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3 Areas to Upgrade to Live a Jet Set Life

Since I’ve been sheltering in place and after I lost my job in the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been taking a lot more outdoor walks. And I’ve been LOVING IT. I live in Murphy, Texas and although it’s definitely not considered in the country, we are in a unique area that has a lot of land and even some country animals.

For example, the house at the end of our street has two goats to keep the grass in the backyard short. One street over, we have a house with two horses that live on the property. And our neighbors told us that a chicken coop used to be in the backyard of our property!

I grew up in North Dallas in a very suburban lifestyle, whereas my fiance grew up in Amarillo on a lot of land that had cows and pigs and horses. We moved to Murphy because it was a really good compromise for us. I have my Starbucks and Target around the corner while he has his acre and the ability to build a large shop in the back for all his toys and hobbies.

I’m not sure if this will be our forever home, but it’s been a nice change of pace to living in the crowded Dallas city.

So back to my walk. I’ve found a lovely path near our house that takes me about an hour to complete. It’s a good distance for me and I get to see some nice things along the way. I get to say hi to the goats, then I come up on a lovely new park area that has a fishing pond and lots of nice shaded paved areas to walk through. Then I see some more goats and chickens as I leave the park. Towards the end of the walk, two loud dogs always run over to say hi then I eventually come back to my house.

In the past, I would listen to music, which I still like to do now and again, but right now I’m loving listening to podcasts. While listening to podcasts and walking out in nature, I get to do some great thinking and I often get some good thoughts and topics that pop into my head as I go.

This week, I was considering my big why while on one of my walks. Some of you may already know this because I’ve shared it on Instagram, but my big why is to unlock what it means to live an extraordinary life. This is essentially the mission of The Jet Set Life. A jet set life is one of the extraordinary. It’s a life where we have fun, enjoy our time on earth, and create new things. We want to know what’s possible for us in this life. We want to make our dreams a reality. We want to create an extraordinary life that we can look back on in our old age and know that we lived it well.

On a side note, if you aren’t following me on Instagram yet, go over there now and add me! I’m at @thejetsetblonde and I’d love to connect with you.

So getting back to my walk, I was thinking about my big why and the mission of The Jet Set Life and it occurred to me that there are three areas of our lives that we can upgrade in order to create a jet set life.

So today, that’s what I’d like to share with you.

We all want to live jet set lives. We want to learn new things, meet new people, create new things, and follow our passions. We want to dream big and then make those dreams a reality. But in order to do this, we need to upgrade three areas of our life.

Now, I can hear you saying to me, “But Brittany, just three? I can think of lots of things that need upgrading before I can live an extraordinary life…”

But I beg to differ. Let me share with you these three areas first, then you can come back to me and tell me if you think more areas still need to be on the list.

I’ve labeled them with all “S” words to make it easier to remember.

Upgrade Your Schooling

So, the first area in your life to upgrade to create your jet set life is schooling. And I’m not talking about schooling in the formal sense of the word, though traditional schooling is very important and a great way to upgrade your life.

But what I’m moreso referring to here is learning. Increasing your knowledge. Investing in your education. Upping your “school” game. Many of us stop trying to learn and grow in new areas of interest after school ends because we associate learning with pop quizzes and final exams and cramming for tests and pulling all-nighters.

Just because you graduate from high school or college doesn’t mean that you have to stop learning new things or developing new skills.

I like to consider myself a student of life whether I’m physically in a classroom or not.

One of the reasons why I love travel so much is because travel creates amazing learning experiences. When I travel, I get to immerse myself in new ideas, new cultures, new ways of thinking, and alternative ways of living. I love the possibility of learning new things and pushing myself beyond what I think I’m capable of.

When I traveled to Spain and Italy for the first time in my second summer abroad during college, I was in awe of how different the cultures were in how they treated work-life balance. I was enchanted by their way of life. It seemed as though people there had discovered the secret to life. Their lives were slower than the constant hustle and bustle that I knew back home. They took time to connect with each other, they took time to be healthy and outdoors, they took time to truly LIVE.

I loved how the Spaniards took siestas in the early afternoon and I loved how Italians could spend hours at dinner with delicious wine and lively banter.

This was something that I wasn’t accustomed to at home. In fact, those practices may actually be frowned upon in other cultures. But as I observed how these other people lived, I knew that I was witnessing something special. I wanted to live my life the way they did. Maybe not by taking a cat nap every day, but I wanted to be connected with the world as they were. I wanted to celebrate life and place value on the things that mattered most to me in life, one of which was human connection.

