69. Dream Travel and the Reverse Bucket List with Dr. Faryal Michaud

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the Point Me to First Class podcast. I hope your Monday or whatever day of the week you're listening to this episode is off to a great start. In the world of points travel, there are some aspirational redemptions that always seem to get all the attention, whether it's sipping champagne at 30,000 feet in a luxurious first-class airplane suite, watching the sunset from the private deck of an overwater bungalow in the Maldives, or enjoying exclusive access to the world's best first-class airport lounges, there are some award travel experiences that seem to top the list of many points enthusiasts.

While there's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to experience any or all of those things, I'm a firm believer that the beauty of points is that they allow you to create more of the dream travel experiences that matter most to you. But before you can turn your travel dreams into reality using points, it's important to get clear on what your travel wish list or bucket list looks like. That's exactly what my guests today and I are going to talk about on today's episode.

Joining me today is Dr. Faryal Michaud, a board-certified palliative care physician, life and wellness coach living and practicing in Hawaii. Her practice as a palliative care physician has given her a unique perspective on the value of travel, the importance of defining your personal values and goals when it comes not only to travel but your entire experience of your life, and what living a memorable life looks like.

She hopes that by teaching people the power of mindfulness and stillness, we can all experience our life to the fullest extent without being weighed down by guilt, shame, or regret. I am so excited to bring you this conversation today with Dr. Faryal Michaud. Please enjoy.

Devon: Welcome to the podcast, Faryal. I'm so glad to have you here today. How are you doing?

Faryal: I'm doing great. I've actually been looking forward to this conversation for a very long time. So thank you for having me here.

Devon: Absolutely and likewise. This is going to be a little bit of a different conversation than some of the other guests that I've had on this podcast. But you have such an interesting and unique background and set of experiences and perspective that I thought that this would just be a really fantastic conversation to bring to the podcast. So I'm just, again, very grateful to have you here today.

I wanted to start by just talking a little bit about your background in medicine, because you are a physician. Your background, at least more recently, has been in palliative care. For folks who are not familiar with that, can you just give us a little bit of an explanation about what exactly is palliative care? How has your practice as a palliative care physician impacted your perspective on life and how you live your life? 

Faryal: What a wonderful question. That's the first time someone's actually started questioning me with that. So thank you for that meaningful and valuable question. So a lot of people who don't know what palliative care is, oftentimes put it in the same bucket or category of hospice. So when patients are in the hospital, and God forbid they're faced with a serious illness of any kind. If the primary team will say, we'd like to have palliative care come and see you, everyone panics. They don't know what palliative care is. They just think it's bad.

While hospice is a part and a chapter of palliative care, it's literally the last chapter of palliative care. So to palliate is a Latin word, which means to cloak, or to offer a blanket, if you may. A lot of times, it's just a layer of support. We are the only subspecialty in medicine that equally cares for the patient and the family.

I think that if you can think about we come at a time of serious illness, whether it's just the time of diagnosis or the fifth line of chemotherapy has failed. We come in and offer a layer of support for patients and their families. Now that layer of support can be very medical, like we can manage symptoms, nausea, anything that you can think about that goes with someone with acute or chronic serious illness. But we also manage the anxiety and what goes on in people's mind, both the patient and the caregiver.

So in that sense, the joke has always been if palliative care was a pill, people would sign up from here to like Two Continents over because everybody after having a palliative care consultation feels better because they feel heard, they feel seen. They're like the question I always get is, why didn't we see you earlier? So if that helps anybody, we are just a layer of support when you're faced with a serious illness.

If you, let's say today got diagnosed with a God forbid cancer, for example, and I came to see you, our conversation can be, you want everything. You want to do all that you can to live as long as you can, as long as your quality of life is wonderful. So that's one conversation. Or the conversation could be, I've seen my friend go through this. I will only do A, B, and C and not move on. So it's just essentially, I come in and offer you a menu, and you choose what you want. Then I support you and stand up for you when other physicians think you want to do everything no matter what.

Devon: Yeah, thank you for kind of educating all of us about what exactly that looks like. One of the things that you were just talking about was this idea about conversations that are really focused on quality of life. I think those are conversations that are probably really relevant for anybody to have and to revisit with themselves, with their loved ones throughout their lives, but it seems like that becomes particularly relevant during issues more end of life care or when you do have a really kind of unexpected or significant health event.

I would imagine that in the types of conversations that you've been involved with with your patients and in your role as a palliative care physician and talking about quality of life that travel is something that I would think may come up frequently. 

