Rosa Linda Román (00:00): Hello, everyone. Welcome to New Mexicast. I'm Rosa Linda Román. And before we get started, I want to share what you can expect here on this podcast. First, you should know that my family lives on a sailing catamaran, and this is my personal audio journal. What you're about to hear is an episode from 2016, when we were just starting our journey of moving from our home in New Mexico, onto the boat, as a long time broadcast journalist, I wasn't sure how I was going to keep working while pursuing this crazy new lifestyle. This journal is where I worked through a lot of things, both personally and professionally. That means you will hear about experiments with new technologies like Blab and Periscope and testing out systems to make the move easier like wild tree meal prep. And KonMari for downsizing our stuff. As you can imagine, some of these experiments were successful. Well, some like Blab and wild tree don't even exist anymore, but I decided to leave even the failed experiment in this audio journal. So you could get the whole story of how we went from New Mexicast to New Mexicastaways. If you like, what you hear, please stick around till the end and I'll share how you can find out where we are now and how you can get much more content by joining the New Mexi-Castaways crew. Enjoy! Theme Music: Rosa Linda Román: 00:28 Hello and welcome to NewMexicast the enchanting show featuring interesting people and places in New Mexico and beyond. This is NewMexicasts audio edition and I'm Rosa Linda Roman and this is my place for my random ramblings and brainstorming and just sharing my general process, uh, with whoever feels like listening. This is a, so for those of you that do not know me, uh, NewMexicast is a television show in New Mexico. Uh, it started as a video podcast back in 2007 and has been, uh, was a video podcast for quite some time for several years, maybe six years before it then became a weekly half hour show in, uh, in New Mexico in Albuquerque. Then, um, of late NewMexicast is all about sharing my family's journey instead of focusing on all the stories about all the fascinating people we're meeting along the way. We are actually prepping and we are currently in the final part of the 90 day countdown toward moving onto a 45 foot sailing catamaran. Rosa Linda Román: 01:43 We are doing, I'm doing this countdown just because I set my, I was doing my goal setting workshop back in the beginning of March, 2016 and in the process of doing that workshop and setting those goals, I realized, wow, we're, we're going to be moving onto a boat within 90 days. So instead of just setting a regular 90 day goal, that became my 90 day goal is getting everything prepped and uh, I didn't want to just move onto the boat. I want to, um, really shed the layers of stuff and uh, things that have been holding me back. So I discovered this system called KonMari. It's based on a book by a woman named Marie Kondo called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And I have been implementing KonMari over the past couple of months. It has been an interesting, interesting process. Basically you take everything in a particular category in your house and you put it in, um, a pile in the floor on the floor and then one at a time, you pick up each item starting with clothing and you decide if it sparks joy. Rosa Linda Román: 02:52 And if it sparks joy, you get to keep it. And if it doesn't, it is done. You get get rid of it. And in the process so far we have donated, we did the clothing category and donated 13, 55 gallon size bags of clothes. What else? We then did the books category and we donated 805 books and 200 magazines to our nearby, um, uh, my son's daycare. They are having a big garage sale later this summer. So that will help them raise money to um, bring down the costs a little bit at their daycare. And uh, yeah, now I'm moving on to, I've moved down to the paper's category and paper's has been really interesting because it, it's not supposed to be the sentimental category of papers. It's supposed to just be, um, you know, receipts and old, um, credit card statements and papers, just general papers. Um, but in order to get to all of the papers, I'm having to open up boxes with, with mixed things in it, a lot of papers, a lot of sentimental papers, um, and then mixed in lots of junk and regular paper. Rosa Linda Román 04:08 And, misc, just a whole hot mess. And from this process, I've realized, um, I am more of a clutter collector than I realized. And also the clutter that I have collected over the years. I didn't, I really didn't understand how emotionally tied I was to, um, some of this stuff. And it's not so much the stuff, but the relationships and the moment in my life that they represented that it, that is the part that's hard to part with. But that is also part of why it's so critical to do this because as we're moving onto the boat, not only do we have a limit, um, the amount of space we have to, um, put this stuff, but we also, you really have to let go of a lot of old ways of thinking in order to free up your, your energy and your space and your mind space and your heart space to allow this big grand adventure to, to move in. Rosa Linda Román 05:12 And so, and I think I talked about Roger James Hamilton and his idea of freeing up the plumbing. I think I've talked about that on a previous podcast episode. Uh, but basically the idea is you gotta unclog the plumbing and your life in order to let the true awesomeness that is supposed to be your life flow in. And for me, by doing this KonMari system, I am definitely freeing up the flow and unblocking things that have been blocked for years and years and years. I, you know, it's not that it was a lot