Reading time: 6 mins

Kindly translated by our Friend Cecile

A year and a half to build up, or should I say, to deconstruct ourselves! This is the assessment we made on our arrival in Guadeloupe, taking (finally) the time to review our achievements. This whole adventure has been a real “deprogramming” journey. Since it can't be prescribed to every single one of us, we would like to tell you how it went for us so that you can enjoy it!

Enjoy the ride!

- Have a break, Have a Transat’ -

We were so absorbed since the adventure started that we almost forgot to take a break. Just to look back, question ourselves and take stock of our project. Far from being obvious for the two go-getters that we are. Even though, our skills complement each other, our personalities are very
similar. Not one to catch up with the other! Our goals, our ambitions, our pace of life or our moments of folly are the same. A compatibility which undoubtedly explains why our duo works so well, but it's also our biggest obstacle to questioning ourselves...

Fortunately, the Inspeer team took a break when sailing across the Atlantic! At the start of this long-awaited experience, we decided to treat ourselves to a real break. Getting an overview while taking it to the open seas. We agreed on not talking about the project during the crossing. Inspeer has been guiding all our dreams, our choices, our actions for 3 years now. Will we even succeed in eclipsing it? Will we manage to store it nice and warm somewhere hidden on the sailboat?

When you cast off for 31 days of sailing, you don't really know what to expect... Spending a weekend without any connection is an exception, so imagine staying off the radar for weeks?! And so begins a deep introspection, one that only time, context and the ocean can allow. Reviewing 28 years of existence is a real challenge! We start with the most recent events and gradually retrace backwards the steps of our lives. We obviously come out of it grown, but also and above all, stunned...

Find out more about our daily life at sea. Two episodes are dedicated to the Transat (emotions and laughter guaranteed)

- Going slower to move forward

It would take us ten days to land from this escape at sea, roughly speaking. 10 days before we could start verbalizing what we had just experienced each on our own. It’s hard to know where to start from, so we had fun filling out a little questionnaire created for the occasion. One part deals with our personal experience, the other part, our inspeer’ational experience! We look back at our first steps, our initial expectations and retrace our evolution through a year and a half of wanderings.

I like to summarize these last 2 years as a “life accelerator”. It feels like we have “gained time”. A lot of time on multiple awarenesses, which I am sure, in this journey or another, would have ended up catching up with us. But here we are, off to provoke them. Or who knows, they came for us? And here we are enriched by hundreds of encounters, discussions, experiences, sometimes just one would be enough to be a life changer! Not that simple to understand it, digest it all. We learned so much and at such an incredible pace. To anchor it all, you have no choice but to slow down or even stop. 

By taking this step back, we did realize the madness in which we had been evolving since the project was born. Too many ambitions, too many goals, too many expectations, too much pressure, too many desires, too fast, too much, just too much... Everything was new, the bike, the video, the nomadic life, and yet we were already trying to do what the big boys were doing. To the point of forgetting to congratulate ourselves on every advance, every success, or simply for having made this dream a reality. Definitely not aware of the whole journey and we only saw the failures we had been experiencing. We lost track of our motivations and lost our path. All in all, nothing really surprising when you know us well.

- Being matrixed from a very young age

Yes indeed, there's no denying it, we are totally matrixed.
10 years ago, we entered the HEC business school in Montréal, where Théo and I found each other very quickly. 

10 years (and even more) of pursuing well-anchored goals of success and achievement. Certainly, our sidestep with Inspeer took us down a new road from where we could overlook the highway we had just exited. However, the fork in the road didn't stop there and that is what we learned during this second year of the master's degree we completed at the school of Life!

- Looking for Life, the investigation of a lifetime

We experienced it through the people we met : project leaders, hosts along the way or the experience of living and getting around by bike... The least we can say is that we've come a long way! Investigating the world and its people led us to investigate ourselves, and more generally, Life. By stepping out of our our comfort zone, by leaving our “circle” of knowledge, we were able to re-evaluate a lots of facts. Our relationship with time, money and work. Our relationship to body, health and intellect. Our system of values and beliefs. So many elements on which we felt... completely lost! As if we had been “coded” in the wrong way, as if it were enough to do the complete opposite of what we had been taught and had taken for granted for years. Needless to say, there is (was) work to be done!

- Our journey through deprogrammation

We would like this adventure, or rather, this “de-programming journey”, to be prescribed to everyone. Whether by our parents, a good doctor or why not teachers ? We should all experience it so that it really sinks in. One thing's for sure, the world would run more smoothly and people would
be happier!

While waiting for this measure of public utility to be made possible (it's also one of our ideas for future projects), we thought that, at the very least, we could tell you what we were experiencing. Saving you a little time too, so you can find your way and enjoy your life. Just live it to the fullest! With the simple desire to share, without pretension or preaching that we've got it all figured out, because the road is far from over.

Check out our articles, right here, in our “Reading Club”, the cream of the crop of our discoveries, doubts, learnings, and bursts of inspiration. It’s hand-sewn and it’s free!

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See you soon for new adventures,

Diane and Theo.
 

Illustration : Anaëlle Barnier

Crédits Photos : Diane Lami
Écrit par : Diane Lami