She's a member of location Indy at somebody network for those who are seeking to leave their 9 to 5 job and become location independent And I've actually been a member. My anniversary is in June I've been a member of location need for four years and if you listen to the past episode we just aired, it's going to be with Jason moore and he is the co founder of the location in the community. This is part two in a part three series of us featuring the location in the community and and kind of getting some different perspectives from a host, which is the episode, we deal with Jason and you're going to do one with kelly today with as, as a member of perspective and then following this episode will be one with Lynn who is the community manager of the location in the community. Um so kelly recently quit her job and is now location independent. Thanks to the support of the lifestyle launch academy program inside location indie. She discovered her love for travel after a panic attack as a middle school student Which developed into agoraphobia if I'm saying that right, uh keeping her inside her home for two years later in her life, she found the strength to face her fears and wanted to make up for lost time and opportunities.

She joined location India in December of 2020 and has since been able to learn through the community and groups how to build launch and grow her virtual assistant business and is now working full time as a location independent assistant. You can correct me if I'm wrong, Welcome to the fun come here podcast. No, thank you, thank you know that was well correct. Great, awesome, so share with me a little bit of your journey because I know you were talking you were talking about some of the different obstacles that you had in your life um that kind of prompted you to, you want to have a different lifestyle, right? For sure. For sure. So yeah, back in middle school, I've always had very much like a shy kind of quiet personality, um scared of a lot of things, very timid. Um and I actually had a panic attack in school and um it kind of set off this series of events and slowly, I just got more and more scared of everything to the point where, you know, I wasn't even leaving the house and um so I got pulled out of school therapists and medication and you know, everyone trying to figure out what was wrong, but I did online school for a few years and I think that's what kind of um gave me that need to want to have a lifestyle where I had that sort of freedom because I would do a couple of hours of school work in the morning and then you know the rest of the day I had to do whatever I want, my mom had to go to work.

So I was essentially, you know, home by myself as a, as a high schooler and you kind of learn a lot of autonomy and freedom and kind of I can do the same thing that everyone else is doing for, you know, they Go to school for 7, 8 hours a day. I do a couple of hours and then I'm done. So that kind of transferred into my work life of wanting to do something where you know, I don't, the idea of being stuck in an office for 40 hours a week is just terrible and it was a long road of, of um getting back into doing things in general, leaving the house, you know, it's a quick trip to the supermarket or eating out at a restaurant and then, you know, slowly, eventually I did go back to school and um college And all that and it's been, you know, 10, 10 plus years of having to continually like face my fears and now, um I don't have panic attacks very often, but anxiety is kind of something I always deal with and um yeah, so I got the email, I got an email from kara and Nate and um talking about this side hustle success challenge, I had never heard of um location India, I had no clue that there was a community out there that offered all of this and um I've waited until the last day to join because I thought it was going to be something where, you know, I take a class and I take a couple of notes and you know, that's it.

And I go on with my life of trying to find something that, you know, fits my lifestyle at this time. I was doing transcription work and it was part time and I had a flexible schedule, so I was, I was kind of there, but I wasn't totally there with the, you know, traveling and being able to do what I wanted to do. Um And so I got an email from them to join the side hustle success challenge and I did that absolutely loved it. The community aspect is everything and so welcoming and so when I got the invitation to go through the lifestyle launch academy L. L. A. And join the mighty network, I agreed and went through all that and that's how I kind of got into it all. Yeah the kara and Nate. Can you remind me how um I think you were, you were telling me a while ago but remind them like to share with the listeners how you who who they are and what the email was about. Yeah. Yeah so um they are travel vloggers um so part of kind of being inspired to like travel, especially when I have such bad anxiety, it was really helpful to go on Youtube and watch other people who are doing, you know, all this really cool stuff.

