How Two People Are Forming Their Best Decade

Recently, our good friends Cory and Mallory decided to hit the pause button on work to reflect on what they really want for their lives. This is something many of us fail to do because life happens and we remain too busy to step aside from what we are doing, to then step into who we want to become.

In following their journey together, I reached out to Mallory to see if they could share what they discovered over the past couple of months while diving into Your Best Decade while adventuring the world together. 

Here is what they had to say about their reflections…

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What impact has Your Best Decade left on your life while traveling?

For us, it has been being able to find out what we really want in this life — not settling for something that doesn’t seem right to us. When we read the book and really paid attention and reflected on what our goals are relationally, personally, and professionally, we knew that change is a good thing.

Stepping outside the comfort zone and going for what you want in this life is the best thing you can do for yourself and for those around you. Living out our best decade is a choice and we are making the choice to do just that.

Which chapter most applied to you and why?

We really liked Chapter 10 — the Yes/No equation.

We both were saying yes for so long to things we should have been saying no to. We don’t regret the steps we took- our job offered us so much experience, so many friendships gained and for that we are thankful. We just believe that we could have had a bit more stress-free time doing it. For so long we kept saying yes to getting trained in multiple areas at work, saying yes to doing call, saying yes to everything basically that we were told to do. That takes a huge toll on someone. We are in our late 20’s/early 30’s and we were heading for burnout. We stepped back and wondered “Is this conducive to our future goals”, and “What is going to be our next step?”.

We decided a change was needed. That lead us to leave our security, buying an RV, and doing that travel trip we always wanted to do. 

Saying no is incredibly uncomfortable, especially when society tells you that you have everything…A job, a house, a spouse, money. We were saying yes to all that, but now it was time to say no, and start living the life that we wanted.

What excites you about living out your best decade moving forward?

What is exciting about living out our best decade is the fact that we now can choose what is best for us and align this with our future plans. We both have different goals- we think about going back to school, or simply aligning our schedules to allow for more of what we want to do. We’re excited to be able to put those goals into motion. It wasn’t easy to take the leap but we’re excited and optimistic for the future. After all, if you’re not excited for the future something needs to change. It’s a beautiful world with lots to see, do, experience and of course endless learning.

If you can, describe the book in three words.

It took us a while to come up with three words-since there really are so many but we decided on these three:

Attainable

Practical

Empowering

What was one major takeaway from the book?

The biggest takeaway we took from this book is how to make choices that will benefit us in the long run. It isn’t just one simple fix- it is taking the variety of tools and information in this book and putting it all together to find the right direction. Of course, the directions we want to be in must align uniquely with our own goals. Life looks different for so many different people and that is okay. We need to do what’s best for us and everything else should fall into place. Yes, life always has curve balls and hurdles yet being equipped mentally is unbelievably helpful and we only wonder why books of this nature are not mandatory in school.

When you envision living out your best decade, what does that look like?

We have already started living out our best decade and it started with asking ourselves what do we want to do? We have always wanted to travel and see North America. We have had a desire to invest more time in reading, traveling, family and ourselves. For the past few years, we kept saying let’s plan a west coast trip…it just never happened, it was never the right timing. It eventually occurred to us there will never be perfect timing unless we did something to make it happen. We had to make the choice to do what we wanted or keep up what we were already doing. 

We chose us. 

That was the best decision we could have ever made.

We will eventually go back to work — absolutely! We are alright with that — we enjoy the work we do, the people we help. The difference this time is that we are going to find the right fit. We will make decisions based on if they’re aligning with future goals. For us that looks like spending fewer hours at work and spending more hours with books, traveling, activities, family and each other.

For everyone out there who hasn’t read YBD yet, what would you say to them?

First of all- Read it!

This book is for the long haul — Ryan gets you reflecting on all areas of your life. At the end of reading it, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how your life should look like according to your own goals.

We encourage everyone to highlight, write down ideas and thoughts, reread it, and have discussions with other people about Your Best Decade!