Hey!
My name is Carmen MacLeod. I have been traveling the world for over two years and documenting the journey as I move through new challenges, careers, and opportunities. I am finding my place in this world through the experiences that come with saying yes to things that spark my curiosity. Throughout this traveling journey, I have been growing my skills in art, videography, and content creation, and am now helping others build their online presence and share their gifts with the world through these mediums.
Why?
I have seen and experienced what it is like to tap into the source of my power as a woman, and I feel called to help other young women access that power to create the relationships, career, and life they want. I have followed my curiosity and journeyed through many forms of self-expression, such as dance, music, painting, videography, poetry, and freestyle rap. I have been fortunate enough to share this journey with the world and act as a small seed, planting inspiration in the lives of others to follow their joy and commit to a higher purpose. This showed me that my expression is not only helping my personal growth journey but is impacting the journeys of those who follow me. This has given me more inspiration to make my expression journey public and help others do the same.
As the journey unfolds and I learn about myself, I shamelessly share these beautiful and vulnerable moments online to aid in the transformation of the community around me. I mentor other individuals who have powerful visions to share with the world, and together we self-inquire, step out of our comfort zones, and express our truest selves to the world through creation.
The Journey
The exciting part of my story begins at age 21 when I changed my life-long career plans from policing to art, after an epiphany that helped me question my career decisions around becoming a police officer, which was the unwavering career goal throughout my life. Even though I was already working in Community Policing and nearly complete with my Criminology degree, I decided to follow the call to become and artist and entrepreneur. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I discovered my hidden talent for painting, thanks to the legend Bob Ross, which quickly became an art business where I was selling canvas landscape paintings in Vancouver, BC. I was inspired by my art business mentor Andrea Ehrhardt who made her way through the world painting murals for people, which opened my eyes to a new possibility. I began looking for mural jobs on WorkAway. Within the next year, I finished university, quit my job, ended my relationship, said goodbye to my friends and family and left home to embark on the journey of a lifetime. ​
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​ I made my way to Southeast Asia and began painting murals for local communities and resorts in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia. At this time, I had been making art content on Instagram and Tik Tok for the last two years with little engagement, until I arrived in the Philippines and started sharing my travelling muralist journey. This is when my pages started getting noticed by people around the world. My journey was inspiring people just as my mentors journey had inspired me. I was volunteering on a remote island in Palawan, Philippines when I was given the opportunity to become a tour guide for Tru Travels. This veered my career in a new direction. I put down the paint brush and began leading groups of 8-25 people through the breathtaking islands of the Philippines, connecting them with locals and with the warm and welcoming Filipino culture.
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​ I made my way to Koh Phangan, Thailand, where I spent the next eight months working with DNA and beginning my own entrepreneurial endeavors as a social media mindset coach. These were some of the most transformational months of my life, to say the least. I not ​
My time as a tour guide shifted when I met the CEO of Tru Travels at a staff retreat in the Philippines. He told me about a start up he is working on called Digital Nomad Adventures (DNA), a company that connects digital nomads in paradise through group tours and networking events. This sparked my interest because of its emphasis on helping people with goal setting, growth mindset, and other topics of personal development that had helped me create the life I have. I knew I could contribute to the facilitation of these topics because of the life-long practice I have had with these subjects. On the same day we met, I asked if I can join the team and he said yes and invited me to Thailand to begin my own journey as a Digital Nomad.
only learned a ton about starting a business and how to balance that with having a social life, but I also tasted first hand the life of a digital nomad. Working on projects that I am deeply passionate about, and helping people around the world improve their lives and careers, while being able to live in paradise, gave me the feeling of immense freedom and purpose. I knew this life of location-independent work was for me, and I knew my gifts could help people who want to take leaps in their life and share their journeys on social media as well.
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Eventually, my time in Thailand came to an end and I flew to Australia and New Zealand to complete the two year travel journey before going back to Canada. I visited long lost family, followed a life changing love connection, and continued working on my career as an expression coach and videographer, while working on my passions for freestyle rap and learning to DJ.
​ Now, here I am, sitting in my moms restaurant, Famoso, typing up a storm and trying to encapsulate these last two years within a single page. I feel immense gratitude every day for the opportunities I have been given to follow my joy and curiosity. I will not be here long. I plan to make my way back into the world to continue the journey and see where it takes me. Thank you for following along and being here for the ride.
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Alongside this boss babe entrepreneurial era of mine was the precipice of a deep creative awakening. It had been about a year since I had painted, as I had dropped my creative pursuits for that first year as a tour guide and digital nomad to focus on other priorities. It wasn't until I had an epiphany around my voice and ability to sing that my journey took a steep turn in a musical direction. I realized I had been holding myself back from singing for my entire life, and decided to explore this hidden part of myself. It was within days that when I met a new friend who invited me to a freestyle rap circle in Koh Phangan. I decided to give it a try and was shocked by the therapeutic nature of the experience. This was about one year ago, and I have been obsessively freestyling ever since, sharing it online and normalizing the art of conscious rap as therapy and self-exploration.