This was a lesson that I could not have learned in a classroom. You could have told me the facts of their culture but I wouldn’t have been able to experience it and partake in it. By traveling there to experience it myself, I could feel the passion that these people had for life. And this new knowledge was invaluable.

Now, there’s still so much value in classroom style training. ANY kind of education - no matter how it’s taught or learned is important for creating a jet set life.

In middle school and high school, we were able to take a creative elective - art, drama, computer science, physical education, public speaking - you know, those sort of classes. And I always took art classes. I loved all of my art classes, but the classes I enjoyed the most often involved more abstract concepts. I loved my mixed media, abstract painting, and pottery classes over the 6 years.

Fast forward to my first job out of college, and I felt completely void of creativity in my life. I was craving something different and creative. I wanted to learn something new that was for me, not for my corporation. So, I decided to enroll at my local community college and start taking Abstract Painting classes.

And I loved it! I wasn’t necessarily all that good at it, but that wasn’t the point. I was investing in myself and investing in learning something new that made my heart happy and my soul re-energized. Each week of the semester we learned a new technique then practiced on our canvases and it put me in a beautiful headspace where I was challenged but felt renewed because I had tapped into my creative side which had been stuffed away for the past 7 seven years.

I also had forgotten how much I enjoyed books. After school, we start to associate reading with giant textbooks and again those dreaded tests and pop quizzes. But there’s so much that we can still learn from books and audiobooks.

My point is: our education is an important aspect of upgrading your life and it doesn’t have to stop when you graduate from school.

So, we want to upgrade our schooling - both in the formal and informal sense, whether you’re in a classroom or not. It can be a documentary, a magazine, a podcast, a class, an online course, or even an organization. Even a conversation can be educational.

When you expand your mind, you expand the potential for extraordinary in your life. So I encourage you to try learning something new - it can be ANYTHING. It could be something as brief as learning how to bake sourdough bread or something as intense as passing the BAR and studying how to become a lawyer.

What are you inquisitive about? What interests you? What peaks your curiosity? Follow that curiosity and educate yourself.

Your schooling in this life is invaluable. Investing in yourself pays the highest return. Your education will expose you to new perspectives, new skills, and new ways of thinking. In a way, that is the ultimate upgrade. So ask yourself, “What is one thing that I could start educating myself in today?”

Upgrade Your Surroundings

The next area in your life that deserves an upgrade and your attention is your surroundings. Yes, your mindset and your thoughts truly are more important than your outer world, but your environment has the power to affect your inner world.

Now I’ve personally always had a pretty strong ability to tune things in my outer world out when I need to. Especially when I’m really wrapped up into things. In my old house growing up, our TV room or den was right off the garage. I could get so focused on the TV show or movie that I was watching that I could completely tune out if my mom or dad had come home. Many times, I’d hear them behind me in the kitchen, and it would completely scare me because I didn’t know that they were in the house. Then they’d say, “Didn’t you see me? I walked right by you when I came in and said ‘hi’!” This isn’t always the best ability to have because it can make me rather rude if I’m tuning out my outside world too much, but for most people, they can’t so easily block out their environment.

Your outer environment can affect your inner one. If your desk is unorganized, you’re probably going to find it more difficult to think. If your house is cluttered, you’re probably going to start feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Pay attention to how your environment could be putting added unnecessary stress on your thoughts and feelings.

Your surroundings of course include things, but it also includes people as well. Are you surrounding yourself with high quality people? Have you ever noticed that if you’re around someone who is constantly saying negative things to you, you start to think negative things as well? That’s because your environment can either positively or negatively affect your inner world.

Your surroundings also include what you put in your body. We want to surround you with high quality things in every aspect, whether that’s food, drink, people, or objects.

When my sister and I were kids, we didn’t have any pets because my sister was allergic to fur animals. Ironically, I am now the one who is allergic to fur animals and my sister’s allergies have subsided. Weird, right? I didn’t know that you could develop allergies in your adult life, but believe me you can!

So, seeing that we couldn’t really have a dog or cat, we got a goldfish. Actually, I don’t even think we were planning on getting a fish, but my sister came home with one after a fair, so all of a sudden we had a goldfish!

When my sister brought home that fish, my mom prepared us for the fact that the goldfish may not live too long. Within a week, my sister’s friend, who also brought home a goldfish that day, had said goodbye to her own goldfish.

But, we wanted our fish to live a long and happy life. And in order for our fish to live long, we had to create the proper environment for that fish. We had to make sure that the fish had clean water. We had to provide the fish with fresh new water every week and clean the fishbowl regularly. We had to feed our fish high-quality flake food, but not too much.

If you didn’t properly take care of the fish’s environment, the water would get cloudy, algae would start to grow, and oxygen levels would decrease.

