a week. I talked to Linda maybe once a month about what was going on, but I wasn’t on Slack, I put an auto responder on my email, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone. I was pretty disconnected from the work side of things. Luckily I have random passwords for everything, so it wasn’t like I could just log back in without looking at the password in my …

Pat:
Oh, that’s a good point, yeah. That’s really cool. A little bit of preparation ahead of time, getting the team sort of going, writing some stuff, and sort of just not leaving right away. I’m curious, did your audience know that you took a sabbatical before you went? Did you kind of let them know this was happening?

Kristen:
I started preparing in June and I left in August. During that preparation period, I didn’t publicly announce anything, but we were working behind the scenes to just make sure that Linda was in touch with anybody that maybe I would have been in touch with, that she needed to sort of take over those conversations, that Linda and Becky were well prepared for sort of what I expected and what I wanted to happen while I was gone, the certain posts and sort of like, we have our holiday gift list, so that needed to be done in November. We did some planning to sort of get like a three month sort of vision for my absence.

Then the day I deleted my social media, my last post was like, “I’m taking three months off.” It ended up being four, but yeah, I announced on Instagram and in my newsletter, and I put a blog post up explaining why I was doing this. Then I immediately deleted everything, so I didn’t look at comments or anything. I didn’t want—

Pat:
Yeah, good for you. I would have been like, “What are they saying about it? Are they angry? Are they upset?” How did you get the courage to do that? I’m curious.

Kristen:
Well, it was pretty easy because I deleted the app, and then that afternoon we went on a five day canoe trip where I had no service.

Pat:
Oh, well, there you go. You almost like forced yourself to …

Kristen:
Yeah. When we got back, then it was, you realize there’s like a physical reflex, like going to grab your phone. I mean, we don’t go anywhere without our phones these days or without looking at something on our phone every couple of minutes or even more. When we first got back from the canoe trip, that was sort of good, because I was like cold turkey cutting myself off, but then we got back and I was definitely noticing myself going to grab my phone. Then I would pick up my phone, and then I’d realized there was nothing to look at.

I also deleted the news app and basically anything that just enabled me to mindlessly scroll on my phone. When I picked up my phone, if I wanted to read something, it was like, I had to think about what I wanted to look up and then look that up. I didn’t just have information in front of me waiting to be consumed.

Pat:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to know what were some of the other hard things or some of the other, perhaps if there were any struggles. You had mentioned this, just noticing yourself going for the phone, which is really weird that that’s baked into us now. You’re right, we never go anywhere without it. Were there any other challenges, were there moments in the middle where you kind of just wanted to check in on things? What else was difficult about it, if anything?

Kristen:
Well, I’m sort of a perfectionist, and one thing that’s like – and this was a lesson learned from this whole experience is, one thing that’s really slowed us down as a team is my need to oversee every word in every blog post, to make sure it’s exactly how I would say it, and every picture has to be a picture that I would choose for that blog post. That sort of stifles the process, and it really slows us down when I have a highly capable team of women who are experienced in the outdoors, who know me well, are totally able to just publish a – I give them the words, they publish the blog post, or even they can go in and make updates themselves without me have to give the check of approval. It was a good lesson in learning how to stop micromanaging and to just kind of empower them to do their job and own the results of the job that they do, and not come in and fix things before they get published.

Every now and then I would go to my blog and see, oh, I wonder what they’ve published this week, and it always was great. Just a good chance for me to step back and let them take the responsibility of sort of steering the ship and making decisions and feeling really good about what they’re publishing. I think as a result this year, we’re just going to be operating in a much more efficient, smooth manner. That frees up my time for the higher level work.

Pat:
That’s absolutely huge, Kristen. I didn’t even think of that. What a wonderful by-product of this for your team and for you and just the efficiency of the business. That is incredible. Wow. It’s true. It reminds me of when I started working with Jess, you know Jess, my executive assistant.

She came in to help me with email initially, and I had to learn, and she had to teach me, that I didn’t have to see every email, I didn’t have to write every email, and nothing was going to break. It’s a learning process, but nothing exploded. That was the thing that I was always worried about, like what if this, what if that. Like, “No, no, Pat, we’re going to be okay. I’ll take care of it. Trust me.” Okay. Then you start to see things moving and you start to spend more time doing other things. I think that’s what’s happened here, and it just reminded me of that.

You had written this beautiful blog post just recently, in fact, on Bearfoot Theory, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. It’s called “Lessons From My 4-Month Social Media Break and Why Digital Detox is Necessary.” I want you to quickly speak to the six points, the six lessons here, just kind of give us an overview of what changed in that manner. Your first lesson here was that getting off social media changed how you traveled. What do you mean by that?