Um So I had been following them and they've you know been too over or at 100 countries and they gained a big following. So they sent out an email um with basically asking if if you wanted to join this uh side hustle success challenge and that you know they they are really um trustworthy and that they're like, you know we don't we don't normally ask this kind of stuff so that was that was part of the thing of of um getting an invitation from people that you really like and trust and kind of um not even advertising but just kind of saying, hey there's this thing, this really cool thing if you want to try it out. Yeah, I get their, their emails to and they're very transparent about their business and about how they um how they earn money as travel bloggers or vloggers and they're super um I've met them in the location in the community a long time ago and um I was really inspired by their journey but I think I wanted to just pick up that a little bit, go a little bit more depth there with, you know, how did you transition from somebody who was not wanting to go out at all?

And I know you said a little bit of like you know, going to the store here and there, but how does it transition from somebody who's just like trying to get back into like normal, maybe what quote unquote normal life would be for most people and then transition into that from that person into being like, oh well now I actually want to go travel if that's the interest. Yeah. Yeah, so a lot of it is kind of finding what works for you um you know, some people do have chemical imbalances and need medication. I did not and I remember the first day I did, they did put me on medication. I slept the whole day and I was like, nope, not for me. Um for me a lot of it was um slowly trying to get back out into doing things. Um one thing I really love dance, so you know, doing dance classes for an hour um and and that kind of thing and getting down into the root of like the psychological aspects of like, oh, I'm really scared I'm going to make this mistake, well what's the worst that can happen or kind of knowing that their silly irrational thoughts.

Um and when I graduated high school as kind of a gift, my grandpa took me to England um for a week and that was kind of the, like how traveling internationally is like the biggest eye opener and you learn so much and a lot of people say, you know, once you travel, you, you catch that travel bug and that was definitely the case for me because I saw that, you know, there's so much out there to experience and um I feel like part of me feels like that I've been trying to catch up on missed opportunities and missed experiences for maybe times that I was too scared and what said no or refused or stayed home because of my anxiety. So now I kind of felt like there was like something to prove of, you know, I want to go out and do these hard things and prove to myself that I can do them and um you know, being empowered by that, that's some very inspiring perspective to have because you could just return to, like, it's hard enough when you have some kind of like an experience like that to just even get back to wanting to, like you said, go out and just go to the store and go to restaurants and things like that, but to really challenge yourself and level up and say, all right, well I can do more, you know, that takes a different perspective and a different mindset and so I think it's really inspiring for you to share that with other people who might relate to maybe not having the experience in depth as much as you have, but maybe similar experiences I know um there's a lot of people, especially like myself included that um and you know, I'm not, I'm not quite sure about this whole reemergence thing after the pandemic and um you know, I gained weight and it's like I feel, you know, I have different emotions now around like seeing people and it's just different being in person now with people and which I love being in in person with people, but so I can kind of relate to some of the feelings of not being sure about Yeah, just some of those emotions, I can certainly relate to some of that um but it's an inspiring story to transition and so you had this amazing experience that was travel related and you wanted to travel more and so you joined um the location of their location, these lifestyle launch academy, tell me a little bit about that experience as you did the challenge, which was like, I think like a seven day challenge or something like that and that kind of was giving you some, some things that was like a free challenge, right?

Yeah, it was Like, I think it's like $7, Okay, so it was a low entry to low entry barrier to get in kind of a thing, so maybe had a little upfront investment, but it was like enough that it wasn't like going to hold you back from like signing up right away, but it wasn't asking a lot of you, but then somehow with that challenge that got you inspired to like join the lifestyle launch academy because then was it more like a, you actually saw that this life is possible for you, Is that kinda what it was or? Yeah, for sure. Um I had kind of, because I was such a fan of Kara and Nate and a couple other like, you know, bucket list family who were doing this, you know, traveling vlogging lifestyle, I had kind of had it in my head that like, oh I would love to do something like that and you know, show the the good, bad and ugly of anxiety and kind of what what this journey is like for me. Um so I had had an idea of like maybe I can get to a point where I can quit my job and do this and I just didn't really know how I was going to do that and also Youtube was kind of getting to the point where it's you know, so saturated and there's you know so much content being pushed that I just didn't know how to gain a following or anything like that.

