I was 15 years old.
And I remember feeling inspired.
I remember telling my mum my wish to want to fly across the world for an exchange in my birth country.
I remember my wish being granted.
I remember not believing my luck.
My mum is awesome.
I remember standing at the airport some months later, nervous and maybe even a little bit terrified, knowing this was going to be one hell of an adventure.
I remember arriving, meeting my sister at the airport in Auckland, New Zealand, feeling a sense of wonder, excitement and eagerness to get exploring.
I remember the jetlag.

I remember starting school and not understanding the kiwi accent very well.
I remember realizing that I was different from the other kids.
I felt special.
I felt accepted.
I felt like for the first time in my life I could fully spread my wings.

I remember falling in love with a boy.
I remember falling in love with New Zealand.
I remember falling in love with my life here.

And I remember staying and leaving my life in Germany behind.
I remember not wanting the adventure to end.
Bless my mother. She agreed.

So at 16, I lived on my own for a while. Flatting. Working, going to school.
Getting up to mischief. Living my adventure. Getting a good taste of the challenges of adult life.

Finally my mum moved to New Zealand a year later.
Gosh, was I happy she was here.
Living adult life at 16 was a lot harder than I had expected.
It had changed me.
I got to be a teenager again for a few more years after.
And I learnt to appreciate just being able to focus on school and later university.
It was bliss.

Again it started with feeling inspired. Feeling inspired by a friend from Mexico who I met in my third year of university.
He was passionate about his country. Spoke so fondly of the place he calls home.
It made me curious.

I had heard so many bad things about Mexico.
Shootings, killings, drug lords.
And after speaking to my friend I knew, there was more to this mystical place than meets the eye.

So I spoke to my tutors, to the administration team and anybody else I needed to speak with. My mind was made up.
It was time for another adventure.
Everything fell into place.
I started learning Spanish again. Nothing from those few hours of Spanish at high school had stuck.
I loved it.
The culture, the ways of looking at the world. The music, the passion.

And only 4 months later I was on the plane to my destination.
The flight in itself was an adventure.
30 Hours of flight.
Two days of travel.
The first thing I did was drink a margarita at a local bar in Tulum where I met some friends who had been travelling here already.
It was humid and hot.
The people were friendly.
And everything seemed so vibrant.
But, boy, did I pay for that margarita the next day.

The next 6 and a half months were a mind blowing journey.
After the first week of travel in the Yucatan peninsula, I arrived in Monterrey.
It was January, it was really cold, it was a big city with huge american influence being so close to the border.
It was decidedly less colourful.
Settling in was hard. I missed my tribe.
I missed the warmth.
It was summer in New Zealand.
But exploring, partying and meeting new people helped to take my mind of that.

I made friends.
Met an incredible amount of people.
The mexican heat finally came.
I learnt about mexican culture, the language.
Once again I couldn’t understand a word. And this time it was okay.
I knew it would come.
I studied.
I immersed myself in different points of view.
My mind expanded.

I traveled and I saw many things.
Jungles, ancient ruins, deserts, beaches, waterfalls, countless churches and museums.
Festivals, restaurants and tiny taco stands, small towns and big cities.
Mexican beer, margaritas, coconut drinks, turtle sanctuaries and incredible wildlife.
And the not so nice parts of Mexican life.
The shootings, the dead.
I was taken care of by new found friends like I was a family member.
Hospitality and human connection at it’s finest.

What has deeply stuck with me until this day is this moment.
A family, living in a 1 room concrete bungalow.
The mother swept the single front step.
The pot was boiling above a make shift fire in the yard.
The kids were sitting around the fire poking it with a stick..
From a material point of view they didn’t seem to have much.
But the smiles I will never forget.
Happiness was apparent in their faces.

At 23 I had my first daughter.
I remember when she came out and was placed on my chest.
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.
I never felt this kind of love for anything or anyone in my life.
I was amazed by what my body had created, a little human being.
And the first thing she did besides snuggle was shit on me.
These first few moments are the epitome of parenting.

It’s the most amazing feeling, something I will never forget.
The word love doesn’t even describe how I feel about my daughter.
And it’s also a time in your life where you deal with more shit than you have ever before.
And I mean this literally.

Becoming a parent was the roughest crash course I have ever done.
I had no idea how to breastfeed.
I had no idea how to even hold her.
I had no idea how hard sleep deprivation can be or how to deal with it.
I had no idea how to look after another human being that is so fully reliable on me with everything.

