Beth Sillince is a 26-year-old website designer, business manager, and paragliding pilot, living in Costa Rica.
I interviewed Beth to find out how she has created a new life abroad, what it’s like after a devastating injury, and pursuing her passions.
This Boss Ladies Abroad interview was born out of my curiosity as to how Beth has accomplished changing the direction of her life, at such a young age.
From living with Beth for the past month, I’ve learned that she is super outgoing and bubbly. Yet, it’s easy to suddenly find yourself in deep conversations with her. She enjoys chatting about world issues, but can also laugh at stupid jokes. She’s a fantastic cook, loves to help people, and is a really hard worker. Most of all, she’s an inspiring badass.
Like most mornings, Beth and I are outside on our patio doing some yoga. As she’s doing stretches recommended by her physical therapist, I tell her that I want to do an interview series of inspiring women who are living here in Costa Rica.
Beth responds with her usual positive enthusiasm, “Oh, that’s a great idea. There are definitely a lot of women here that you could interview.”
When I ask if I could interview her, she is surprised but willing to be my first subject.
She has that always ready for anything attitude that I admire in a person.
“I know you’re from England, but how did you end up living in Costa Rica?” I ask as she moves to her next stretch.
“Originally, I came here on holiday to visit my uncle who’s lived here for almost 25 years. Then I met his next door neighbour, Zion,” she smiles. “He later became my boyfriend. That’s kind of the short story of how I ended up here.”
I’ve done my fair share of moving for partners that I loved, so I’m dying to ask her if love is the reason she decided to remain in Costa Rica. I don’t want to assume, so instead I ask, “how did you decide to stay here?”
“Meeting Zion was a big part of being here,” she trails off, “but I love just being in nature and especially being in the mountains. There’s magic there.”
What she says is true. I’ve been to the mountainous area that she’s talking. It’s surrounded by a buzzing magical energy that can’t be ignored. The land and the community are truly special.
She goes on, “it’s the best feeling being there, surrounded by birds and butterflies and the river and the trees and the green.”
There’s no shortage of beauty in Costa Rica. So it’s easy to see why it’s ranked second on the list of top places for expats to live.
When Beth was living in the city, she told me how she didn’t have the same access to nature. “For some reason it’s a lot of effort to leave the city to find the outdoors,” she explains, moving into the down dog position.
It used to take her a couple of hours on a train to be in the countryside. Now she’s surrounded by it all the time.
“You just feel so good when you’re outside,” she sighs as she motions to everything around us. “Of course there’s the paragliding which is a bonus, because it’s right in our back garden. That’s also a big reason to be here.”
We are both craving a smoothie, so we head into the kitchen to make one. Beth grabs a pineapple out of the fridge, “another big thing is that it’s never cold here.”
“Yassss,” I annoyingly interrupt.
She grabs some frozen bananas and says, “I don’t hate the cold, but now that I don’t have to be in it I’m happy not to be knee-deep in snow every winter.” We both laugh and I empathise with her. Neither of us are missing the normally cold February temperatures back home.
While the blender whirs, I wonder what made her commit to moving to Costa Rica permanently. As a person who has always stressed about being financially secure, I was interested in knowing if she was worried about money too.
Once it’s quiet again, I ask, “how did you plan on making a living when you had decided to live here full time?”
Pouring the smoothie into four glasses, Beth admits, “the first season I spent here two years ago, I’d saved up a lot of money to go travelling. I didn’t have to think about working.” Like most of us, she couldn’t just travel on a whim without thinking about money. So after about five months she went back to Europe to work.
“I was actually working in Italy. It was then that I realised I wanted to be here [in Costa Rica].”
Zion walks into the kitchen and interjects, “I knew she didn’t want to be working there either.”
Beth wasn’t going to sit around and wait for change to happen, so she and her partner came up with a plan that would allow her to move.
Sitting at the table outside, she told me about the agreement she and Zion had made. They decided Beth would work for his paragliding business, and they’d grow it together.
“Two years later, it now supports us both for the season. Out of the season, we both do our own work.” (The season is December through April, when it’s dry enough to give tandem paragliding flights nearly every day.)
Before moving to Costa Rica she was working in e-commerce for a fashion company, where she learned a lot of skills in technology. Now, she makes websites for individuals and small businesses.
