Your gut is smarter than your spreadsheet 🧠🤓🎯

Hey, Reader!

Happy Saturday, Fellow Go-Getter!

I want to tell you something I don't say often enough.

I didn't move to Puerto Rico because it made perfect sense on paper.

I moved because after my divorce, after 17 years of building a life, a brand, a family, a whole identity around something that no longer existed, I was sitting in a house I couldn't afford, in a city that reminded me of everything I'd lost, trying to figure out how to pay for housing, school for my kids, and care for an aging parent on what felt like nothing.

The math didn't work. Not in Illinois. Not at that season of my life.

So I did something that probably looked, from the outside, like a mental and emotional breakdown.

I bought a house in Puerto Rico.

Here's what I told myself at the time: this is practical. It's cheaper. It makes financial sense.

And it did. Housing costs less. Quality schools exist. Elder care is accessible and affordable in ways the mainland stopped being a long time ago.

But here's what I didn't know when I made that decision — what my gut knew before my brain caught up:

Puerto Rico was going to give me back something no spreadsheet could have planned for.

I wake up now and walk outside into warm air. I'm learning Spanish, badly, joyfully, and without apology. I'm moving my body because I want to, not because I'm punishing myself for something. I'm sleeping. I'm laughing.

I'm building by acquiring real estate and even venturing into the boutique hotel industry.

Best of all, I feel like Puerto Rico gave me the option to build myself back.

The sun here is not a metaphor. It's just sun.

But what it does to your nervous system when you've been in survival mode for years? That part is real and a huge reason why I've stayed so long.

Here's what I want you to hear, my friend:

Sometimes what looks like a practical decision is actually your intuition pulling you somewhere your healing needs to go.

Sometimes you think you're moving for the numbers. And you are. But you're also moving toward a version of yourself that couldn't have emerged where you were, because where you were had too much history, too much grief, too many rooms that smelled like the life you used to have.

Your gut is not irrational. It's just speaking a language you were never taught to trust.

And yes, you should absolutely work the numbers. Get the financial clarity. Make the plan. But don't let the plan be the only thing leading you.

Your body, your intuition, your quiet-before-5am knowing, that is data too.

The men & women who have rebuilt their lives after the thing they didn't choose?

Almost none of them did it by being perfectly rational. They did it by taking one imperfect step toward something that felt — against all logic — like theirs.

I'm not saying move to the Caribbean. (Although I will say: it's a good time of year to look into it.)

I'm saying: you are allowed to design a life that actually feels like you, not the you that was holding everything together, not the you who followed every rule and still ended up here, but the you that exists underneath all of that. The one who has preferences. Who has always known what she wanted, even when she was too busy or too scared or too responsible to say it out loud.

That woman deserves a plan.

Not a recovery plan. A life plan.

That's exactly why I created The Designed Life Guide — and I want you to have it, free.

It's not a budget worksheet. It's not a 30-day challenge.

It's a guided framework for casting the vision of the life you actually want.

Even after the heartbreak, after the loss, after the season that broke what you thought was unbreakable.

Because here's the truth I had to learn the hard way: the steps will come. But first you have to know where you're going.

Vision before strategy. Always.

👉 Download The Designed Life Guide here — it's free

Print it. Fill it out. Give yourself one hour this weekend to stop managing the crisis and start imagining the life on the other side of it.

You deserve to want something again.

I'll see you next week.

— Aja

P.S. — If you're curious about what life actually looks like on this side of the leap, come find me on Instagram. I show up there most days, chronicling my Caribbean hennaighans and building something in the sunshine.

Come see what "starting over" can look like.

A few things that might help right now:

📋 The Designed Life Guide ← Start here
🏠 Build Wealth with Real Estate After Divorce — how I acquired 4 properties in under 4 years post-divorce
🌴 The Caribbean Buying Guide — if your gut is already pulling you somewhere warm