Kristen:
Yeah. Well, I think so much of my bucket list is determined by photos that I see on Instagram, and I get there and they’re busy, sometimes they’re littered, there’s a lot of people just going to get their photo and getting back in the car and leaving. That kind of travel was starting to like, I don’t enjoy that. I would rather go somewhere that’s not crowded, that’s off the beaten path. Maybe it’s just not like as Instagram worthy, per se, but the experience itself is more enjoyable to me.

We did a lot more of that kind of travel. We went to places that I would’ve never gone to, knowing that I had the pressure of posting on my Instagram channel five days a week. We spent probably a month at the beach. The beach is beautiful, but I know my audience is mountain people. You know?

Pat:
Yeah, so this is the equivalent of like, if you’re a food blogger, the difference between getting the pie to look perfect, standing on the table, looking down while your family is just waiting for you, versus just like, let’s enjoy the meal together. Right?

Kristen:
Yeah.

Pat:
Even though it looks crappy, it tastes good. Right?

Kristen:
Yeah, exactly.

Pat:
Where did you go? What’s one of the new spots you went that you didn’t think you’d enjoy?

Kristen:
Sure. Well, it wasn’t that I didn’t think I would enjoy. It was more just the content side –

Pat:
You had a different reason.

Kristen:
I was always thinking about the content that I’m going to capture. We took off in our van. The West was so smokey, so we decided to go back East. We went to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, which was where we canoed, and that was where we set off. Then we went into the upper peninsula of Michigan, and then we saw all of the five Great Lakes, and then we went up to New Hampshire and Vermont for fall and did the fall colors there. Then after that, we went down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They have really great national park campgrounds right on the beach there, so we were there. We were in North Carolina for about a month. Then after that, we went down to Florida and were kind of in the panhandle of the Northern Florida area as it started to get colder.

Pat:
That sounds epic. That’s cool. It changed your decision-making and your why behind where you go, and just probably made you more present while there, I’m sure. Beautiful. Okay. Number two, my social media break allowed me a lot more free time. Tell me more.

Kristen:
Yeah. You don’t realize how much time you spend scrolling and looking at what other people have to say. Just turning that off, all of a sudden I have time to read books. We would get back from a hike and rather than me just launching into getting on my phone or getting on my computer, I would read or I’d meditate or we’d cook dinner together, play with our dog, and just downtime that I didn’t fill every second of by staring at my phone.

Pat:
You closed this section off by saying, “Taking this time off helped me see that I have plenty of time. I just have to make an active choice to spend my time on things that matter to me most.” That just speaks to what you just said. A lot of us are spending time on things that when it really comes down to it, probably doesn’t matter that much, when it really comes down to it.

Kristen:
Yeah. You had a guest on recently, he wrote that book, Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Pat:
Yeah.

Kristen:
Yeah. I read some of that book, and he talked about how your time is indicative of your priorities, and you should spend your time doing the things that you want your future self to be, like what you want your future personality to be engaged in. I kind of just thought about that: Wow, I spent so much time looking at other people’s photos online, of people I don’t even know or connect with personally. It was just a good exercise and sort of regaining that time and feeling like, “Wow, I don’t feel so rushed around anymore. I can actually do these things that matter, because I’m not scrolling on my phone for two hours every day.”

Pat:
Absolutely. You had also mentioned, next, that you just felt more present in your relationship. I know that everybody here has relationships of all different kinds, but whether it’s a spouse, a partner, a kid, a friend, tell me more about how getting off of social media made you more present with the people close to you.

Kristen:
Sure, yeah. It wasn’t just social media, but it was also the work in general, just actually taking a real vacation, because normally when we’re traveling, I’m really juggling work and our travels. Whether that means I’m on my phone planning where we’re going next, or posting some photo or posting some story or uploading my photos or responding to emails, so just turning that off allowed us to just enjoy each other’s company, I think. Like when we get in bed at night, rather than sitting on our phones and we’re both looking at our phones, looking at Instagram or the news or whatever, it’s like we allowed us to really connect, to be present and appreciate this amazing trip we had together, that wasn’t muddied by other people’s experiences, I guess.

Pat:
Yeah. No, that’s awesome. That makes sense. It’s like my wife and I, we often put the phones down, we just chat. We need to just do that more. Let’s just talk. There doesn’t have to be anything else involved, just two people connecting. And you’re right, I think when we start to add other noise out there, it starts to kind of get in the way of that. It’s crazy that you’ve done this cold turkey for three months, but we can do this in a day. We can do this within a couple of minutes or a couple hours within a day. It doesn’t have to be a three month thing. Although obviously this has become a very, very amazing thing.

