Two weeks before my family and I left for Colombia, I got home from a month in France. A summit. An art holiday. Traveling with a friend in between. Group energy, almost nonstop, for four weeks straight.
I love that kind of travel. I also know exactly what it costs me.
So when my fiancé and I sat down to plan a week in Medellin with all three kids, I already knew something the trip hadn’t accounted for yet. I was going to need time by myself in the middle of it.
A Trip Everyone Wanted, On a Window That Didn’t Leave Room
My fiancé had wanted this trip for a while. We’d taken two of the kids to Colombia a couple of years ago, and they loved it. This time was for the one who missed out, and for his friends in the country who wanted to show us the parts most visitors never see: the rural towns, the indigenous communities, the real texture of the place.
We had one short window to make it happen. The middle child’s school calendar left us a narrow stretch at the end of July. Eight days, no more.
Medellin also happens to be one of the first cities that ever made me feel creatively alive. Expansive. The kind of place I wanted to actually be in, not just pass through while managing a schedule of kid-friendly activities.
Those two things don’t fit inside the same eight days. What a twelve-year-old wants from a trip and what I wanted from that particular city are not the same thing. They never are, at that age.
The Conversation That Made Room
So I said something to my fiancé that I don’t think enough women let themselves say in the middle of planning a family trip. I want to do this with all of us. I also need time that’s just mine.
We talked it through, and it worked out cleaner than I expected. His friend had already organized a three-day excursion into the hills: coffee farms, paragliding through a canyon, whitewater rafting, real time inside the culture. My fiancé took the three kids on that adventure. I stayed behind in Medellin.
The shape of the trip became a couple of days together as a family first, a few days apart, then a few days back together before we flew home.
I want to be clear about what this is not. This isn’t a look-at-my-life post. It isn’t about how great my trip was. It’s about a decision, made on purpose, after I paused long enough to actually know what I needed.
The Decision Most Women Won’t Let Themselves Make
I don’t know many moms or stepmoms who would say, in the middle of a family vacation, now I’m taking a few days for myself, you three go have your adventure. The guilt around that runs deep. The idea that a family trip has to mean constant togetherness, that quality time means shared time every hour, that anything else comes at the kids’ expense.
That belief is real. It’s just not true for me, and it doesn’t have to be true for you either. Taking time for yourself on a trip you also want to share with the people you love isn’t a contradiction. It’s often what makes the shared part actually work.
I show up better as a human when I’ve had time to recharge. I’m more fully present with the kids after I’ve had space to be in my own energy. That’s not a preference. That’s just how I’m built. I’m an introvert. Solo time isn’t optional for me. It’s structural. A quiet evening here and there on a trip isn’t the same thing as three or four full days to actually reset.
So I’ve had to learn two things: how to honor what I actually need, and how to say it out loud to the people I love in a way that doesn’t invite guilt or the sense that I’m failing them by asking for it.
What the Time Was Actually For
Those three days weren’t about getting ahead on business projects. They were for napping in a hammock. Sleeping in. Letting my own rhythm set the schedule instead of anyone else’s. I spent a few afternoons trying my hand at fiction from that hammock, just because I wanted to.
This wasn’t about being productive with my time alone. It was about being allowed to just be. To do what felt good, recharge fully, and find my own way back into something I’ve always loved about solo travel, even in the middle of a family trip.
It also made room for something I hadn’t planned. A friend from a mastermind I’ve been part of for four years happened to be in Colombia at the same time. We’d connected virtually every couple of weeks for years but never actually met in person. I reached out. She and her partner flew up from Bogota, and we had dinner that night, the first time meeting face to face after four years of knowing each other.
None of that happens if I’m on a mountain paragliding with the kids that day. It only happened because I’d already made room for it, the same way she’s made room in her own business to say yes to a last-minute dinner invitation in another country. She’s designed her business around the freedom to make choices like that in the moment. That’s not luck. That’s the same kind of decision I made, just made by someone else, in her own life.
The Compass Underneath the Decision
This isn’t really a story about a vacation. It’s a story about knowing what you want clearly enough to make a decision that outside expectation would never hand you.
That’s what a compass is for. Once you actually know what you want, you start making decisions differently. You rewrite rules you didn’t realize you were following. You start noticing chances to move toward the life you actually want instead of the one you inherited by default. None of that requires permission from anyone else. It requires knowing, first.
The Questions Worth Pausing For
Most people never stop long enough to actually answer the questions underneath all of this. What do I want to do with my time and energy? What do I want to do with my money? Who do I want to be around? How do I actually want to balance work, rest, play, and the people I love, not as an idealized picture, but as something real I get to design?
Those questions are the compass. Everything else, the decisions, the rules you rewrite, the trip that looks a certain way, comes after you know the answers.
If you haven’t stopped long enough to ask yourself those questions in a while, that’s the whole reason the Compass Session exists.
The Compass Session is a live, 90-minute workshop built around exactly this: getting clear on what you actually want your life to feel like, so you can stop building a business blindly and start designing the one that fits the life you want. It’s the same live session that’s been running for three years, and women are still telling me what shifted for them, years later. Seats are limited, and it happens live, on camera, with no replay.
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Katrina Cobb is a Business Architect for women founders generating $300K to $1M+. She helps leaders redesign the architecture of their business, lifestyle, leadership, and identity so growth feels spacious, sustainable, and deeply aligned with the life they actually want. Explore her work at katrinacobb.com.