Episode 265: Rewrite Your Unspoken Rules to Live Like You’re on Permanent Vacation with Marni Battista

By Sarah Walton | January 28, 2025

Click here to watch the video version of this podcast episode

What would it be like if your life felt a little bit more like a vacation? Now, before you freak out and go that is for other people. That is not possible. That is for irresponsible people who don't have responsibilities and who don't have bills. That's not real life. I hear you. And I want you to know I've been one of those skeptics for years.

But today, with this guest, Marni Battista, I think you're going to hear something you maybe haven't heard before. Marni helps you understand what unspoken rules and what invisible laws are running your life.

Marni Battista is an entrepreneur, author, transformational life design specialist, podcast host, and radical truth seeker. Her honest, relatable, and down-to-earth podcast and writing drops pearls of wisdom that not only inspires laughter and insights, but shares radical life-changing stories of triumph and love. She’s on a mission to help women harness the courage to stop letting life live them, and start LIVING a life that’s beyond their wildest dreams.

Identifying your unspoken rules

It takes time sometimes to figure out what we're meant here for. For Marni, every step on the path was a little breadcrumb.
“I was just really inspired by the reinventing. That is possible if you follow your soul,” says Marni.

Her first step is breaking down the “shoulds” in life. Question every assumption because the unspoken rules that we have about our lives and what things “should” look like are so baked in. Marni wants people to start thinking about is what the shoulds are that you have for yourself regarding how you're supposed to do your life, what your relationships are supposed to look like, what your daily schedule is supposed to look like.

For example, that you're not supposed to work on weekends, that you're supposed to close your laptop at 5:00 p.m., that you're supposed to eat vegetables. All of these things are shoulds.

“Think about it this way. If you've read a great fantasy book or you watch shows like Bridgerton or movies like Marvel … you either get in with the rules of the world or you go, “no, I can't get with this,” and you abandon it,” says Marni. “But once you're in, you don't question it. Fairies fly and Iron Man has a suit, whatever it is.”

What you can do, is examine the world of your life. If you were going to share it with someone who didn’t know anything about you, what would the rules be? Those are the pieces that you can start to deconstruct what your shoulds are so that you then can begin to question, is this designed by me? For me? Is this essential, explains Marni.

“We are so focused on making other people happy and what's convenient for other people at the expense of our own flow and engagement,” says Marni.

Dream Framework

Once you’ve identified your shoulds, you can ask: where did you learn this? Who told you this? How far back does it go? The framework follows these steps:

D - Discover and dismantle
R - Recovery
E - Embrace
A - Action
M - Maintenance

“You can choose to keep them, by the way, of course, because not all shoulds are bad. And that's the point, is consciously choosing them so that you are designing a life and a world that is aligned with who you really are at the core,” says Marni.

Once you’ve dismantled the unnecessary shoulds, you can create what Marni calls a soul map, which asks what it is you love, what it is you love to do? How do you like to carry it out best? And then your why: What are the core motivations that really light you up where you feel like it's effortless?

One small step at a time, you can start to make adjustments to your life to align it with your soul map and remove your unspoken rules.

“Shoulds from the outside may or may not apply because you are living your life designed for you, not by everyone else,” says Marni. “That's why I say design a life you don't need to retire from. Find work that you love so much. You don't need to be free from it because it's just you doing your thing and it doesn't even have to be paid work. It's just you living your gift. That's freedom.”

Marni says most people have the fear fantasy of being broke or homeless if they dare to pursue their dream life. She says they always come up with a safety net because it is real life and people have to pay their bills.

People get so overwhelmed and burned out and frustrated, they don't want to deal with the other options. So having the space and time to create that safety net is really important.

“Most people just imagine or dream a 10% variation of their current life,” says Marni, who adds that experimenting is what helps you unfold and uncover the things that are beyond the 10% you can imagine.

“Actually allowing your emotional self to have psychological safety so that you can start to intuit and bring information in,” says Marni. “There's no Thelma and Louise moment in this. We want to like, live life on your terms without blowing up the life that you have.”