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By the time you read this, I’ll have just wrapped the craziest week of the summer — and, still have two stops to go! This summer’s speaking schedule looks like this: St. Louis, Minneapolis en route to a retreat in Wisconsin, Chicago, Nashville, and back to Minneapolis. Five cities. One summer. Two kids at home with social schedules that do not care about my flight times.
Real talk: I used to wing travel. I’d pack the night before, forget my charger, land exhausted, and wonder why I felt like a zombie on stage. Now? Travel runs on a system, just like everything else in my business. Here’s the whole routine.
The real work happens before I leave
A five-city summer doesn’t work if the business falls apart while I’m gone. So before this trip, I prepped hard: podcast episodes recorded, weekly training videos filmed, Make Money Mondays done weeks in advance. Everything publishes on schedule like I never left, and I get to be fully present in the room I flew there for. It took a couple of focused batch days, and it bought me a whole summer of breathing room.
Pack light, then get lighter as you go
Here’s my favorite trick this year: I rent most of my travel wardrobe from Nuuly. After stop one in St. Louis, I’m boxing up a chunk of it and shipping it back. UPS picks up anywhere, and my suitcase gets lighter with every city. Rented outfits, returned mid-trip, no lugging worn clothes through three more airports. 10/10.
And a confession: I checked a bag for this trip. I hate it. I’m a carry-on-only girl through and through, but a week worth of outfits and speaking materials was simply too much. Sometimes the system flexes. My toiletry bag, however, never gets unpacked. It lives in my suitcase fully stocked with travel sizes, so packing is really just clothes and shoes. Add a blowout the day before I fly, and I’m zipped up in under 30 minutes.
Protect your voice and your energy
When speaking is the whole reason for the trip, your voice is the product. So I travel with a little wellness kit: my daily liquid multivitamin, Throat Coat tea, and my reusable water bottle that I fill the second I’m through security. Airplane air is basically a desert (not to mention the smoke from Canada that blew into Chicago – ick!), and losing my voice the night before a keynote is not on my vision board.
When I got to the hotel in Chicago, I actually used Instacart to order a gallon of bottled water and a few other little snacks to have on hand. Lifesaver!
Noise-canceling headphones are non-negotiable for every flight. Sometimes they’re for a podcast or a Spotify playlist. Sometimes they’re for absolutely nothing, which might be the most valuable sound of all.
Make the travel day a work day (on your terms)
Here’s the thing: a flight is a meeting-free, notification-light block of focused time, and I refuse to waste it. I always pay for WiFi. Always. The laptop is open on the way to every event, and that’s usually when I do my best deep work: finalizing slides, batching content, or writing blog posts like this one.
A backup battery lives in my personal item, because “my phone died” is not a sentence a traveling business owner gets to say. And I book direct flights only. A layover is just two chances for something to go wrong.
Get home fast (and stay close while you’re gone)
The night before I speak, it’s room service, an early night, and one more run through my talk. Future me on stage says thank you every single time. But once the event wraps? I’m on the first reasonable flight home. I know some road warriors stay an extra night to decompress. Not me. I want to get back to my family as fast as humanly possible. And, that flight home? I don’t usually open the laptop. My brain is fried and I spend the flight with a beach read or watching an in-flight movie.
And can we talk about the real hero of this five-city summer? Jeremy. While I’m collecting boarding passes, he’s shuttling kids to practices, helping Cody build his new bedroom desk, and taking two tweens as his dates to his cousin’s wedding instead of his wifey. (Sorry, babe. I owe you a dance.) I do my part from the road: I FaceTime the kids every single day and leave a detailed plan at home so everyone knows the schedule, and we lean hard on grandparents too. It takes a village, and I hug mine extra tight when I land.
Order the $10 airport coffee
Because business travel is not glamorous, no matter how it looks on Instagram. It’s time changes, early alarms, gate changes, and a protein bar in a hallway before you walk on stage. So yes, I order the ridiculous $10 airport latte, zero guilt. And when the budget allows, I upgrade to business class on the long hauls. Both are line items in the “showing up well” (and keeping my sanity) budget.
The takeaway
None of this is fancy. It’s just a system, decided once, so travel weeks don’t drain the tank that my business (and my family) runs on. Work smarter, not harder applies at 35,000 feet too.
What’s your one non-negotiable when you travel? I’m always adding to the routine.
P.S. Want the behind-the-scenes from all five cities this summer? Join my email list and I’ll bring you along for the ride. ✨
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