My intuition was screaming at me to uproot our lives and start fresh in a new country. But my logical mind feared I was making a mistake.
If I left, I’d be taking my children away from everything familiar – our family, friends, community. We’d be stepping into uncertainty, insecurity, the void. My mom and others were skeptical, even critical. Was this idea totally insane?
I agonized over the choice, carefully weighing all the pros and cons. But no amount of analysis brought me clarity. I realized choosing perfectly is impossible – every path has risks and regrets. I had to stop overthinking and trust my gut.
I asked myself what would happen if I stayed. The answer shocked me. My soul said bluntly: “If you don’t go, you will die.” This jolted me awake. I knew deep down I had to take the leap, as scary as it felt.
Of course, many may not need a drastic life change like moving abroad. But for me, staying put meant dying inside. Once I listened to my inner wisdom, the path became clear. We soon found ourselves starting over in Vietnam – and I’ve never regretted it since.
Challenges inevitably arise when changing course. But meeting them head-on is how we grow. By embracing each difficulty, I became stronger and discovered more of who I’m meant to be.
I’m still learning to trust my intuition. But taking that first terrifying leap taught me to have faith in my inner voice. When your soul whispers “go,” don’t let fear hold you back. Boldly step into the unknown, and watch how your life opens up.
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Ep 002
[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode I will talk about making big life decisions, including our decision to take the kids and move from Norway to Vietnam. I will talk about what we do when we meet challenges in life. You will hear some of my thoughts around how everything is connected and what we need to do to have a fulfilling and meaningful life.
[00:01:00] Sometimes life presents us with a choice, and it’s just a really big choice, and it’s super, super, super hard to make a decision. And that’s what happened when we were faced with the decision of moving abroad. So there was a long story leading up to this and I won’t take all of it here, but I had shared custody with my ex husband and for some reason he decided to move out of the country and it left us with the kids and it left us with the opportunity to do something.
And before that, Peter Erik and I already had started our online business because we just wanted to be location independent. There was something in us that just knew. We had to be location independent, and I had this dream actually, since I was 20, I think to live a period of my life, some other country, just checking out, see how it felt, explore, learn new languages and get to know other people, because somehow I think I knew, There was more in [00:02:00] store and nothing wrong about Norway.
It’s a great country. I have so many great memories, but in me there was this feeling like I just need to get out of here and test something else. So now we’re there in this situation. My ex husband is leaving. We’re there. We have the kids. We actually can take them and we can go. And that was a big one.
It was a super big one. We were looking around everywhere around the globe thinking, where do we want to go? What are the criteria? And for us, the beach that was for me, that was kind of the main thing was I want a beach. I want to be barefoot at a beach. So that summer when everything kind of fell together, we had planned a vacation to Vietnam, and Peterek was researching places with expat communities, international schools, and he found Hoi An, Vietnam. And we were there for two hours, I think, we got shown around the school. I remember my kids hearing about the menu, like the warm lunch getting served every day. And they were like, okay, if we are, if we are to move somewhere, we [00:03:00] can go here. and I was faced with this. decision still, is this the right thing to do?
I will take my kids away from their family, away from the whole network, away from everything we know, away from the social security system. And it was a really, really, really scary decision. I get super emotional, even when I think about it now because it was I’d realized after, to be honest, how scary it was because right there and then, of course, I was protecting myself from the hardest feelings around it.
a lot of people around me was skeptical. And I don’t want to say anything negative about my mom because I love her dearly and she did a lot of good things for me and I know that she loves me. But she was very skeptical of me moving to Vietnam and for me it felt even more taking her grandkids away and take them to Vietnam.
So she was one person and there was other people that just thought this idea was totally insane. [00:04:00] And me, even like I looked at it objectively, if I could, of course I couldn’t, but it was insane. It was totally insane. I had so much things going on. I had my whole network. I had my security system. I had all my friends that everything, all the life I built up until.
Almost like 40 years of life built up, and now I’m actually considering and taking two kids out of that and throwing them into insecurity somehow
And what I did at that time,
I asked myself, what do I do? And I asked myself, what will happen if I don’t go? And I got to really A brutal answer from my soul, which was, if you’re not going, you will die.
And it was literally the answer that I got. And I think this was my soul just making this really important and telling me, I know [00:05:00] it’s scary. I know that there’s a lot of things at stake. I know that you don’t know what you’re getting and you know what you have, but you really need to do this. So we just took a leap of faith and we did it.
And one of the things that I was thinking at that time, so I knew kind of it was serious, I knew that I had to make a change, I knew that I had to mix something up, I knew that I had to get impulses. And when I talk about this, sometimes people ask me like, Maria, but do you say that everyone should move to Vietnam?
