The Tortoise with Brooke McAlary

A few weeks ago Ben and Brooke flew over to LA to speak at a podcasting event. And while they figured they’d probably meet some interesting podcasty folks, they had no idea that in a random session they’d sit down next to a slow travelling couple from Canmore, who’d turn out to be today’s guests. Ryan and Amanda are the World Wanderers and they love slow travel. In today’s episode Ben chats with them about their travel philosophy, why they like to travel slowly and what drove them to give up their 9-5 jobs to live and work around the world. They discuss managing the expectations of family, friends and colleagues as they continue to travel, and how to convince people that full-time travel is a valid lifestyle rather than just a “bug”. They also chat about when to pull the pin on a trip and how to make the re-entry less difficult, as well as some of the lessons they’ve learnt about themselves (and each other) over the past few years. It’s a really fun, slow travel themed episode that leaves Brooke and Ben doubly inspired for their own year of adventure in 2018! Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/195 for the full blog post and links to everything mentioned in today’s episode. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====  Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brooke first discovered the idea of deowning via Joshua Becker and initially found it quite challenging to understand. Surely isn't decluttering the same as deowning? Letting go of the excess is the same as no longer needing to own them, right? Not quite. Turns out it’s more about letting go of the need to own things at all. And tied up in that idea are things like ego and convenience, expectations and habits, boredom and discontent, advertising and status. In this episode Brooke and Ben talk about their own realisation that decluttering and deowning are related and yet quite different, as well as some of the ways they’re learning to deown even now.  This includes sharing, hiring and borrowing things, and thinking outside the box when it comes to needs versus convenience. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/194 for the full blog post and excerpt from SLOW. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s been a couple of months since Brooke and Ben announced their plans to head off in to the wild and spend 2018 travelling, and quite a lot has happened since then. So they decided (somewhat foolishly, perhaps) to sit down, hit record, and just… talk. No notes. No plans. No idea. In a looser, more conversational episode, Brooke and Ben share a clear insight into life at the moment, including the preparations for their upcoming trip (or rather, their lack of preparations) as well as the first couple of weeks of book launch life. Brooke talks about the vulnerability hangover of the book’s release and the beautiful (and not quite as enthusiastic) feedback she’s been receiving over the past couple of weeks. They also talk about the importance of creating and honouring their personal boundaries at the moment, and Brooke’s ongoing project of learning to say no more often. Ben thinks this is the loosest poggie they’ve recorded in a while, and isn’t sure whether that’s a good or bad thing… Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/193 for the full blog post and to let Brooke and Ben know if you like these off the cuff check ins, or…not. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To celebrate the release of SLOW in Australia and New Zealand this month, Brooke and Ben are spending the next few Mondays diving in to four central ideas in the book. It’s a way to share some of their favourite parts of SLOW with you, but also a way to say thank you for all your support over the past few years. In today’s episode Ben and Brooke talk about the importance of caring more and caring less. It can be really easy to become overwhelmed as we begin to walk the path of slowing down, with every blog, every podcast, every book telling us different things we need to focus on in order to do life right. And the hard part is that none of them is necessarily wrong. The key is to figure out what matters to you, and what doesn’t, then spend time learning how to care more about the former and less about the latter. Ben and Brooke talk about their personal take on this duality of caring, and what Brooke calls her Barometer of Caring. They also talk about how you can learn to care less about the things that don’t matter but that might take up an inordinate amount of time. You can do this by monitoring your inputs. That is, look at the utter BS stories we’re sold via media, social media, TV, shoulds and expectations of others, and ask yourself how you would feel if you cared a little less about those stories. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/192 for the full blog post as well as the Barometer of Caring illustration from the book. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today’s guest is Guido Verbist from The Bower Reuse and Repair Centre, and he is on a mission to make buying second hand normal. If you watched War on Waste, the recent series on the ABC, you may have met Guido already. He’s the Co-op Manager of The Bower, and he’s been doing a huge amount of work over the past few years to reframe the way we think about second hand stuff, as well as empowering each of us to take control of repairing the things we do own. Brooke sat down to chat with Guido in the workshop room of The Bower’s new Reuse and Repair Centre in Parramatta, and they got to talking about convenience, the stigma of buying pre-owned things, and the lost art of repair. The Bower aims to help minimise the amount of stuff going to landfill (and to date have stopped more than 1.3 million kilograms of stuff from ending up in the ground) and they do this by: reselling unwanted goods to people who need them fixing items and reselling them to people who need them testing and tagging unwanted electrical items and reselling to people who need them teaching people how to repair their own belongings at regular repair cafes and various workshops working with local councils and encouraging residents to use their services working with refugee and domestic violence services to help those in need establish a new home This is an organisation making a huge difference across Sydney, and Guido talks openly and honestly about the benefits and challenges of being at the forefront of the reuse and repair movement in Australia, as well as his advice for people who want to set up similar services in their local community. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/191 for the full blog post and links to resources mentioned in today’s episode. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the last one of the slow learning poggies, and this week it’s all about informal learning. If you’re someone who will spend a long time researching online or taking informal courses this is probably something you can identify a lot with. An informal learner sees learning everywhere. They like to do it anywhere and at anytime and they’re often heavily focused on using technology as a tool in order for that to happen. There usually isn’t any kind of qualification at the end of this kind of learning, and more often than not it leads the learner in to further research, deeper thinking, or a new direction. For example, when Brooke first started learning about simplifying life, this was her go-to learning mode. She read endless blogs, books and articles on minimalism, simplicity and the myriad ways to adopt it. She took courses, enrolled in membership programs and listened to podcasts. What she didn’t always do though, was act on that information. And, much like the overwhelm we can often feel when learning collaboratively (as Ben and Brooke chatted about last week) this is the biggest drawback of informal learning - lots of information but very little action. That’s not to say it’s not valuable, because the opposite is true. More and more of us are working in areas where formal qualifications are no longer relevant (or at least as relevant as they used to be) but passion and ambition and skill take precedence. Similarly, this is one of the most accessible ways to learn about non-work related topics, ideas and skills and processes that we use outside of our work, that impact how we live, what we do with our time, our hobbies, our energies. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/190 for the key takeaways from this four-part series, as well as a heads-up on what’s coming next week. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you enjoy gardening (or perusing gardening photos on social media!!) permaculture is a term you may have heard bandied around. It’s most commonly attached the food production, and is a philosophy that results in better soil, better food production and higher yield. What is less often mentioned is that permaculture doesn’t stop at food production. In fact, much like slow living, the permaculture philosophy extends to community, connection, family, relationships, business and how we view the world at large. It can impact on where we live and how we live there, as well as the things we own, the money we earn and the way we interact with those around us. In today’s episode Brooke chats with Robyn Rosenfeldt, the founder and editor of Pip Magazine - a magazine dedicated to spreading the ideas of permaculture far and wide. Pip is released three times a year and is packed full of both inspirational articles that dive deep in to permaculture, as well as the super practical information that will help you turn that inspiration in to action. Brooke and Robyn chat about the similarities between slow living and permaculture, as well as self-sufficiency, and why permaculture isn’t necessarily going to allow us to be individually self-sufficient, but rather encourages the creation of self-sufficient communities. The conversation also looks at what community means and why we sometimes may need to look beyond our neighbourhood to find a tribe of like-minded people. Robyn has some fantastic suggestions for those of us who want to start on the path to permaculture but don’t have a lot of time, and one of those suggestions is to let go of perfection. Another of her other suggestions is to begin to educate ourselves on our food - where it comes from, what time of year we should be seeing it in supermarkets (and what times of year we shouldn’t - AHEM, nectarines in July!). It’s from this basis of knowledge that we can begin making small, consistent changes and from there springs real and lasting change. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and be part of our monthly live calls.  And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week Brooke and Ben continue their look into the different types of learning and how understanding personal learning styles will help us develop ways to adopt even more slow-ness and mindfulness to our lives. Today’s poggie is all about collaboration - probably the most well-known type of learning. Brooke identifies a lot with this kind of learning (though during today’s episode she does start to wonder whether it’s the most helpful for her!) and a lot of you will likely identify with this mode as well. Collaborative learning is all about collective intelligence. This podcast is a great example of collaborative learning, or learning from one another in order to benefit the whole. There are so many ways to tap in to collaborative learning when it comes to slow and simple living: Online forums, chat rooms Facebook groups Mentoring groups (like the one Ben is involved in at the moment) Live calls (like the monthly Patreon catch-ups) The key here though, is that if you identify with this type of learning it’s important to acknowledge its limitations. Often we find ourselves getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available, as well as the breadth of opinions and advice. It can feel completely defeating when there is literally an opinion for every option, so the key is to also apply a little discernment. Find an entry point that works for you and only go looking for additional information as and when you need it, rather than bathing in the infinite pools of opinions online! Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/188 for the full blog post and to share your thoughts on today’s poggie. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join us for our monthly live chats. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today’s poggie Brooke speaks with Katy Bowman, a biomechanist, founder of Nutritious Movement and all-round activity advocate, about the curse of convenience in modern life and what it is costing us in terms of movement, the food we eat, our health, our relationships and the larger structure of our society in general. They also talk about the infiltration of technology into the lives of both adults and kids, as well as some really practical ways of lessening the impact technology has on our days, and how to deal with the inevitable complaints from kids (and maybe some adults) when they’re forced outside. They also talk about the massive benefits of spending more time outdoors and why Katy is lobbying for outdoor exposure to be classified as a nutrient. Katy shares her family’s journey towards minimalism and why it began with letting go of their couch, and how the root of their simplification lies in a desire for more movement rather than less stuff. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in our monthly live video calls. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brooke and Ben have taken a bit of a departure for these current Monday episodes, as they’re talking about learning - a topic that sits more at the periphery of slow living rather than the centre of it. Last week they began by talking about how we learn and the impact it has on how well we make changes to our lives, and this week they begin looking at the specific modes of learning and why some are more beneficial than others when it comes to making big shifts in life, such as learning to slow down and simplify. This week is all about the personalised learner. Someone who is the champion of their own destiny. They are highly individualised in the way they like to learn, preferring one-on-one coaching or tailored courses set up to deliver learning expectations that are unique to their own needs and circumstances. They don’t often thrive in communal learning situations or online courses aimed at a broad range of people, instead preferring their learning to be, well, personalised. For example, Ben has struggled a lot with developing a meditation practice, and he thinks it’s partly to do with the fact that he can’t find a program or app that is specific to his needs. He would be better off working one-on-one with a coach for a few weeks, get the specific information he needs, and then using that to establish his practice. Brooke and Ben talk about the pros and cons of this mode of learning in today’s episode, and Brooke realises that she probably need to do a little more of this kind of learning, rather than continue to fall in to the well-worn grooves of past behaviour. Ben, on the other hand, can recognise that by only learning in this way, he’s missing out on a huge range of benefits. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/186 for all the details from today’s episode and the full blog post. Enjoy! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially. And thanks so much for listening! ====Join The Tortoise Community: https://brookemcalary.substack.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.