But I'm curious to hear if that has been your experience, and if you could speak a little bit more about kind of what role does travel take on for people both at sort of these more significant times in their lives? But then how can those of us who are not yet really thinking actively about end of life care, how can we incorporate that into our own perspectives? 

Faryal: Yeah, this is a wonderful question that you bring up. So for your audience who doesn't know me, and it might have been in my introduction, I actually live in Honolulu, Hawaii. I remember long ago when the show ER was on. When Dr. Green got cancer, he wanted to go to Hawaii and die in Hawaii. It always made an impression on me. I was living in Michigan at the time. So I was like yeah, that'd be a good place to go.

So this may be interesting to your audience. People in Hawaii, when they're faced with a serious illness and they want to die, they have one more trip they want to have before they die. Do you know where they want to go, Devon?

Faryal: My guess would be for people who were not born or raised or originally from Hawaii that they would want to go to whatever, quote unquote, home is for them. That would be my guess. 

Devon: So that is absolutely true. So those of those patients who are from the Philippines very much want to go to the Philippines. This conversation always comes up, and sometimes it's really, really sad because they're not in a position to fly. They could have shared that earlier when they could have flown. 

But the reason I share this with a little tongue in cheek, they want to go to Vegas. They call Vegas like the seventh isle. For whatever reason, people who live in Hawaii love Las Vegas. I think part of it is because it's inexpensive and Hawaii is so expensive. So for them, they can go to Vegas and live like kings and queens. They have, like people go for three days to Vegas. So they want one more Vegas trip before they die. It's just funny. I feel like I don't think the rest of the world thinks of Las Vegas as the last place they want to visit, but on the island.

But anyway, so, yes. You are correct in that a lot of times like going to a place, this comes up. There's good and bad and everything. Right. So what I mean to say is it's wonderful that we travel. I was born in Iran, and my family lives all over the world. So I don't have that cohesiveness of a nuclear family feel. But I mean, I think that's the same experience for many, many people.

So the joke in palliative care is like let's say you have a family meeting with someone, and the daughter who's living with the patient will go along with what you're suggesting because they see mom. But the daughter who's in New York will say, “No, we want to keep going.” So it's always like when you think about the nuclear family because the nuclear family is no longer a nucleus within one space. People are gathered everywhere. So that's the privilege of flight. That's a privilege of the life we have now.

But on the other hand, when the end of life comes, people want to come. Both people want to visit their dying loved one or people who are close or people who are close want to have one more visit with the grandchildren or whatever that is. So yeah, travel is very, very important.

The concept of bucket list came on years ago. The idea of bucket list is really to focus on you. What is the thing just for you? When I have, those of you who have listened to my podcast on my podcast, I do ask all the guests that my last question is always like what is on your bucket list? Partly I'm curious. I've actually traveled to some of the places that my guests said hey, that's on my bucket list. We were in Belgium. I'm like, let's go to Bruges. I mean, it was on somebody's bucket list. 

So part of it is I'm really curious. Part of it is because it's such a hedonistic question, we approach bucket list because now I can just do what I want. No one asks Faryal where she wants to go. It's always let's go visit family and the kids. I have so many places I want the kids to see before they go to college. So the bucket list really is a hedonistic question to make an attempt to make life memorable.

It's like, and it actually is a concept that came up by a behavioral economist and psychologist, Dr. Daniel Kahneman years ago that we want to have peak experiences in life, and we have a tendency to want those experiences as we feel like our time is running out. So travel is definitely a peak experience because we experience things that are a little outer worldly. Right? Like when you go to India. Seeing Taj Mahal for me was kind of that experience. So it makes sense that as people get closer to life, want to have those peak experiences.

But also I want to tell your audience to not wait for that. Because if that's really important to you, if you want to have not necessarily the hedonism of it, but if you want to have I call them high definition experiences. If that's something that you really want to weave into the tapestry of your life, do it now. Like I remember anywhere I've gone, and there's an opportunity to go up like, I don't know, hundreds of stairs. Every time I'm like do I really? It's August in like, gosh, in Europe, I'm sweating bullets. I'm always like girl, this may be the last time you can even have the option of hundreds of stairs in August in Europe. 

So I just want to offer that perspective that you don't have to be given a diagnosis to live your life from a high definition state of being. Trust me, the more you can take care of you, the more your children will say, “You know what? Look at mom go.” Living in that space allows you to be free. If there's no peaks, no memories, right? We're never going to be like I'm so glad I stayed back and read three more journal articles that day. Now, is that important to your life? Yes. But is that a peak experience? No. So it just so happens as we get closer to end of life, travel just really kind of becomes front and center somehow. 

