Do everyday chores ever feel like impossibly weighty tasks? Are there projects that you know you should tend to, yet you can’t seem to muster the focus to deal with them? Do you feel powerless to alter your destiny?
Everyday tasks and future plans don’t have to weigh on you. You can find the strength and the motivation to tackle the projects you’ve been putting off. You can (and will) alter your destiny.
And travel will be your catalyst.
How is Travel a Catalyst?
The more I travel the more I realize how much it changes my perspective and strengthens me as an individual. For instance, a few days ago I returned home after a month-long quest to explore the East Coast of the United States. Upon returning, I began to realize, just as I realized after my West Coast trip, that I had perceptibly grown as an individual. I felt more confident, more clear, more decisive, and more able to confront challenges that appear in daily life. Over and over again, I have realized that travel is a powerful catalyst for growth.
Why is this the case?
In short, the act of travel gives you sublime opportunities for you to mature in uncounted ways, including increasing your own power. From repeated observation of this pattern in myself and in others, I’ve seen how travel (especially travel that involves exploring expansive areas or contending with situations you’ve never been in before) poses excellent opportunities for you to adapt to new surroundings and situations. This process often features a collection of challenges in different areas, and these challenges increase in difficulty as you proceed into more foreign and new experiences. And in the process, these challenges stretch you as a person — they stretch your consciousness itself.
And the result becomes clear when you return.
When you return back to your old surroundings, you return to an environment that you created from your previous level of thinking. Your old environment was a product of the person you were before you ventured out to travel, so when you look at your old environment (your office, living situation, relationships, etc.) you’re really seeing an old reflection of yourself. Yet this new you, this post-adventure you, sees your old challenges in a completely new light, and they probably don’t seem nearly as weighty or intimidating as before.
If you’ve stretched yourself at all while travelling, you will feel a shift; and the more you’ve stretched yourself and challenged your assumptions about life itself, the more pronounced your shift in perspective will be.
How to best harness this New Power
However, if you’re not careful, you can lose most of your gains because your environment will support or hinder your overall sense of power. You want to hold onto this newfound strength, right? If you do, you’d be wise to harness this newfound strength now to upgrade your life to support this new sense of perspective you now have. Best to do it now, because it’ll be much more challenging later.
What are some things you should think about doing?
To harness your new power after any consciousness expansion (including, but not limited to travel), I highly recommend you:
- Form a Fresh Vision
• Write a few sentences about where you’d like different areas of you life to be a year from now. (Cover health, relationships, social, career, and finances.) Where would you like them to be a year from now? - Upgrade your Workspace
• Take some time to reconsider how you’ve designed your workspace because your environment is critical to supporting the habits that will shape you into the person you’ll become. My article “How to Improve your Workspace in 7 Steps” will help you reevaluate and refresh your workspace so it’s truly supportive to who you are. - Take ACTION!
• Are there any tasks you’ve been meaning to do for weeks but let go for an extended period, certain that you’d “get to them later”? You are strong now. Whether it was short trip or a longer quest, you have just returned from travelling and that makes you wiser than you were before. Take decisive action now while you’re still hot.
Conclusion
Always remember, with each new adventure comes a new opportunity to stretch yourself and expand your awareness. I’ve found that keeping a journal helps me see these changes in myself, and if you take action soon after you return from an adventure, you can better lock-in those gains made from travelling. In the process, you increase the rate at which you’re able to evolve and grow as a piece of this incredible planet we call our home. It’s begging to be explored, so even after you’ve expanded your consciousness many times, never forget that there are always new ways to grow and new ways to expand your awareness through travel.
Travel is one of the most profound ways to grow, so if you want to continue to grow and increase your power and awareness, never stop travelling. Its rewards compound over a lifetime.
Now you’ve really done it . . . put into words why I’ve always loved to travel! 🙂
Getting rid of previous levels of thinking and recognizing we’re seeing old reflections — what a wonderful testament to the ways we can personally empower ourselves.
Beautifully written. Thank you!
@ Vernessa
Thank you! I’m glad you got a lot out of the article. And, it’s true, our current reality is a reflection of the level of thinking we’re at now. Everything we see and hear, is the result of billions of small (and large) choices we’ve made.
When you return from a journey, what you once accepted as the status quo quite often becomes dead to you, and you find the power to improve it.
And that’s one of the most beautiful things about travel, I think.
I really like to go on adventures to see who I really am and what I really can do. I always want new challenges with every adventure. Thanks for sharing this article!