“I like to help people reach the clients they want. So, I do that when I’m not [managing] tandem paragliding with ten clients a day,” she laughs as our partners are putting their wings into the back of the truck.
“Knowing how to run a business just kind of seems to make sense to me.”
Her partner Zion taught her how to fly, so that’s how she got into paragliding. It’s a sport in which a person uses a parachute to fly. It requires a lot of bravery and skill to get off the ground and into the air. Lately, she hasn’t been flying much because in October 2018, she had a paragliding accident in Argentina that left her with a broken femur. I ask her to share what that experience was like for her.
“It was a pretty traumatic experience,” she recalls. “I had surgery in Argentina, and then about a month after the surgery and as soon as I could hobble my way onto an aeroplane, Zion and I came back home. My body is very sensitive to doing anything that has to do with that leg, but I still enjoy being in the [paragliding] scene and running the business.”
Recovering physically from an injury takes time, but I wanted to know if the accident had changed her mental state in any way. Our bodies tend to recover faster than our mind, and the painful memory can last longer than our injuries.
Beth shared her thoughts, “this is something I’ve been thinking about lately. When it first happened, I was really grateful to the people who looked after me because I couldn’t do anything for myself. I had to be friendly to everyone because I needed their help.
“I had to take it with as much gratitude as possible.”
“Before your accident, do you think you had a hard time accepting or asking for help?” I inquired because that’s something that I’m working on improving.
“I guess I did. Asking for help is definitely something that’s difficult to do. But when you’re faced with needing help… like you need it to go to the bathroom,” she trails off, and we both laugh at the thought.
Beth takes credit for her accident happening and what she’s learned from it. “Maybe if I’d dropped my pride a little and decided not to fly that day, I wouldn’t have had the accident,” she says. Her intuition told her not to fly, but she ignored it and flew anyway. It was too windy that day, even with two years of flying experience.
“I’ve learned to say ‘no I’m not doing that, I don’t wanna do that, or this is what I wanna do‘ and making that clear, whether it’s to yourself or with someone else.”
“What are some goals that you’re working on right now?” I ask her.
“I’ve realised that with a lot of the fears I have, the actual thing I fear is not the thing I think it is. It’s actually just having pain whether it’s physical or mental which I think is a really human thing. To overcome that, you have to go through it because I’ve just been through something painful. I really feel it still.”
It’s easy to agree with her. All of us have to face our fears at some point if we want to overcome them. ” With paragliding, it’s a mental game, so to do it again…” she hesitates, “the actual paragliding is still fun, but the landing right now [for me] is difficult, so I worry about that. Then when you fly and you’re not relaxed you make bad decisions. It’s like a vicious cycle.” Psyching ourselves out can be one of our greatest obstacles, so we have to break that pattern in order to grow.
Compared to the number of men, there aren’t many women in paragliding. Only about 5% of competition pilots are women. “What’s it like being one of the few women in a sport dominated by men,” I ask her.
Beth raises her eyebrows, “To be honest, men and women can be on a level playing field. It’s not so much a physical sport as football or rugby, where men and women play in separate teams. The equality is kind of there for the competitions. I think it’s male dominated because they have less fear, or they take more risks. I feel like it’s in our DNA to take fewer risks.”
In her experiences, the paragliding community has been very welcoming and friendly towards her. However, she’s noticed that she receives a lot more unsolicited advice at launch sites than men do.
“I’ll get advice that I didn’t ask for, like ‘you shouldn’t be doing this.'” I can’t help but roll my eyes at the thought of her being mansplained to. “At the same time, sometimes if you do want the help, I feel like it’s much easier for me to ask for it, than maybe a man.” Seeing both sides of a situation is another one of her admirable qualities.
“Obviously, a lot of your choices show that you like to be free and be your own boss,” I say to her. “What advice to do you have for other women looking to do the same?”
“The first thing to address would be my white privilege, and the way I was brought up that allowed me to make those choices. I went to university, I had a good job, and I got the job because my sister knew someone there. From that job I learned how to make websites, which is something that can keep me sustained whilst living a free life.” This isn’t the first time she’s admitted her privilege. It’s something that she knows she’s lucky to have.
“Privilege is one thing, but I think everyone has some choice. You can say yes or no to things, and I think that sometimes it’s really difficult to say no, I don’t wanna do this, and walk away from something.”
