Why Some Trips Change Us and Others Don't

Have you ever noticed that some trips stay with you forever, while others disappear almost immediately? Maybe you've taken a two-week vacation that barely changed anything, yet somehow a weekend, a conversation, or a single experience altered the way you see the world. So, what actually makes travel transformative? Because it turns out it might not be where you go at all. My name is Kiara and I am your host of Put the Guidebook Down. Today we are going to be talking about why some trips change us and others don't.

Starting off by calling it as it is, we assume travel automatically changes us. Whether that's from travel marketing, travel influencers, the stories that get told and are the ones that often get published. Maybe it's from the media or movies. I mean my mind goes directly to Eat Pray Love. And we use this one so much that people even say, I'm gonna have my Eat Pray Love moment. All of this content shapes our mind and ideation of how we interpret travel and our expectations that we have of our trips, that they have to be transformative or else we're doing something wrong. And it's all a travel cliche. Travel changes you. Does it? Or does travel simply create opportunities for change? Have you ever met someone who travels constantly but then they come back home or you have a conversation with them and you realize they haven't changed at all? This is where we see the whole travel is transformative statement become false. Because in reality, some trips leave no lasting impact. And that can be good and it can be bad. It depends on what your travel goals are. In some of my more recent episodes, we've been talking about how some trips feel like you didn't accomplish anything, or you just feel unchanged. And how we all need to really go back to the reason of why we booked the trip in the first place and what were the goals, intentions that we set from that travel.

Because some trips just feel forgettable. And I'm not making a joke because some people decided to go on a party cruise or they decided to go out in Budapest and have their own journey there. But I mean just genuinely some trips are forgettable. And this may be because of how we start off the trip and the mindset that we adopt while we are on that travel, because where I personally see this experience is when I'm focused on hitting landmarks or just going from place to place and it becomes very checklist oriented, where my only goal is to hit everything on my itinerary. That's when everything starts to blend together. I get forgetful and start to try to recall memories from those vacations and realize I don't remember anything with what I did. And I look back on my photos and videos. And I'm like, I don't even remember whose crown this was, but I took a photo, so I guess it must be important. All of this is just consuming travel, consuming content, and is really just at the high side of it, just passive consumption. And that's why I'm gonna keep saying it's all about the root or the intention of why you're traveling in the first place.

Because I would challenge you to ask yourselves, is checking landmarks enough? Should we be orienting our travel around landmarks? Or just what people are saying on social media or in travel reviews that we should be doing for our trip? And that's again where some people who are interested in those topics genuinely or just want to be able to take those photos to get X amount of likes on Instagram, that might be their goal, and therefore their answer to that question is yes. But a lot of us who are listening to this are the ones who want that transformative travel experience and want to come back changed. So I would say and challenge that checking those landmarks off is not enough for those people who are looking for those experiences. You can travel extensively without engaging deeply. This is that whole performative travel or surface level travel that we see heavily marketed in the tourism industry this to this day. And this is why we're seeing people talk about more of slow travel, immersive travel, cultural travel, skillcations, as I've talked about in one of my episodes. Because they're looking for ways to engage deeper and learn something new, to come back changed or grown in their personality or mindset. I think when you return from a trip and you're not exactly the same person that you were as when you left, that means the trip was a success. But again, that's my own travel criteria. And that's back and related to the reason why I traveled, is to come back more open-minded and grown in a positive way.

So maybe we need to take a step back when you're going to plan your next travel or you're thinking about your travel goals and ask yourself, are you collecting places or experiences? I'm looking at those people specifically that have the country counter in their bio. I did at one point, it's no shame, but that just shows of what type of travel you're looking to accomplish.

So let's get into the real ingredients of transformation. For those of you who are looking for that transformative travel experience. What moments actually change us as human beings? Research shows that novelty and challenge strengthen memory formation and individual growth. Transformation usually occurs when expectations break, assumptions get challenged, or your values or beliefs get questioned, and even your identity on the bigger level. And this all relates to a result or reaction of uncomfortable feeling or maybe an uncomfortable experience. But those are also the ones that we recall the most quickest, and the ones that we often recount when we're talking about a travel journey and experiences with friends and family when we return home. Because this is where we felt those challenges to us. Questioning ourselves, our beliefs, who we are, where we fit in the world. It's making us think bigger. And answer or look for answers to the bigger questions. And they often provoke different conversations with other people, which means that you were able to formulate deeper connections or have more meaningful moments or memories with those people, which is why it's so easier to recall and why we want to talk about it. And these are often the experiences that we reflect on once we come back from a trip rather than the landmarks that we were just checking off our lists.

And I can 100% relate to this because my easiest moments to recall are the ones where I was in Moldova, Indonesia, on my grants, or just staying in places for a longer period of time. Because at that point I was immersing into the local environment, trying to understand the local identity, culture, heritage, mindset, and then reflecting on my own and seeing where there's similarities, differences, trying to understand why I think X, where someone else may think Y, and how this all fits into the bigger question of culture, community, and the world. And I know that's like a lot of deep questions and reflections, and maybe not everyone wants to think about that when it comes to their travel, but that's when we start to see the growth and the transformation happen because you're drawing your own connections and reflections. They're forcing adaptation and immersion, which is where we should really be heading as travelers.