Devon: Yeah. I think sort of this concept of taking what are some of the things that you've really seen people genuinely kind of grapple with and question themselves with when they do sort of reach that point of very clear end of life decisions. Taking the wisdom from that and saying, well, how can all of us apply that to make our lives richer and to inform our decisions right now when many of us, I think the one guarantee is we all expect that we will pass at some point. But we have no idea what that's going to look like or when that's going to be. Right?

This idea about, I love that you call them high definition experiences. I'm curious, again, because of the work that you've done with folks that maybe we can transplant some of your wisdom from that arena to our own lives. Are there any other questions that you have found particularly helpful for people to ask themselves in order to get really clear about, like you said, what those bucket list experiences are for them, or what would enable them to have more of these, quote, high definition experiences? 

Devon: Yeah. So I share this with you because it is the experience that I have with other people, right? Like patients near their new diagnosis. It happens two major times. That's first when you, I like to think about it, and this may make sense to your audience in some ways. That we live our life before a serious illness. We live our life in this false sense of security and false sense of certainty. Like, for example, right now as I'm talking to you, I have like travel plan for this summer, travel plan for I have like three. Like October, we're going to somewhere. November, we're going somewhere. I mean, literally for the next two years, I'm booked, right, in terms of plans we all have.

But then remember when COVID came and then I was like wait, COVID wiped out two years of my travel and my family's travel. I had such a sense of scarcity because specifically with my kids, I have a vision of the places I want them to see before they're off to college. I feel like COVID robbed us. I mean, it robbed a lot of people of their wellness. I lost family members. I'm not taking COVID lightly. 

But when you think about there is this almost cocky sense of certainty that I'm going to do all these things. So as long as we live in the life of well-being, we make these plans.

What happens is the second you're given a diagnosis in anything or, God forbid, your family member’s faced with the diagnosis, you no longer live in that life of certainty. Now you've thrown into the world of unknown. As much as you were really dying to go to Barcelona, for example, don't know what's happening next year.

So I'm sharing this with utmost love and care to your audience, especially if you have audience members listening who just are faced with an illness or are going through all of this is first of all, I think living from a space of no bucket list is a good place to be. Living in a place that I don't really need to go to wherever I was planning to have that magical moment with my family. Living from a place of how can I bring that Zen, bring that sense of this is good enough life to here, wherever I am.

Well, it's easy for me to say I live in Hawaii, right? Like when I was complaining during COVID, people are like in Chicago. People are like freezing in Chicago. Faryal, if you post one more picture of rainbow saying your life is hard, I'm going to just punch you. 

But the bottom line is it doesn't really matter. We were isolated. You could have gotten in your car, technically, and drove to any family member, any corner of the mainland, and I couldn't get to see my family. I couldn't leave the island. 

So it doesn't really matter. I think what I want to, first of all, offer people is the mindset of being in a place that, living your life from a place of you don't need a bucket list. You don't need a place. It's wonderful to plan. I am, you know me and I like signed up to work with you. It matters to me. Travel is hugely important in my life. 

My father owned a travel agency. I've traveled all my life. So travel is a part of who I am. It's not a privilege. It's like a right. It feels that way to me. But I want to say to your audience that could you live from a place of trying to be with the kids present in your hectic life as opposed to let's go to that wonderful suite in Kauai so we can really be present with our kids.

So I think living our life in some way that we're borrowing from future, a situation where we're all together. But borrowing from that theoretical situation to bring those high definition moments in your everyday life, you'd be so much more at ease and at peace with the life because traveling creates a sense of restlessness. Traveling creates a sense of its better there than here. 

I mean, think about it. I myself doesn't matter if I fly whatever kind of plane I'm flying. The second I get through the plane, I'm happy. I'm excited. Doesn't matter what's going to happen. But it's the sense of its better on this plane. No one's texting me. I'm not going through email. It's better. So can you carve your life? 

So my question for all of your audience is I want you to live in a place of introducing high definition moments of walking barefoot in absolute pouring rain in Taj Mahal. It's like I will never forget that. My kids will never forget that. But can I bring a little bit of that to my everyday life? That awe and wonder in my everyday life without leaving? 

Because one day, once we're thrown into that life of no longer being well, all of those things, all of those currencies of living life like that are no longer available. Where are you going to create them then? 