I didn’t expect it to be this hard.
I didn’t expect the baby blues.
I didn’t expect it to be so complex.
But also, I didn’t expect it to be this rewarding and full-filling.

I am grateful every day for those key people that supported me and guided me in my journey of parenthood.
I am grateful for my kids dad who, obviously, was instrumental in helping me create my best work of art yet.
I am grateful every day that I somehow managed to be a pretty relaxed and awesome mum.
I am grateful that I got to be a parent.

Only 3 ½ years later I did it again.
Another crash course.
Harder than the first one in many ways.
A walk in the park in others.

My children are my greatest self-development tool yet.
They give the best hugs.
Say the most honest things.
And they so lovingly throw all my shit back at me.
Thanks Brooklyn and Summer for being my babies.

I was sick of my job and the corporate arena.
The bureaucracy and monotonous work.
Amazing talent and human beings under one roof.
Miserable faces everywhere.
Pretty much all the time.

I missed being creative.
I missed working on projects.
I missed feeling inspired.

I approached a friend whose outlook on life at the time was similar.
We connected, we vibed.
She told me about this idea she had.
I loved it.
And so we birthed a small business.
Because we could.

I learnt about well-being, mindfulness, mediation, spirituality and the human body.
I learnt about what running a small business means.
I learn about numbers and accounting.
I learnt about costings and marketing strategies.
How to build websites and do the day to day running of a business.

I loved the business.
I loved seeing people’s faces when they saw our products.
A sense of wonder and delight.
We created big visions.
We developed the product.
We rebranded and we grew our reach.
We were proud of what we had created.
I won’t lie, I struggled through a lot of this time.
Managing motherhood, a business, part-time work, my partnership and my own well-being.
Feeling stressed became normal, I didn’t even notice feeling anxious anymore.
It was constant.

I tried to do everything.
I tried to be supermum.
And I was supermum for a while.
Nobody did this to me.
I created it myself.
By always wanting to be perfect, to do it all.
Feeling like I have to do it all to get the kind of life I want.

But what did it cost me?

We tried.
And we tried really hard.
We even sought out help.
But we couldn’t connect anymore.

I remember the day it happened like it was yesterday.
And I will never forget it.
It was, besides parenting, the hardest decision of my life.

And I did it out of love.
Love to myself, my children and the father of my kids.
I chose the long game.
The hard road.
I can’t really describe it besides that I just knew this is what I needed to do.
I numbed myself for some time.
Drinks, food, distraction of any kind.
Avoiding my emotion.
I just couldn’t face it.

Then, as life does it, something happened that made it impossible to avoid this emotion any longer.

I cried.
I was hurting.
More than I ever had before.
It just wouldn’t go away.
I was struggling in many arenas of life.
I was trying to keep life as normal as possible for my girls.
I was trying to be strong.
I was trying to keep everything going.
Until I realized that it was time to stop.
It was time to embrace my journey.
It was time to stop resisting and start living the path I have chosen.

I went and did a self-development course recommended by a friend.
It was a 3 day intensive.
I went with my critical eye.
I am always skeptical first.
And I went with an open mind and open heart ready to discover something new.

And I got so much more than I had bargained for.
The course was great.
The content was great.
But the breakthroughs were caused by me.
Because I stopped resisting and starting accepting.

I asked myself some hard questions in the months after.
I made some life changing decisions.
I learnt what ‘being authentic’ actually means.
I started being honest to myself.
I started actually being my real self for the first time in my life.
Going for the things that I wanted and brought me joy.
And I stopped settling for anything less.

It took me on the path to where I am today.
It was only the beginning of the path towards the rest of my life.
The rest of my life that, I know, is going to be the best part of my life.

Hi, my name is Sophie Kaiser and I am a Happiness Coach, a mother of two, a lover of life and adventure, a joy seeker and a navigator of life.

I love my life and my life loves me back.

The split from the father of my children in December 2018 was a turning point in my life. I embarked on a journey of self-discovery, healing and empowerment and even though it didn’t feel great at the time, looking back, the first half of 2019 was a huge positive growth period.

I was fortunate to have amazing people in my life, that propped me up, let me cry on their shoulder, listened to me, gave me their immense wisdom so I could learn the lessons I needed to learn.

I knew, deep down inside, I couldn’t play it small anymore.
I knew I wanted to create an extraordinary life for myself and my children. For the first time the possibilities were endless and boy…… was I excited to get creating!

And the universe provided. In March 2020 I completed my Accelerated Coaching Certification with Authentic Education in Sydney and in lockdown in April 2020 I made the decision to start a life coaching business. Because in the end…. What was I waiting for?