RVing and Achieving Self-Actualization

Each new year, we participate in KYD55, a challenge founded by full-time RV family Keep Your Daydream. It's their way to invite the community to inspire and hold each other accountable as we kick off our year with our most desired missions at the forefront. They recommend choosing daily habits from 5 pillars: Water intake, nutrition, exercise, reading, and acts of service. You set goals in each pillar and try to accomplish them daily for 55 days to instill healthy habits. The pillars and goals are flexible; you create your plan on your own, knowing that you have over 4,000 fellow RVers and RV enthusiasts behind you as you work toward your success.

I was in the process of choosing a book for the challenge when I came across a recommendation in the KYD55 Facebook group: Confetti Moments: Fifty-Two Vignettes to Spark Conversation, Connect Deeply and Celebrate the Ordinary. The author, Amy Jamrog, is a financial planner who, during the pandemic, decided to start a blog sharing inspirational stories. She has since turned those stories into this book. I had never heard of it but thought the content would be uplifting and thought-provoking. I later found out that Amy is from Massachusetts, so a lot of her stories take place in familiar places. Win-win.

We were a couple of weeks into our KYD55 challenge when I came to a chapter in the book called The Integration Sweet Spot. In this chapter, Amy talks about how she doesn't like the idea of a work-life balance, because even a 50/50 balance only yields you 50%, and 50% is a letter grade of F. Instead, think about how to integrate the different aspects of your life. Is there any way you can involve your family in your work? Is there a hobby you can integrate into your paid job? I thought about the RV life, and how so many of us are seeking this very kind of integration. By having our "homes" with us on the road, we can integrate home and travel. We can integrate work and vacation. We can involve our families in aspects of our lives that used to be solitary and distant.

I was reminded of a reel we filmed a while back, answering frequent questions we're asked about our time on the road. One was the remark that we're really lucky to be able to work on the road (the follow-up remark to "What do you do," or, surprisingly more common now that we're nomadic, "Do you work?"). Our answer was that we made sure our jobs would be sustainable on the road. I spent two years pivoting my business so that I could offer online resources for music and mental health. Anthony took all the necessary steps to ensure that his office - locked down during the pandemic - would not reopen and demand his return. Several months later he got a new job that doesn't even have an office. Even though his initial job worked fine remotely, this new one is actually set up for remote work, and his coworkers are not only aware, but are also supportive, of his status as a digital nomad. Anthony worked very hard searching for a job where this would be the case.

This integration of work into RV life not only blends our jobs with our "hobbies" (RVing and traveling), but it allows us to be more involved in each other's jobs. We can share stories that might have been forgotten after a long day at the office. We can use each other as sounding boards when we want something worded better or if I'm struggling to create an Excel spreadsheet.

But let's dive a little deeper. How many RVers are out there so that they can simplify their lives, soak in new experiences, and build a sense of community and camaraderie? Probably all of them. How many have learned how to bring their hobbies on the road, whether it's making art, making music, attending auto shows, or the whole plethora of outdoor recreation? It's no wonder RVers put contentment at the forefront of their lives. They have found a way to integrate so much of what they love, while also fulfilling their basic needs.

In psychology, we call this self-actualization. It's the idea conceptualized by Abraham Maslow, that as our more basic needs our met, we are able to focus on those needs that are more complex and abstract. It's a motivation theory. In this hierarchy of needs, we are motivated first to satisfy the most basic, biological level, such as food intake and other motivators that keep us alive. Then there's safety, followed by love and belonging, and then esteem, and finally, self-actualization. With self-actualization, all potential is reached. A self-actualized person is fulfilled biologically, feels safe and secure, feels loved, feels recognized and accomplished, and is now basking in the outcomes of all that satisfaction. Now, not many people reach this high level in the form that Maslow talked about, but that's the point. It's supposed to be hard to reach because it's supposed to be motivating. If we open ourselves up to our greatest desires, we can strive to be our best possible selves.

Even if we don't all measure up to Maslow's standards of self-actualization, we can think of a self-actualized person having enough space in their minds, enough clarity, to engage in their experiences on a higher level.

1. Momentous experiences that you allow to shape you
2. Deep appreciation
3. Acceptance of self and others
4. Rooted in reality, not fluffing the experience but seeing and appreciating it for what it is
5. Independent, embracing others' acceptance but not letting others dictate your way of life or being

Whether it's choosing the RV life or something else that sparks your passion, truly immersing yourself in what motivates you can help bring you to your own point of fulfilled potential, of self-actualization. It's coupled with the idea of a growth mindset, where a person strives to continue learning and growing, using their life happenings as guidance.

In Confetti Moments, Amy talks about having a Venn Diagram, where you overlap parts of your life so that you can integrate all the aspects that make up you. Hopefully, you'll spend the majority of your time in the center portion of that Venn Diagram. The center of my Venn Diagram contains my husband, fur babies, RV, job, and hobbies such as travel, yoga, meditation, hiking, and other nature-oriented activities. I have another Venn diagram just for my job, containing all the hobbies that I've been able to incorporate into my music offerings: nature, hiking, yoga and meditation. According to the experts, I'm on the right track.  So what's in the center of your Venn Diagram? If it's an RV, can you put other aspects of your life with it? If you're striving to full-time RV, what needs to change for you to fit more into the center of your diagram? I feel like in a lot of ways, RVers have been able to achieve this kind of life satisfaction. I wonder if all those KYD55 participants who chose to read Confetti Moments also thought about our integration of the RV with the rest of our lives. It seems emblematic that this book just happened to make the rounds in our little challenge community.

At the time this blog post is released, we will have already finished our 55-day challenge to establish healthy habits. But it's so much more than a challenge, and so much longer than 55 days. We set off on this travel journey so that we could find our potential, fill our cups with our most cherished wishes, and celebrate a series of accomplishments that only just began when we took this leap of faith. And if the KYD55 community shows us anything, it's that we're not alone in our motivation to keep learning and growing, and whether those lessons come hard or easy, to enjoy every minute of learning them. KYD55 is but a small challenge that we partook in the middle of a big, giant challenge. We're still establishing ourselves as full-time travelers, but within that, we're learning how to reach our full potential through small habits that will hopefully be a recipe for health, happiness, and satisfaction.