Happy Monday, everyone. Here’s some food for thought to start your week.

So, over a bowl of popcorn shrimp, a few months after our wedding, my husband and I decided to put our apartment up for rent, take off in an RV, and travel the country. It was supposed to be a six-month book tour but ended up turning into three years with the pandemic. I’ll talk about this more later, but I say we decided “loosely” because we didn’t reach a conclusion, sign a dotted line, and immediately put our apartment on Zillow and put a down payment on an RV.

We did something we now call “try it on.” We gave ourselves two weeks to pretend that we were going to move into an RV. What would that look like? What would living in an RV entail? Could our finances support it? Could we get Wi-Fi to work remotely? Like, where would we even get mail? Where would we park it? Could an RV bathroom support my 12-step skincare routine?

Okay, maybe the last one wasn’t as important, but we gave ourselves two weeks to “try on” this idea of living in an RV, researching some of our questions and seeing how we felt with the answers. And if at any point we felt like, “Nope, this doesn’t feel good,” then we had full permission to back out. But if at the end of the two weeks we felt like we were in the flow with the process, then we’d just add another two weeks on the clock.

I’m sure you read or listen to a lot about commitment and just diving all in, which, yeah sure, sometimes it has a time and a place, and sometimes it doesn’t. We don’t need to go all in, all the time. We can try something on, see how it feels, set a timer, and revisit it with permission to quit at any time. If we set the expectation of ourselves that any shallow end will always turn deep, then we’ll have a lot of hesitation to wade in the shallow end. Being a beginner requires you to be loose. Be loose with your expectations, be loose with your goals, be loose with your self-image, and be loose with being definitive about everything.

So I’ll leave you with this: We think things are written in ink, but most of the time it’s only chalk. You have permission to try something, pivot, and start over.

Thanks for listening to Amplify. If you are a fan of the show, show us some podcast love by giving us a rating and review, and give us a follow at Mic Drop Workshop and at Jess Extra.

Coming up on Amplify, what you have to do is generate content that causes people to go to your website, go to your email list, go to your shop, go to your course, your webinar, what have you. If they are staying in the app, you’ve failed at content marketing. You have made Meta more money and made yourself poorer. What you need to do is say, “I don’t want you to be satisfied with Instagram. I want you to be enticed to go see what I got going on.”

This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence, and I’m Jess Ekstorm, your host. Remember, you deserve the biggest stage. So let’s find out how to get you there. I’ll see you again soon.