Devon: Yeah, yeah, that's incredible. There was a time that I heard you on a podcast where you were being interviewed, and the host asked you what's on your bucket list. I was really struck by your response. I don't know if you're even going to remember this at all. So feel free to say like nope, it doesn't register. But you responded that you don't have a bucket list. You have a reverse bucket list. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about what that means. 

Faryal: Yeah, absolutely. Glad you mentioned that. The whole idea of bucket list, again, is like this idea of there are things I want to do so that I am happy. There are things I want to do when it's just we talk about hedonism. We talk about only me. That those things will make me happy.

The reverse bucket list is what else do I not need? Right. Like, imagine when we didn't have a house, the first time you got a house. It was like oh my God, I have a house. Like everything, like even a job. Any time we get something, it's like oh, it's so amazing to have something. Right. It's so amazing. The first time you get whatever, like your audience is varied, I'm sure. But like the first time you got your own car, the first time you got your whatever that gave you so much joy and excitement.

Reverse bucket list is the idea of can I be happy with less things? Can I live with no bucket list? Right. It's hard. I mean, I thrive to be that way, but I'm nowhere near that. So I thrive not to have my Apple watch with me. But if I don't, I'm like oh my gosh, I didn't, like what was my heart rate variability when I was doing hot yoga? Like, it's really hard. We so easily give away our attention. We so easily give away our focus to external things that it just like hijacks our peace.

Like even travel, right. Like I am a huge follower of yours. I'm in your course. I loved it. I've learned so much. I have applied it. We're going on travel if nothing happens to us wellness wise. So I've used all of that. It's so exciting. But even that sense of what other card has, that sense of there is almost like a gambling sense. There's this excitement when we sign something or when we find out that this is. So that sense, I like to not have it. 

So reverse bucket list is I do not want what I do not have. Can I sit with that peace? If I actually never dive in Maldives, am I going to be okay? Like, is that okay? Is that okay not to have Maldives on my bucket list? So I think the idea is can you live with yourself without thinking that if Faryal had a life that she love in Maldives and she was with tiger sharks with her husband? If that never is part of my story, is that still a good story? 

Devon: Yeah, I think that is such an incredibly powerful question to ask because I think it's this sort of constant balance between both looking at that initial question you asked about just what do I want? Like what types of experiences are going to actually add value to my life? Right.

What's personal to me, but not holding and gripping that so tightly then that, like you said, up until that point or in the absence of those things, then we're really devastated or we feel like we're missing out. Or we're experiencing this sense of, like you mentioned, scarcity. Right? Like that the absence of the things that we want somehow then becomes a source of suffering for us.

So I think that's sort of the eternal challenge is how do we hold both of those things to be true to be able to identify what matters to us? What would we love to experience, incorporate into our lives? Also, where's the beauty in having everything I need in this one moment, even if it's not those things that are on my wish list? I think that's a great reminder. That's certainly one that I need all the time.

I agree, especially in this very, very kind of limited space of credit cards and points and travel. I think it can sometimes be a little bit of a dopamine hamster wheel. Right? Like what exactly am I chasing? Like oh, I missed out on a 250,000 point American Express Business Platinum signup bonus. Ultimately, is that really the point? Like, is that like what you'd term as a high definition experience, or am I sometimes losing the forest for the trees sort of thing? So I think that that's a great reminder for all of us.

Sort of before we wrap up today, there was one more question that I wanted to ask you. You have your own podcast. You're the host of a podcast called Write Your Best Chapter. We'll obviously link up to that in the show description in the show notes today for anyone who wants to find you there. But I was curious if you could speak a little bit to what it means to you to write your best chapter, and how can other people incorporate that idea into their own lives? 

Faryal: Yeah, so thank you so much. I think that how I sort of got into medicine. I was a dancer years ago. Like I said, I traveled a lot. How I came to medicine was like really a desire to connect with people. That's always been sort of my pull. When I was practicing as a hospital physician, academic hospital physician for a long time.

But what sort of changed is that I would see these people getting in and out of the hospital like this conveyor belt. Like ER ICU, PCU, telemetry, nursing home, home, ER. I saw people doing this over and over again. I'm like nobody's having a conversation that if your time is limited, which all of our times are, how do you want to spend it with somebody who has a non-curable aortic stenosis or whatnot? 

So I just thought I want to have these conversations. So I kind of became a hospitalist before palliative care was a subspecialty. So I had to come back and do a subspecialty training to do palliative care. It's the most meaningful conversation. Like, how do you want to live your life? Like, it doesn't matter, serious illness or not. How do you want to live your life? 