Because we took care of the goldfish’s environment, he was able to live multiple years.

And just like a little fish, we have to take care of our outer world. We need high quality food, We need high quality water, We need high quality air. We need high quality people. We need high quality things.

Even deciding what we wear can impact our mindset. Y’all know I love lounging around in my robe but I struggle to get real work done in my house when I’ve decided to keep that robe on. Even on days that I work from home, I make a point to put on some jeans and a t-shirt, because doing so helps me to get in the right mindset for working. If I’m in my sweatpants or my robe, I am more likely to laze about the house all day, which may feel good in the moment, but I usually go to bed feeling depressed because I ultimately enjoy how I feel about myself when I’m being productive.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to sell your house and upgrade to a gated, rich community and stop talking to all your friends and family. Sometimes we are not going to find ourselves in environments of our own choosing. But if you are constantly in an environment that is causing you stress and challenges at every turn, where you have to constantly manage your mindset, why put yourself there?

Look at your current environment and pick one thing to focus on upgrading around you. Don’t try to change all the things in your environment all at once. Just find a single way that you can upgrade your environment today so that you can make a little more room for oxygen in your fish tank.

Clean out a closet. Bring a fresh flower arrangement into your home. Diffuse some essential oils. Start eating differently. Start drinking more water. Get outside and go on a walk. Maybe stop hanging out with certain people.

Choose one thing today that you can upgrade in your surroundings. Because whether you’re conscious of it or not, our environments impact us. So try to notice how it impacts you. Observe how your surroundings can influence your thinking. Pay attention to your surroundings.

Upgrading your surroundings will help you to manage your mind and to ultimately upgrade your life.

Upgrade Your Stamina

The final area to upgrade in order to create a jet set life is your stamina. I’m talking about not just your physical stamina but also your mental stamina.

We want to ensure that we have physical energy and health so that our physical bodies can live longer. But we also want to have mental energy to manage our thoughts and emotions. Our thoughts can create our emotions and our moods. And experts estimate that we think between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts a day. So imagine how many mood swings you may experience within a single day. If you are acting on your current mood, you’ll be on a roller coaster with constant whiplash. Not to mention, your hair would be a mess.

So we need to keep our emotions and thoughts in check so that we can stay focused on what we want to create in this life. I’m not saying that we need to become robots and become completely numb to our thoughts and feelings.

But instead I’m saying that we shouldn’t let ourselves be ruled by our emotions. We need to have the stamina and the spirit to let emotional energy flow through us.

Our emotions are energies in the bodies. They are vibrations. For me, when I’m angry, I feel contracted and tense. The vibration is intense. When I’m sad, the vibration feels faint and low.

In contrast, joyful vibrations feel high and exciting. My body feels relaxed.

Our emotional vibrations emit energies. Those energies will attract other energies on the same frequency. So we want to become an energy match for that which we seek. And in order to do that, we need to have mental stamina to address the lower vibrations and return back to a state of high vibrations which will attract what we want in this life.

This can be a hard concept to understand. It took me some time to really sit with this idea.

But think about it this way. I had a job interview this week. I knew that I wanted to exude a high energy vibration during that interview to let my self-confidence shine through. In order to do this, I needed to do things in my outer world and my inner world. I went to bed early the night before. I got my hair styled that morning, and I put on my best professional outfit that I had in my closet. Then I practiced confidence affirmations to put me in the right mental state. I was building my stamina both physically and mentally so that I could maintain a positive vibration for the interview.

Think about if I had not focused on this energy. What if I had gone to bed late that night? I would be physically tired and dreading the interview. Then I would probably be feeling anxious and worried as I went into that interview.

How do you think my energy would have been then? I probably would have shown a lot of self-doubt and fear, which is not an energy match for getting a new job.

The person full of confidence is probably a better match for the employer, right?

So we want to upgrade our physical and mental stamina or energy in order to create a life that aligns with our dreams. This last area may be the most difficult area to upgrade because it’s the least tangible. BUT, it has the greatest reward.

Upgrading my physical and mental stamina is something that I practice on daily. Ask yourself, “How can I upgrade my physical energy today?” Do you need to get more sleep? Do you need to drink more water? Eat different foods? Do you need to go on a walk?

Then ask yourself, “How can I upgrade my mental energy today?” Can you practice some affirmations? Do some journaling? Listen to an uplifting podcast?

Managing our physical stamina helps us to manage our mental stamina. And when we can upgrade our overall stamina, we have the power to create jet set lives. Extraordinary lives.

So, the three areas of life to upgrade: Schooling, Surroundings, and Stamina. Focus on upgrading these three areas and you’ll be well on your way to living a jet set life.