#73 – Midlife Van Life: reinventing work-life balance with Kyle & Jen Steen

This show is so much fun and launching this now coincides with the launch date of my friends’ journey, which you’ll hear all about in this episode.  

Kyle & Jen Steen have been friends of mine for the last 7 years.  Kyle’s been a CRNA for 13 years, Jen is a fashion designer and farm-to-table chef.  The short story is they built out a custom Sprinter van into a tiny home on wheels, sold pretty much everything they own, including their house, and hit the road this week on a mid-career van life adventure with no end date on the calendar.  Kyle is 41, Jen is 39.  They’re in the middle of their careers.  

In this episode we talk about the why behind their decision and the how – both financially and specifically: like what kind of van they built, how they paired down 25 years of accumulated stuff to the absolute bare necessities and what they hope to do while they’re on the road.

This is a long-form interview.  We take our time over the next hour to talk through their decision & dream.  I can remember talking with Kyle & Jen when they first hatched this plan and I’ve watched them pull this dream together over the last couple of years.  We did this interview from their van on the day before their epic road trip kicks off this week.  You can see photos of the van in the show notes to this episode, on Anesthesia Guidebook’s Instagram page or in the biggest and best way by following Kyle & Jen on Instagram @FrankvannSteen. 

It’s not every day you see a highly intelligent, socially well-connected couple quit their high income day jobs and hit the road full time in a tiny home van.  We talk in this episode about the American Dream and the accumulation of wealth, status & possessions.  What I love about Kyle & Jen’s story is that they kept seeing people embrace the mantra of delayed gratification all the way up to retirement and then hit walls:  walls like ailing health, limited physical ability, cancer, strokes or just the fear of change that security & stability can subtly bring to one’s life… and they didn’t want that.  They didn’t want to just keep contributing to retirement accounts and doing the same thing every day while the best years of their life passed them by.  So they’re doing something different.  They’re taking a break from their careers to travel & create an adventure and a life worth living.

I think it’s so interesting because many people who go into anesthesia get very used to the income and routine of their careers.  Kyle & Jen’s decision drops the gauntlet for the rest of us to re-evaluate our lives and the why behind our lifestyles.  Where do you really derive your sense of enjoyment from?  If money wasn’t an issue, what would you do with your time?  Are you able to get to the point, even for a short period of time like a month, 3 months or a year, where your financial situation would allow you to chase that dream? To do that thing that may right now already be fading from the front of your mind under the scrutiny of Common Sense, your Practicality or sense of “but what would people think?”  

And maybe it’s not about finding a bunch of days all strung together but the ability to drop down a day or two per week.  We work on average four 10-hour shifts at our hospital.  My wife just dropped a day and now only works three 10-hour shifts a week.  That extra day off each week has made a huge impact on her well being and satisfaction, especially because it gives her more time to spend with our little 9-month old munchkin.  We also both take around 10 weeks off a year.  We could certainly work more and make more money, but we value the time more than the money we would make.

I came across this idea years ago that “what’s not important will continue on without you.”  

Kyle’s decision to step away from full time anesthesia work to adventure with Jen came at the same time that a couple of our other CRNAs, physician anesthesiologists and even our lead administrative specialist, retired after long, long careers at one institution.  Those people will be missed and there was a lot of legitimate nostalgia shared when looking back over their careers.  But the patients keep coming, the department has hired replacement staff and the healthcare machine churns on.  

I’ve always been wary of the sense that CRNAs and physician anesthesiologists are just cogs in a giant healthcare wheel.  It can be de-personalizing, anonymizing and demoralizing.  When you think about the statement “what’s not important will continue on without you,” it’s a reminder that we have to actively build for purpose in our careers… 

Research shows* that if you can arrange for 20% of your time at work to be geared towards something you truly are intrinsically motivated for, it’s protective against burnout.

(*Swensen, S. J., & Shanafelt, T. (2017). An Organizational Framework to Reduce Professional Burnout and Bring Back Joy in Practice. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 43(6), 308-313.)  

I wanted to share Kyle & Jen’s story with you as an opportunity for you to re-evaluate where you’re at, where you’re headed and whether you need to make changes so you can take a step in the direction of being more fully alive.  LOTS of people go into anesthesia because it’s an amazing field and a fascinating type of hands-on, brainy kind of work that can be very rewarding and a service to others, but also, because the income allows us to pursue other things in our lives.  This podcast is an invitation for you to re-calibrate your story.  I hope you enjoy it and what it does to you as much as I have! 

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