We as a society are beginning to forget the whole reason why people traveled in the first place. It was to learn something new, to engage with something unfamiliar, and to talk about what you learned. Now, in this day and age with social media, text messaging, FaceTiming, we're able to remain connected to our original roots at almost any point in time. And we're just focused on sharing that constantly and in the moment. That we lose focus of where we are and lose the To have a true disconnection to be really in the moment of where you are. And once you take a step to really go in the moment fully, be truly engaged with your environment and the people that you're with, those are the moments that change us. And they're rarely the moments that we plan for. These are all events, whether physically or mentally, are around participation. But it also involves an element of observation.

In one of my first episodes when I started this podcast, I did a comparison of what it means to be an observer versus a participant when you're a traveler and what really changes in your travel experience, whether you go one or the other, or opt to blend both. Because there is a difference between seeing a culture versus participating in it.

And I want to caution about this as well, because in sustainable travel, cultural travel, and those elements, we want to make sure we're not therefore pushing the travel industry to go into that performative travel element where we're trying to create artificial environments for people to engage with a culture to have that cultural travel experience. That's fake. That's cookie-cutter. We start to lose the authenticity once we start doing that and giving permission that that's what we should be doing. We want to create the environments where people are just able to join or participate with a local in their daily schedule or to see how environments go without any ulterior, exterior influences. And I know several different travel companies are starting to add these types of experience into their group tours or self solo trips. It's literally just a day in the life of a local. And I think it's such an interesting experience and I'm kind of curious about how they go about building these programs. So if anyone has information about that, please share, because I'm genuinely curious if it's still authentic or if it's starting to get into that performative stage level. But I think it's a move in the right direction at this point in time. Because it gives you the opportunity to observe a local culture and environment while also learning how to participate it with genuine intentions. And this also, as everyone knows, goes into the conversation around language learning, because by interacting with these people from different cultures and groups, you're most likely gonna be interacting with a different language, which means you're gonna get some language learning and thus be engaging more deeply and immersively in the destination. And that helps with formulating these deeper connections which help us transform as human beings. And is why some people return home feeling more connected versus others. It's because of how much effort, work, and intention they put into being an observer versus a participant versus a hybrid versus someone who really jumped in and engaged with the environment.

Because transformation requires participation. Watching isn't enough. If you're just taking photos of a market and then posting them on your Instagram story, moving on to the next thing, you're just observing on the very surface level. If you're someone who is signing up to learn how to cook from someone in the local market or you had a conversation with a local you met passing on the street and they ended up inviting you to a pottery workshop, that's a observer who meets a participant who then gets an immersive travel opportunity. That's a huge difference and completely different travel experiences. Again, it all goes back to the root and goal of your travel. What are you looking for in your travel journey and destination? How do you want to get to there? And are you open-minded to spontaneity?

So you may be asking then, how do you design more transformative travel? My first recommendation is to always ask before you travel, what assumption do I want challenged? Or how do I want to feel when I leave and return home? Then during your travel, ask yourself: what am I avoiding because it feels uncomfortable? Whether that's opting to eat by yourself in a restaurant during your first solo trip, whether it's trying to communicate with someone who doesn't speak your native language, or just trying something completely new for the first time and you're unafraid if you look like someone who's never tried what you signed up for, because that's why you signed up. That's where we get the uncomfortable feelings and we get those deeper memories as we discussed earlier. And then after travel, reflecting, what did I learn about myself? This is kind of like in business terms, we talk about KPIs and your ROI. What are your measurements of success from your travel? Did you meet those goals that you said at the beginning? If not, why? What else could you have done to reach them? Or what went wrong? Where did you make a decision that steers you away from the pathway that would lead you to those goals? It's a lot of reflection and it can seem like a lot the first time you adopt these different practices, but it starts become natural language and something you just do on your own once you get the hang of it, because you start to become open-minded as an individual or even more than you were before, and then just open to new experiences and connections so that you naturally go out and seek those connections. Which in turn result in more transformative travel.

I think one of my biggest changes when I started traveling was someone told me to be flexible and adaptable and to say yes. To different opportunities within reason, of course, of safety. And that led me to be more open to having conversations with people that I normally wouldn't have, such as like the person at the local market, instead of just saying, how is your day, and asking for the cost of the items you're purchasing, maybe asking a little bit more about their story and what they're selling, how long they've been selling that. Because that then led to other conversations and sometimes even going on a spontaneous adventure or journey with them. And that's where I started to see my whole travel experience or the way I move through spaces as a traveler change. And I came back as a completely different person and individual in the bestest of ways. And I wouldn't change what I did at all. And it's something now of a mindset that I take on with not just when it comes to travel, but how I move through life and the people I meet. It just has really left a positive impact and helped me to grow as an individual tremendously.

So before we end this episode, I want to leave you with a question. If your trip ended tomorrow, what would actually stay with you? Not what you saw. I'm not talking about your camera roll and the thousands of photos you posted on your story or Instagram. I'm really asking what changed? And if nothing and that bothers you, then maybe this is your sign to do some more reflection and to really start reflecting on why you're traveling to begin with. Maybe transformative travel isn't about crossing oceans. Maybe it's about crossing the boundaries of who we've become. And perhaps the trips that change us aren't the ones that take us the furthest away from home. They're the ones that bring us closer to understanding ourselves. I want to thank everyone so much for listening. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe to our channel, and follow our videos where we're investigating more of modern travel psychology and how it shapes how we travel and move through spaces. Thank you so much, everyone. Bye.