of, it isn't like monumental, like, a big breakup or some failed friendship or relationship. It's really just the, the accumulation of years and years of things that represent the past and feeling uncertain about letting that go for fear that, you know, first of all, it'll never be again. Rosa Linda Román: 06:14 Right. And I used to kind of hang on to all this stuff because it felt like, well, if I, if I throw away that letter or I throw away that ticket stub or whatever, I'll lose the memories. But the more that I go through this process and you do go through it in, in a certain order based on the book, uh, and the more that I do this, the stronger I get in tune with my own intuition and my understanding that these things do not, um, really represent, um, what, you know, they, they aren't really the relationship or the memory, they just were a moment in time. And through this process you're supposed to basically just acknowledged that this thing had played a part in your life. Thank it. Um, you know, give thanks to it or for it, whatever, and then let it go. Rosa Linda Román: 07:12 And it's really, really been hard. And because in order to get to the papers category, I've had to pull out all these boxes, I realized I need to break this down into sub categories and really cause I found myself getting stuck over and over and over and over again. Um, I'd open up a box and I just feel overwhelmed because mixed in with my daughter's baby things was, um, a bunch of, you know, uh, junk or a receipt that I didn't need. Or, you know, just art supplies, I mean just mixed boxes of stuff. And so by going through this in this systematic way, I'm able to really thoughtfully decide does this, and by the way, that's the bottom line of this criteria is does this thing spark joy? It may have sparked joy in the past, but if it doesn't spark joy in this moment any longer, it is time to let it go. Rosa Linda Román: 08:13 And that's a tough question to ask yourself. But if you can do it and, and I'm learning through the process of doing this, I'm getting stronger at hearing my own inner voice and getting clear on what does spark joy in this, in, in this moment. And looking ahead, what kind of life I'm I really want to build. Um, it was interesting just because I'm doing this audio recording and sharing it on NewMexicast. I will tell you that from this process it, it forces you to shine a light on the areas that do not work or the areas that you feel shame or embarrassment or guilt around. And NewMexicast has been one of those areas for me. Not, um, not the whole thing, but the state of my, um, website, the state of a lot of how I have managed the actual business because I just feel like it never lived up to its full potential. Rosa Linda Román: 09:18 And as I'm going through this KonMari system, I'm starting to see that it's time to sh to really shore up the things that do matter business-wise, personal on the personal side and the business side. And in the process of doing that, I, I recently had a consult call with a woman named Tia Hain. I think her website is Creative, Uh, what is it? Creative creators maybe or, Ooh, I wish I remembered her name. Um, anyway, she did this consult, uh, where we talked about maybe working together. I, it, it was basically to talk about how to shore up my website and she helped me really think about like, what do I want from this website? And she pointed out that she said, hey, have you done a Google search on NewMexicast.com lately? And I said, no, I really haven't. She said, well, the first thing that comes up is a warning from Google that says this website may have been hacked. Rosa Linda Román: 10:24 And that was news to me. And it was shocking, although I guess it's not that shocking because I do occasionally get notifications from, um, Wordpress, which is the, the, um, what I built the site with was Wordpress, uh, saying, you know, it would show me a very spammy comment in one of my posts and it blocked it, but obviously it didn't catch everything. And from looking at it, just that little cursory glance at it, at the website, over the course of her consult, um, it made me realize this website has been sorely neglected. And of course the hackers found a way, a backdoor in and, um, it looks like maybe they pasted some code on some of the vulnerable pages and I need to find that and eliminate that and hopefully it won't heal all of my Google rankings. But, but on top of that, at once I launched the TV show for NewMexicast, my website became sorely neglected. Rosa Linda Román: 11:31 And, um, I have not posted on the website in two years. The last post was April of 2014. While at the time of this recording, it's May of 2016. Now, that doesn't mean I haven't created new content. I've created a ton of new content and it's on my YouTube channel as NewMexicast TV, but I haven't updated the website or my subscribers in any way for two years. That's ridiculous. I mean, granted I've been updating people through Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that, but my own website, which I own, I have neglected. And this is really a metaphor, this KonMari system and dealing with my house and the clutter in it and, and really getting clear. And the other factor that I'm, I'm really, uh, have to own up to is, um, I have a serious, excuse me. I have a serious media management problem and I am working toward using a program called VBA by Chalene Johnson to figure out how to get it under control. Rosa Linda Román: 12:39 And I'm really not anywhere near, um, done on that. That's still a work in progress. But these different areas of my life, all of these loose ends and these I've felt for so long that NewMexicast the website and is in many ways the business itself