Um so with the seven day side hustle challenge um that kind of set the building blocks of like, oh you know that people actually can do this and um it helped me build and figure out how to actually have this lifestyle and they kind of get you thinking about what you can do and I definitely switched ideas a whole bunch trying to figure out like how can I make this work and it was enough to get it going and he um Travis made a really good point that you can invest in yourself and you know, if if you, you wanna sell these types of things, you know, you want people to invest in you and your your business, what are you doing to invest in yourself? And I think that was kind of the point that I, that kind of got me to where I was like yeah okay, I kind of need to do this because you can, you can always do it um by yourself and you can figure it out And I'm a huge learner.

I love to learn and and teach myself how to do things. But with something on this scale of kind of achieving your dream lifestyle. Having the community was the biggest part and that was like again with this timid and shy nature and stuff when I would go on the challenges when you know, I have these people messaging me and talking to me and welcoming me that who were all part of l I um that was such a huge thing because I don't start the conversations myself and for them to be there and welcoming me and making me feel like part of a group. That's why I was willing to invest because I knew that you know, these were the people that I wanted to be around, the people that shared the same dream as me and the same goals and I've realized like how valuable that is. Mm hmm. So you joined, You had the lifestyle launch academy. When did you start that? And how long of a program is that? Yes. So I started that um it started, I think like a week after the side hustles success challenge. So it was kind of keeping up that momentum And that went for I wanna say two or three months of um you know, weekly calls and um all of that and at the end they let you know that you know, you can obviously join um the location in the community and and keep up with the involvement and all that and it is great motivation and and I put so much work um so I wanted to to continue that.

So um in november december um is when I switched over and joined um Ally, so the lifestyle launch academy, uh you had some like maybe instruction or coursework and then there were some live calls, like it was a combination of some instruction and then live calls. Yeah, so it's a, it's a mixture of um you have a weekly kind of coaching call with a whole group of everyone else who joined um L. L. A. At the same time and then you had, you know, they gave you courses to watch and you were already in the Ally community, so you get, you got to start um you know, posting and interacting with other people and I know all of us did like, you know, introduction posts and all that kind of stuff. Um so we were working on the career dream lifestyle aspect on top of being in the community, there was a structure to it, a roadmap or some kind of structure that told you, you know, this is where we're starting, you know, start here, here are the videos that we want you to start with or or how did that work?

Yeah, you could do it at your own pace. Um but they did have a structure of, you know, first. Um one of the things that makes their programs so unique is that they have, you look at the lifestyle you want first instead of like thinking about this is a business, I could start right? So like, you know, what kind of hours are you looking to be working? You know, who do you want to serve and why and all those really important questions before you should even be thinking about like what kind of job you or or business or whatever lifestyle you want to create. Um So that made it so unique because I had, I had never experienced that before. So you talked a little bit about having, I'm picking all this stuff apart just because I had, I had this exact, I had a similar experience except I didn't go through L. L. A. Um And so that's why I'm asking about L. A. Because I feel like it's helpful to know the on boarding when I talk to clients um who launched communities and have courses, we talk about onboarding a lot.

And one of the things that you're describing is how they onboard you and you're describing that experience as a member. And in each step they could have lost you at some point like that, you could have not been involved, but they were really involved to make sure each step of the way, like you got the content, you knew where that was right, they um like tell me a little bit more about. Mhm. Yeah, that's the experience of like coming into the money network and how it was to like find the content or find different aspects of like connecting with people and sharing your your information and that kind of thing. I guess the ease ability would be j Yeah, yeah, they sent out an email um and kind of one of the things was um logging into Ally and the Mighty Network was separate from where they hosted the courses.

So um they did really good of outlining the steps of one you need to sign on to this to, this is separate, but here's where your courses are essentially where you can get into, you know, the weekly calls and stuff like that and a lot of communication of when they had our first coaching call, they made sure, you know, can everyone see where your courses are and you know, have you been in L. I. And I know Casey posted a um right a um meeting that you know, would go in depth on on using the Mighty Network and joining groups and um through the, through the few weeks I think, I think it was about seven or eight weeks worth of coaching calls. I definitely noticed that, you know, our numbers would start to dwindle, but I think the fact that um I did get so involved in, especially in the Mighty Networks, I joined um like the V. A. Group and and really kind of put myself out there and and shared my story and I think I got so much back from it that um you know, I was I was part of the group that kind of stuck with it and decided to keep up with it.