Of course not. Our life stories are very different and our, our intuition and our, I believe in life purposes are very different. I think we’re supposed to kind of experience different things. And for somebody They don’t need that change, but I needed that change. So what I was asking myself was this question of, will I regret it if I go there and it’s a total failure and we have to go back after a few months.
And I realized that my regret would be much [00:06:00] bigger if I was just staying in Norway and staying in Norway and staying in Norway and never try. so this whole idea of trying to make the perfect choice all the time doesn’t make any sense because before you make a decision. You can think about the consequences. You can predict what the good consequences will be, and you can predict what the bad.
It’s not serving us to go into overthinking. And Trying to kind of analyze everything, how it’s going to go, because we, we won’t know, I made it an important decision. And I dared to take the step
So I think for everyone, for every entrepreneur, for every person that wants to have an impact to want to live a good life that wants to just be a good human to the people around them, you will be faced with a lot of decisions where I just think we need to follow our intuition.
And sometimes the intuition doesn’t even make sense.
but sometimes it doesn’t. So I’ve been doing a lot of coaching. I always [00:07:00] have a coach. I always have mentors in different aspects of my life. And, and one of the things that my recent coach said to me was when your, brain is starting a conversation is usually like not a good conversation regarding a choice because your intuition very often knows.
But if you’re starting to use your brain to rationalize whatever decision you’re making, it’s sometimes just taking you into a rabbit hole and you will never get out of there. Because again, there’s always positive and negative consequences with any choice that we will make.
So I know there are a few people out there that may make decisions too impulsively, but
I think it’s much more of a problem in society that we are overthinking, that we are trying to find the perfect solution, that we are trying to weigh All the consequences and list them out and then make this very like mathematical somehow calculation of whatever choice is best.
That’s not how [00:08:00] life should work. Our human bodies, the universal mind. Whatever you want to call it. I think there’s so much more here than most of us realize I’m realizing it more and more and more how connected we are how everything kind of makes sense and makes no sense at the same time
our intuitions are really strong If we dare to listen to them and to get to that place where you dare to listen to your intuition, where you dare, to make those big life choices, you need to start trusting your intuition in the small choices, in the small choices and just letting go of a lot of guilt and shame around making wrong decisions and, and not being good enough. All of these things I will talk more about in future episodes because I’m just discovering so much more about how interesting human life is.
I don’t think that life is going to be one directional, I, at least not for me, and probably not for you as listening either.
I think life is [00:09:00] supposed to take us a lot of places to a lot of experiences, to a lot of new learning, to a lot of challenges, because those challenges help us grow.
They help us evolve. They help us understand new things, and they help us go stronger into the future. So whenever life throws a challenge at me now, I do feel the challenge. However, I know that something good is coming to come out of this.
the growth is going to come out of this. And that’s why. I’m not taking it so seriously that it is challenging right now because I also know that life is about all the ups and downs. That’s what makes it interesting. If life was all the ups, they we didn’t know there were ups because we didn’t know about the downs.
So it has to be this contrast between whatever feels challenging and hard and, the great experiences. And I do think that when we dare To follow our intuition when we dare to make those big choices, even if they feel super [00:10:00] scary, So when life throws challenges at you, just, just be with them and learn from them and be in them. And you are allowed to cry and scream and ask for help and all the things that you need to do and get a healer and a coach and a personal trainer, whatever you need to.
I had this experience with my personal trainer the other day I was, I was doing financial coaching with my U S coach in the morning. And then I went for a walk on the beach, which I. Almost always do, but now it’s turned into some kind of self healing practice where I use like tapping on energy points and I talk to myself and I release fears and trauma and a lot of things, maybe sounds a bit weird, but it’s turned into be something super effective.
And then I had a really, really hard session with my trainer and she pushed me so hard. And suddenly within something where I was struggling, I was first starting to make all the struggling sounds And then suddenly there come these like super deep, super loud thing out of me. And I didn’t even know where it came from, but I do think it was something [00:11:00] releasing.
I do think it was something that was moving and something that was changing the energy. Um, And when we are in the challenges, sometimes we get so lost in everything that is challenging right now that we forget the big picture. But I think that’s my point with this episode is just trying to help everyone including myself see that there are we will be thrown challenges that we will be thrown big choices at
and listen to our intuition going with it.
Ask for help being with it. It’s just the best we can do. And when we do that, we turn into role models for others because we are authentically living our lives and we are moving with it. I think life is supposed to move us around. I think a lot of people are just kind of holding too hard in whatever it is in front of them and not voting wanting to move.
I think we’re supposed to move. I think we’re supposed to be [00:12:00] flowing and experiencing and And make choices all the time.