was a house of cards. I was putting out what I believe was very quality content, but it lived on a website that I felt was going to fall down at any point and it hasn't, I have certainly not maximized the potential of what I have created. The good news is it's as soon as you Tony Robbins says, um, awareness is sometimes curative. Now granted it's going to take more than just awareness to fix all of this. But for me, I am grateful that I'm finally facing the reality that not, not my business, not my garage. My storage, my house, um, and many of my relationships, they were not what Chalene Johnson asked in Smart Success. Rosa Linda Román 13:50 She said, you know, what are you doing to support the people that lift and not drag? Make sure that you're surrounding yourself with people. And, and I would extend that to say, and things and businesses and ventures and adventures that lift and not drag because we all know how many people and things in our lives drag and pull us down and weigh us down and, and really make us feel less than our true awesome selves. Right? And so I feel like I, I have discovered all these little tiny leaks in the dam and my first reaction is to pan. It was to panic and be like, oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this handled. But then I went about, and then once I allowed myself that moment of panic, then I stopped and said, okay, it is what it is. What am I going to do to plug these leaks? Rosa Linda Román: 14:49 And so I'm systematically going about very thoughtfully, I'm dealing with these leaks in my life, these areas that are not a where they should be. And by the way, I've been sharing all of this, um, through live streaming on my Facebook page and Periscope. Um, and that's at NewMexicast as well. So that has been very, um, it's been interesting, very therapeutic to share the process, uh, very publicly, especially the clutter issue because so many people don't really want to talk about that. And it is embarrassing. I mean, I'd like to believe I'd, you know, you want people to think that you've got it all together and especially when you're on television and you know, people recognize you or they used to at least, you know, I don't, I, I never wanted to admit that I had this like area that I just felt like a failure. Rosa Linda Román: 15:45 But now that I am sharing that and being honest and open, I feel really great because I'm getting feedback from a lot of people who are telling me my process is helping them in their journey by sharing how hard this is for me and sorting through boxes of things that I feel shame about having collected and carried all these years. Um, by sharing that journey, it has opened up a new journey for me, number one, but it also has connected to me to amazing people that otherwise might not have reached out. So, um, it's been an interesting process. NewMexicast is definitely still in the middle of a major overhaul and a major evolution. Um, and as I looked as I talked with Tia, um, and I'll have to put her, um, her contact information, I think it's creativecreators.com, but I'll put her information in the show notes, uh, when I was talking to her and, and she said, well, it sounds like you really need to get clear on what you want with this website. Rosa Linda Román 16:55 And which of course was very insightful and, um, if you need a website built or overhauled, you should call her for sure. Um, but she, I realized, um, my, my video content is alive and well. Like on YouTube, on my NewMexicastTV on YouTube and also in, um, on my Facebook live page on my Facebook page through the live work I'm doing. But these audio additions, I love this and it's easy for me. And if anyone, you know, unlike the videos where you worry about like who's watching and how many viewers, I feel like I can just talk here and it feels much more authentic and open and genuine and whether or not anyone is going to listen to these doesn't deter me from, you know, putting the content out there. I enjoy it and I'm going to continue. And when I move on to the boat, this is the most likely way that I can communicate, um, from, from a very limited connectivity, uh, on the boat. Rosa Linda Román: 18:06 Cause I've already started realizing like the idea of doing all this live streaming that I've been doing is going to be very difficult with the kind of internet we'll have access to, um, when we're sailing to the tiny little islands. So this audio podcast I think is going to be the meat and potatoes of NewMexicast.com and also of course, New Mexicast in iTunes and Stitcher. Because this is a way for me to continue to share my journey and to document some of what, what I'm thinking and what my kids are experiencing. And, um, so yeah, this is, this is going to continue and I think that's really where this is going to go. I'll pull in the video content when I can create it on. Um, NewMexicast TV and make sure the feed, feeds into NewMexicast.com once I shore up this broken website. Rosa Linda Román: 19:02 But ultimately I think this is going to be the easiest way for me to share and communicate. So thank you for checking out my audio podcast and joining me on this journey and I hope you have a fantastic day and I will check in again as soon as I get a chance. Take care and I'll talk to you soon. I'm Rosa Linda Roman. Oh, and by the way, if you do want to check out my live broadcast, go to facebook.com/NewMexicast team. No, just New Mexico's facebook.com/NewMexicast and, uh, subscribe to my live broadcast and you can see a this crazy KonMari process for yourself. See you later. Bye. Theme Music: 19:48 Sailing away on a boat. Hailing from New Mexico. Enchanting stories as they go. Riding the tides, taking your time. Sailing away on a boat.