Building Your Life With Passion

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Vanessa Plimley, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

I think the most significant change in my life was when my husband was diagnosed with cancer. He was a strong 31 year old mountain man/surfer, did not feel sick, and was on top of the world.

He beat it thank god, and after a year off he started getting back into living. The only problem was that he was lost mentally after facing death, and did not know what the future held. He began to spiral downward, until I cornered him with a serious request. It was a plead for him to find his new path, to go away and seek answers. My friends say I “lovingly sent him on a vision quest”, it was not so pretty as that. It was a dire cry to regain the incredible relationship we had, to re build our lives from a major “life quake” and look inward to the new needs within each of us.

He left. It was heartbreaking as I was not sure if we were going to survive it.

I holed up in my house, searching through my heart, and realized that I needed to check in just as much as he. So I sat and wrote my goals with him, as well as if I was alone and not married. What an eye opener.

When I sat to write mine, I felt my hand begin to scribble at warp speed and within a matter of minutes had a 5 year plan to sell everything, work up north to bank some cash, and then take my dog into Central America and build a surfing guest house. WHAT?

Where did that come from? In my heart I realized I was not on my path and had not been for a long time. Like in many relationships, it was so easy to get pulled along without staying on top of individual needs as well as the needs of a couple.

In the meantime, my husband was on his own incredible journey, that took him all over two provinces, ending up with a friends’ parents. Talk about random.

They happened to be a part of a real estate group that mentored people getting into the rental real estate business. This struck a cord with him. He came bursting in the door two weeks later, full of the old light and fire. He had a plan of how to get out of his job he did not enjoy, and also build a long term solid investment.

I made him sit on the far couch, as I spelled out that I had my own new plan, and that we may not be able to bridge the two.

Where we are at today was a direct result of that crossroad.

We entered into the rental market, have a great passive income and long term investment. He changed careers to something he can do globally, and also still earn a decent wage. I went back to school for coaching, and we are currently buying land in Nicaragua!

The dream is manifesting but only because we did the work to create it. The vision has changed direction a bit, instead of a guesthouse I’m building a remote coaching business with retreats all over the world.

But we have freedom, soon a southern home with waves galore (we are passionate surfers), and are building the new dream bit by bit.

I will say it was because of a few key things.

The real estate group we were part of hammered home each month, the necessity of writing monthly goals and having an accountability partner to call you out, if you did not get things done. This we did as a couple in all matters of our life rather than just real estate.

We have hot tub meetings, or dinner dates where we continually hash out where we are going, and what we need to do to get there.

We check in, and ask each other what we need personally for the month. It might be” I need to go out with the boys and suffer a bit in the mountains” or “ I need to go dancing in the city” or “we need to reno our basement suite to bring in more cash”.

Point being one of the greatest tools we ever learned was to take continual action in creating our lives.

That and of course taking time to celebrate health and our relationship together.