Why did you decide to sign up? You said you wanted, you did the course, but then you wanted to continue with location and you, so you had paid something to to do the L. A. Program and then joining location and he was an additional payment. Um What was the importance of you really deciding you wanted to make that um something you're gonna keep your going to keep being a part of. Yeah, again I think just being um really shy and kind of struggling to make connections and all of a sudden I was in a group that understood the lifestyle that I was trying to achieve and there's people who had already achieved the lifestyle was so valuable and you know, I love my family and they're so great but they didn't really understand what I was trying to do. Um They supported me which is great but they didn't, you know, kind of the struggles that come along with trying to create a business and you know, working remotely and you know, holding yourself accountable.

Um all those, all those little pieces. Um it was so helpful to have um people who had already done it and that I could fall back on and say hey I don't really know how to do this or not even that I didn't know but I'd be like I'm so nervous to kind of take this next step. Is there anything you can recommend? And that's part of what makes the community aspect so valuable because everyone is always so friendly and so willing to help you know everyone's like hey like do you want me to look over your welcome packet or hey I saw this article and I thought of you and um that was really what what kind of um brought me in as well as the fact that I I had learned what virtual assistant work was through. Going through the side hustle success challenge. I had never heard of it before and I didn't know what it was and um I was learning more about that so I was part of the v. A. Baby's group that um you know helped you learn about this particular business of being a V.

A. Um as well as I started by um asking if anyone wanted a social media audit. So those kind of um the people within l I were some of my first you know clients or discovery calls and to have that experience before um spreading out to people who aren't involved in the community again with such a huge confidence booster and such a great community to be a part of, to be able to kind of, you know, practice and and get my feet on the ground instead of trying to do all this by myself, you mentioned about networking and just being able to like bounce ideas off of each other. I think you know, the V A group that you're talking about was led by Casey who has been a full time virtual assistant for quite a while, has a really great experience and was training from some of the best virtual assistants in what she does. And so um I was a part of that group too because it's some there was a point in the last year that I was thinking about being a virtual assistant and I think I didn't know a whole lot about it.

And it's funny because when I joined location into cases like oh you're going to be a virtual assistant, you're like totally meant to be a virtual assistant. I'm like no, no, I don't think so, and I was going to do it, you know, all these different ideas and so I kind of got lost and I feel like um what I was curious about was how did you um you know, you said you had a couple ideas like how did you narrow in on the virtual assistant, was it something you were already thinking about and then you just kind of like decided this is what I'm gonna do. Yeah, I definitely had a hard time because I at first I was thinking about you know maybe some sort of like coaching and you know my experience with anxiety. Um It would be really awesome to be able to help other people out there may be going through the same thing. Um And you know so that was an idea for a little while or maybe someone who you know helping people who have anxiety and want to travel and maybe like you know guides that maybe think about specific things that could trigger anxiety like you know parking situation.

Which is a really funny thing but when you have anxiety like that's the type of stuff you worry about. Um So I was thinking about all those different things and um I think trying to look at my skill set um Starting as a V. A. Was the easiest. Um in terms of um and and being via is such a broad term so you know there's some people who do like email marketing and and um you know website design and graphic design and thankfully because I had been doing youtube just personally for fun for a little bit. I had experience with Canberra and a little bit of graphic editing and um so I I fell into the kind of social media um social media manager aspect of being a V. A. Because I just used social media personally. So I thought that that was something that I knew enough about um that I could start to offer right away. And so I I did I joined um uh Well I um like fall winter of last year and by january I had my first you know paying clients.