“Right, especially if it’s something that other people would see as a good thing, but it doesn’t feel right to you,” I agree with her.
“Yeah, like I really didn’t enjoy working in an office, especially after I travelled and went back to it. I kind of went crazy and felt the saddest I’ve ever felt. I feel like the people I worked with would say that walking away [from that job] was the easy thing to do. It wasn’t explicitly said, but I felt people were judging me for not sticking it out. I knew it wasn’t right for me, but it was difficult to find the strength to say, no I don’t like this and it makes me feel really bad.”
“Basically, you’re saying if you aren’t happy doing something then you should change it.”
“Whether that’s changing your job or where you live,” she interrupts herself. “I say those things like it’s just that easy to do them, which I know they’re not. You can’t just snap your fingers and change them, but at least if you are unhappy in certain areas, make a plan to change it and then learn something new.”
It’s important to figure out what you truly enjoy, so you can invest in that instead of things you don’t need or want. Beth suggests more ways to make a change. “You could buy less clothes, and put that money into something else you enjoy, like photography or something. Later you could make it into your job.”
She stresses this, “if you’re creative definitely try to express your creativity because I find when you bottle it up you feel worse. If you have a passion project, then keep putting in the hours when you’re not working and make it happen.”
“I read something that said ‘seeds always grow where you plant them,’ so as long as you give it the attention and energy and nurture it, then you’ll get there.”
She adds, “nothing was built overnight. We’re so quick to be like, oh these people made this app and their super billionaires. But they probably made ten or twenty apps before that one was successful. We just don’t know about it. We get so sucked in to seeing people’s highlight reels, so you have to remember that’s just what they are, and keep chiselling away.”
“Everyone has a starting point,” I agree with her, “you have to give yourself some compassion and let yourself grow. You can’t go from seed to gigantic fruitful tree.”
“I feel like most of the boundaries we have, are put there by ourselves,” says Beth. “If you want to be free and work from wherever you want in the world, then you have to save up a little, and work on getting a skill that will sustain you. Once you’ve done that, and you don’t have to pay rent in an apartment, and decide to buy fewer things, it becomes a lot easier.”
“Do you have any advice for women who are looking to start their own business?”
“I would say if the field that you’re currently working in is something you think you can make a business out of yourself, then learn as much as you can from that person’s business on their money, before you go and make the mistakes in your own business.”
“The one thing I never did [before], was speak to clients. That was not my job. Now, I’ve learned there’s a lot more to speaking to clients than just being polite, especially when it comes to talking about money and negotiating. I’ve noticed when talking to men about money, as a woman, they treat you differently to how they treat men.”
“How so?”
“As a woman, you kind of have to justify [to men] why they should pay you that amount of money to make the website. It’s definitely something that’s thrown me.”
It’s clear that she knows her self-worth and won’t take less than what she deserves for her work.
“Do you make time for yourself or things that you’re passionate about on a regular basis?”
“I think with the way I work, I have a lot of free time. It’s not like working 9-5 in an office where you [only] have so many hours per week that are yours. I’m never actively thinking oh I should do this in my time off. I could probably make more effort to do things for myself, but I feel pretty content in working for myself.”
“Because someones not telling you what to do all the time?”
“Also [that],” she says as we laugh together.
“Is there anything else you’d like to share about your life abroad?”
“No matter how long I’m away from home for, or how many times I say goodbye to loved ones, it never gets any easier.”
Beth continues, “I used to feel guilty about not being there with them. Now, I feel less guilty, but it doesn’t mean I don’t get guilt tripped by certain family members about not seeing them as much as I could.”
“I get that.”
“I’ve kind of justified it by saying to myself, I probably used to spend less time at home when I lived half an hour away in London, than now when I go home and spend a whole month there. That kind of makes me feel better.”
I think to myself, isn’t it strange how we have to justify our own decisions that bring us happiness, so that we don’t feel guilty about not pleasing others?
“The nice thing about when you do get to go home is nothing really changes, yet you’ve seemed to grow and change so much, and you can see that every time you go and visit.”
This is the first of our Boss Ladies Abroad series. Check out Beth’s website at BethSillince.com or follow her on Instagram @bsillince. Also check out the tandem paragliding business atZionParagliding.com.
Written by Drea Casali
Blog: https://www.teacherturnedtraveler.com/
Instagram: @desert_drea