I want to ask you more in a minute about whether or not you think you’re going to do this again, but number four here, you had mentioned, and we had talked about this already, so we don’t have to talk about it too much because you already touched on it, but the idea that you have more control over the information you are consuming. You have now the ability to be conscious and choose the things that you want to bring in versus just kind of being fed all this stuff. Number five I do want to talk about, you felt energized around new passions. Tell me what happened on this sabbatical and where new passions came into play.

Kristen:
Before my break, I was feeling pulled in a new direction a bit, but I never really had time to explore that or share any of it on my blog I felt, because I was sort of in this hamster wheel of always trying to catch up and was – never really had the time to kind of write about something new. It was always doing more of the same thing. Basically, my partner and I started a plant-based diet just over a year ago, so yeah, about 14 months ago, and it’s made such a huge difference in our health and our energy and our happiness. My niche that I consider is the outdoors, but I think it’s all related, because as an outdoor enthusiast, I really care about the environment.

Now that I’m learning more about the benefits of a plant-based diet in terms of the environment, I think it’s all really connected topics that I would love to share with my audience, but I just felt like I didn’t have time to actually learn enough to share it. I didn’t want to just watch a documentary and all of a sudden I have all these opinions. I wanted to read and learn. Yeah, just having this space to sort of read books and I signed up, I’m almost done with this six week plant-based nutrition course that it was offered through eCornell. I’m so excited to introduce more of these topics on the blog.

We have a post coming out this week about the environmental benefits. We’re going to start swapping out … I didn’t realize that so much outdoor gear is made with animal products. Now that I’ve like, I’m diving deeper into this, I want to start swapping those products out with other alternatives. Eventually I’d like to be a fully vegan, where all the information on my blog is vegan friendly and the recommendations we make for products are vegan friendly, because there are good alternatives out there. We just have to sort of shift that belief system around, that there are alternatives and they’re just as good. Anyways, sorry, that was a little bit of an aside, but you can see I’m very passionate and fired up about this stuff.

Pat:
Yeah.

Kristen:
During my break, we watched a number of movies. I started reading books. Before my break, I was like, “Oh, what should I do next? Should I create some sort of membership around hiking in the outdoors?” or my festival got canceled, so I think will be this year as well. I was just kind of trying to figure out what to do, and I think the answer was always in me. I just didn’t have the space to really let it transpire. Yeah, so we’re going to start incorporating a lot more of that onto the blog, and I’m really excited about it. I know it’s not going to resonate with everybody, but I think new people will come in who are going to be really fired up about it.

Pat:
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. In a way the break actually is helping support the business in that regard, and that’s really cool. Then finally here you say, “My life felt more full.” What does a full life mean to you exactly?

Kristen:
I think when we’re on these social media apps, everybody’s posting. I mean, it’s obvious, everybody’s posting the best moments. Nobody’s posting about the fight they had with their partner or the trip that went sour. It’s like, we’re just seeing the highlights of the best of the best. I think even now we’re seeing like, oh, that person’s house is decorated so perfect. It just leads to a lot of unhealthy comparison. When you’re constantly looking at what everybody else is doing, and even on my travels, we’ll be somewhere really beautiful, and then I get on Instagram, I’m like, “Oh, I wish we were there,” which is just crazy.

I’m like, we’re somewhere cool too. When you take away that sort of comparison, you start to be a lot more content with what you have in your current present moment, versus constantly wishing, “Oh, we should’ve gone here,” or, “We should have done that instead,” or, “Maybe this would have been better.” You’re just like, “Oh, this is awesome, and I’m happy in this moment, and I’m not worried about what anybody else is doing,” or feeling like maybe we made the wrong choice and should’ve done something different.

Pat:
That’s so key. I mean, it’s such a huge realization. My final question here as we finish up – First of all, thank you for letting us in on everything that’s been going on, and it’s cool to see you back online, because I know that we had not spoken to each other for awhile and you’re back. What’s changed now? How do we make sure that while working you still have these things in place, and are you going to take another sabbatical, you think?

Kristen:
Definitely, yeah. Next time I’ll bring some of my community with me. Let’s disconnect here, go connect with nature, and come back and reconvene in the new year and share what we learned. This is obviously something a lot of people are struggling with, especially right now. Yes, I’m going to do it again. Before I was trying to just work hard, play hard all the time, and it was just getting really exhausting and unsustainable. Now I’m kind of like, okay, well rather than work hard, play hard 365 days a year, I’m going to work hard nine months a year, and then set the pieces up so I can take the three months off, not work during that time, and then really be able to explore my creative side and learn and do some of these new passions and just kind of disconnect. Because I think then I come back to feeling fired up and ready to bring new ideas back to the business that maybe I would have never even thought of had I just continued. I think for the first time, things went exceptionally smooth, but there’s a few things that could be improved on to make this go even better next time.