So it was it was a really quick turnover and transition of trying to figure everything out. That's really great that that's very fast. And so how is it going since january 2? It's almost june as we're recording this. How has it been going for you in your first six months of location? Independent officially virtual assistant work. Yeah it's been it's been crazy. Um It was a lot of figuring everything out and very very much humbling myself of you know admitting hey I don't really know how to do this. Um The client work itself was really thrilling to you know already have clients and and be really doing the things that I enjoy to do. Like you know creating posts and offering my ideas to help these businesses out. I work with all um independent business owners. So you know they're trying to juggle everything themselves so to be a part of their team and like help them is a really great feeling.

Um But the struggle has been the back and stuff of like you know setting up a business and I just got my you know LLC thrown together and then learning you know now I have to open a bank account and getting ei in numbers and I don't know anything about taxes and it's just kind of realizing that um I think something that was really tied to my anxiety is that um I felt like I wanted to be perfect at everything and realizing like that's not gonna work, this isn't gonna work, so just reminding myself to enjoy the day by day and not trying to scare myself off by thinking I need to do this, this, this and this and um just just enjoying it really. But um, I officially quit my job what, two weeks ago now? So I've had two weeks off. Um and I'm already up in Alaska visiting my family and just to, you know, wake up and do a couple of hours of work or you know, this morning I woke up did an hour and then I went on a little hike to a waterfall and now I'm back at home, I'm going to do a few more hours, so it's just, it's been really awesome and I think like I said, I could have learned to do it by myself, but being part of a community that supported that, I felt like I hit my goal so much faster than I ever thought I could.

Yeah, that's so awesome and I'm glad that you're sharing with us some of your, your lifestyle because that's what it's about as an entrepreneur is we want to, you know, we want to, we create our own, like running our own day instead of having the day run us as they say, and you can get into as an entrepreneur the, You know, the race of like I have to learn all of it and it has to be perfect and I have to compete against people who have been doing it for 15 years and it's like you can get in your head that way and, and I love that you're finding some calm basically around this journey of entrepreneurial ship and and trying to enjoy the journey of what is going to be um you know, your work, of your, of your work and that's how, you know, it's hard to sometimes wrap your mind around like all of those things and letting go of like the perfection aspects, some people, it's a little hard to let go of, so congratulations for like that and, and that you left your job and that's super exciting um I just wouldn't Wrap up with the like one Or two more questions for the community aspect, going back to location Andy, what's your favorite part of the community?

Like if there is a feature um whether it's like an event that you really like or whether it's just like the group, um like accountability or um, you know, is there any features or functions that you really like of location. Indeed, I think definitely the events as a whole um is probably my favorite, that's what I participate in the most and I think if it wasn't for um you know, the coworking session, sometimes I have a bunch of stuff that I just don't want to do and I kind of force myself to go to a coworking session so I sit there and do it. Um or you know, the accountability calls or even like the social calls are really fun and it kind of cements that that aspect of getting to know one another and, and speaking, you know, even though we're all separated face to face um having that is really unique. I think I would have um stuck with it or or used it as much if it was just the posting because I don't do that too much anymore.

Um so yeah, I really love those. That's where I was going to ask you next is around the posting of if you comment or if you're really active in posting things or if it's more about showing up on the events, which is what you kind of answered. Great. Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. I prefer the events. Um the posting, I did do it a lot. Back when I was still asking for a lot of help. I think I've gotten to a point now where I'm kind of just trying to maintain what I have going on. So I don't use it as much. I did notice actually I was looking through it the other day um and I did notice that I had wasn't following a couple of the different um like categories or tags that they have, so for example, I wasn't following introductions, so I didn't notice that I didn't even see, like it didn't show me any of the new introductions of anyone else who has joined since. Um So I realized I had missed out on a bunch of posts, like I kind of clicked them all so I could see everything that was like available and that people were posting. That's good. Yeah, it shows up really predominantly in your feet when you're following a topic and so that's a good note for hosts who are listening, making sure that you're pointing your members to these places that you want them to see content and um uh you know, pulling their attention to certain things like if you're really interested in focusing on one topic that you're following that topic, for sure.