So to live my best life, I like to move. You talk about like, it's hard to walk with this fine line of two things in your hand. Oftentimes there's grief and gratitude at any aspect of our life, no matter. I offer your audience to sort of navigate life from this space of grief and gratitude.

But how I live my life because I am absolutely imperfect. I'm an imperfect mother. I've made a number of parenting mistakes back then when they were little, now that they're teenagers. I'm sure I would continue to make it. As a physician, like, I am not above anything. I make mistakes. So for me to write my best chapter, Devon, I have to wake up every day and look at my life with equal part compassion and equal part curiosity.

Compassion is Latin word, and it actually means to suffer with. It's not just that I love myself. It's like I understand that it sucks to be 53 years old. It sucks that I don't have the running pace that I had when I was younger. It sucks that I can't like snap out of jet lag like when I was seven. Just having compassion for where I am in life, right?

For all the bad things that I've done, all the mistakes, all the credit card. Like oh my gosh, yesterday was day one. I've had a Bilt credit card, and I've missed day one every single month. I'm like girl, you have to remember one thing with this card. So how can I live my life? Like living my best life is compassion and curiosity. The compassion is suffer with, it's like dude, I'm sorry you missed that. I'm sorry that you logged in. Because I try to be very intentional with my time on FaceTime and social media.

So every time I log in, especially in your space, which is like a bazaar in Turkey. It's like everybody has so much to say. All good things, by the way. I want all of it. But it's like I come in. I'm like girl, every time you log in, you miss this. So it's like, how can I live my life from a place of compassion and say?

Then the curiosity, right? The curiosity is I missed this. What was I doing? I'm curious why I missed May 1st, right. Why did I miss the May 1st moment of it was clinic day. I was taking care of really sick cancer patients. So what was my trade off? I missed the brain space that remembered hey, it's the day to like capture all the points. I was like making that extra call. So it's like with curiosity, I can go back to compassion. 

So I think the way I try to live my best life is always have compassion once I have awareness that I've missed the boat, I've missed the train, I've missed the plane. Have compassion that it is what it is. It's life. It's inherent to life. Then be curious why did I miss something? Did I miss something doing something that was more life meaning and purposeful? If I did, I don't care. I say that about money. It's just money. Like I say, it's just points. Because I can really get caught up into that game.

I have to catch myself. It's fun. It's good. But at the end of the day, it's game and it's like compassion and curiosity helps me forgive myself because there's nothing worse than beating yourself up. I think I have a like a doctorate in that. I think it comes naturally to me. It’s like I don't want to miss that great deal. I don't want to miss that great whatever.

I want to just offer all of your audience, whether they have a serious illness or not, whether they're in this game or not, just kind of navigate life with that lightness of compassion and curiosity. It's all good.

Devon: Faryal, thank you so much for that reminder. I know it's very useful for me. I'm sure it's going to be useful for so many people listening today. I just want to thank you for sharing all of your wisdom, all of your insights. Like I said, I was really looking forward to this conversation because I think it's really going to bring a different dimension to what a lot of us think about when we are making travel plans and just the way that we think about travel in our lives.

So, thank you so much for joining us here today. I appreciate you and your time so much. For people who want to learn more about who you are and what you do, where can they find you? 

Faryal: Yeah, sure. So I don't know when this podcast would be actually aired, but I am Dr.Faryal.com. People can just go to my website. I have an Instagram. I'm not very active on it. I hate to say. I'd like to be. On Facebook, if you're a physician, you can join our Physicians Living Intentionally. I just share these kind of thoughts and pictures. It's not anything other than maybe just have a different vision, just pause for a little bit. So I have those spaces.

People can like literally DM me if they have serious illness questions. I try to be there for everyone in capacity that I can be or guide you to a place that I feel like, hey, this might be helpful for you. The podcast is Write Your Best Chapter. There is a lot of information on people with serious illness and how to think differently about your situation, but I also interview amazing guests like yourself. So people can just be there and learn more about that.

Last but not least, before I forget, I do host a retreat for women physicians on Turtle Bay on Oahu in October. It's very small. It's not a big conference kind of thing. It's not a CME event. So people who say oh, how about CME? It's like if you're going with a CME mindset, that's not that kind of. It's really just gathering and just pausing and reflecting. That's in October. So if people want to learn more about that, again, it's on my website, Dr.Faryal.com. I am so happy to be here to just see you and talk about this. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give people a moment of reflection. 

Devon: Well, thank you again for everything. I really appreciate your time. Thank you, everybody, for joining us for this conversation today. I'll see you again, same time, same place next week. Bye, everybody.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.