Pat:
What would those things be?

Kristen:
What we did is in my absence – so I introduced Linda to my audience and she took over the weekly newsletter. She was communicating with them every week, signing the newsletter in her name, so it wasn’t like it was pretending to come from me. It was from her. I thought that was really great, because now it’s not just me. Now, it’s kind of the two of us, and we’re a team, and the audience knows both of us. If I take a break, she can sort of fill on that gap and it’s not weird, like, “Oh, who’s this person that we’ve never heard of who now is communicating with us?” I think since I got back, we’ve never really operated with an editorial calendar, like where we’re planning in advance.

I think that it’s just, like I said, the three of us and we have 500 blog posts, and it’s just a lot of times I’m coming up with ideas, writing and publishing it immediately without really getting ever ahead. This month we’re spending on getting ahead. We set up a whole editorial calendar that we’re going to update every month or every quarter, so we can start planning ahead. That way, when I’m gone next year, we can still be publishing some new content and things don’t just completely halt in terms of new stuff. We’re also experimenting with some social media scheduling tools. I’ve never used any sort of scheduler, which seems crazy because I have three different Instagram accounts, one for my festival, I have a van one, and I have my Bearfoot Theory.

The fact that we haven’t ever used any sort of scheduler is just crazy, so now we’re experimenting with some schedulers. That way I can not be on the apps as much and using a scheduler to get my content out there, communicate with my people, but not have to be on there scrolling as much. Jtust having that piece in place is, not just for my break next year, but just going to make this year and my relationship with social media be a lot healthier.

Pat:
There’s so much in this episode. I definitely believe that there’s going to be people listening to this who are now going to be inspired to take their own sabbatical, three month, one month, one week even. It doesn’t matter. I think unplugging, it just, there’s so many lessons to be learned from that, and sometimes you won’t know what the benefits are until you do it. I’m definitely inspired. Kristen, thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything that you did and packaging this for us in a very, actually, easy way to not just understand the benefits, but even the how and some of the nuances with the business and how that worked too. That was really helpful. Where can people go to find out more from you and where should they follow you?

Kristen:
My blog is BearfootTheory.com, but it’s spelled like bear, the animal, B-E-A-R, Bearfoot Theory, and also Bearfoot Theory on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Bearfoot Theory pretty much everywhere. Maybe soon to be on TikTok, but I don’t know.

Pat:
Awesome, Kristen. Well, thank you so, so much. It was a pleasure to chat with you. This is the first time I’m hearing about what the sabbatical has done for you, because right at the tail end of our time together was the time that you were about to leave. Congratulations, well done. Looking forward to hearing about the next one and the other people you take along the ride with you. Thank you so much, Kristen.

Kristen:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Kristen, and hopefully this was an eye opener for you, because it definitely was for me. I know it’s maybe a little bit difficult during the pandemic, and Kristen has a van that she can just climb into that is her home at times, and she can roam around the country and explore and literally escape. I hope that as we start to come out of this pandemic, that we can also consider the fact that, well, maybe this doesn’t mean we need to dedicate every minute of every hour of every day to going back to business and going full throttle, but also planning for time, maybe mid-year maybe next year or some time in the near future, to actually take time off and to escape and to discover new things just like Kristen did.

It’s so inspiring, and Kristen, I’m so grateful for you for sharing and being open about this and sharing this on your blog as well. We’ll put all the links to the things that we mentioned and the article that we sort of went over at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session467. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session467. That’s where the show notes and links are going to be. Again, BearfootTheory.com with Kristen Bor. This was amazing.

Thank you so much for listening in today. Thank you in advance for all the reviews that are coming in and have come in and are going to come in. They’re so meaningful. We read them at Team SPI, and we just enjoy them so much because it gives us energy.

I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about how you’ve been feeling about the Friday Follow-ups, because these episodes, these ones with interviews, come out on Wednesdays, and on Fridays it’s just you and me, and we have a little follow-up, we go deep on something, and we’re going to go deep again about something that we talked about here today. You’ll have to subscribe to find out what that is, but 15 to 20 minutes on Friday, to sort of recap all this. I hopefully can hear about how this has helped inspire you as well. I’m looking forward to chatting with you again in just a couple days. Friday Follow-up coming up soon. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Thanks so much, I appreciate you, take care, and as always, Team Flynn for the win. Peace out.

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