Um Is there anything that you wish location in the offered or had, I was trying to think of this and I couldn't really think of anything. Um the only thing is maybe just still coming up and and Lynn is doing a great job with this um now that she's the new community manager of just kind of finding new events and new fun things to kind of keep people interested um Sometimes when it's just the same old, same old, you kind of get a little used to it. Um and so you know, now, like lately I I kind of stopped doing the accountability calls a little bit and um you know, so just keeping things fun and interesting and and adding new new features or you know, maybe collaborative projects and stuff like that. Um I think that that kind of keeps me interested in wanting to keep using it. Gotcha. Yeah, that's a great point, keeping it fresh, keeping a new new ideas flowing and having new generations. I know we did some games last year, we had some social happy hours last year.

Um Sometimes they get to some of the coworking and sometimes that's fun because then it kind of gives you a little a little bit of socialization where it's like, okay, I'm gonna go get this work done, but I also get to see a lot of cool people, so I think that's super helpful. Um The only other thing I was gonna ask you, I know um I had a ticket for location, Indies Camp Indy and I still have that as of now, I'm still tentatively planning on going and so I guess moved to september now. Um I don't know if you're interested in like meeting in person everybody. Is that something that you're interested in, Like if they offer more impersonal events going forward. Yeah, for sure. I would definitely be interested in that. I know there was a couple of us in florida that we were talking about um potentially meeting, but yeah, I think that would be really great. Have you, have you met any location in the members at all in person yet? I haven't, I haven't, not yet. And you're, where are you based out of? I'm in florida, I'm in central florida by Tampa. There are a couple of location in the members in florida.

So I don't know where you're, where they are in comparison to where you are in florida is a really big state, but it might be cool. I know um there's some people in pennsylvania here and there are some people in Virginia and a couple different places around the country. So it's cool to like Jason, I talked a little bit about this, but like, it's cool like that you could like, you know, post like I'm in, you know, I'm in Alaska right now or I'm in florida or I'm in Tennessee or whatever and um you know, is anybody or you know, does anybody want to meet up because I've done that. Um I've done that before, I met up with people in person or connected with, I was in Maine in january and I was in Maine and driving down from Maine back to pennsylvania and lily was like, oh, well we're in massachusetts, she would have stopped by and so I ended up spending a, you know, a half a day with lily in massachusetts, which was really great because I hadn't seen her since the Mex, uh the Mexico Trip, which was in 2019.

So I've seen people in L I I went to the Denver experience, that was in 2018 in Denver and Then the Mexico experience which was incarcerated in Mexico in 2019. And um hopefully I'll be at camp indie, we'll see how everything goes over for the rest of the year. But I'm so excited and if I get to meet you in person, that would be lovely. I would love to to meet you as well. Um if I'm down in the florida, I was just in cocoa beach. So uh I was just in the florida area a couple of weeks ago, but um next time in florida will reach out to you if I'm anywhere near you for sure. So for sure, lovely to have you on the Fine come here podcast. Thanks so much for being so uh just really open and and sharing your experience as a community member in the location in the community. If anybody's interested, you are, I guess for hire, right? You're available, however you want to say that as far as taking clients on, I think it's looking for what is your specialty? You said, social media, yep, social media, marketing, content creation, all that.

Yeah, so if anybody's interested, I will have links to the show notes two to your website if you want to share. Uh just let us know everybody where you can find where everybody can find you. Yeah, so my website is Callie Gene, so that's C A L L E J E N E dot com. And I have an instagram. That's Callie Gene dot v A um and yeah. All right, well, thank you all so much for listening. Hopefully you have already listened to the first episode of the location in the series, which is what Jason moore, who's the co founder of location, et. And coming up next, the following episode will be with Lynn and she is the community manager of location. So make sure you subscribe to get all of our episodes and many more that we have coming up in the future. There's some really great episodes with some awesome money network hosts. Until the next time. I hope you're finding calm in this day, evening, afternoon, weekends, morning, wherever it is, whatever time it is for you, wherever you are, I hope your funding calm until next time.

Take care. Mhm