Travel Can Guide You to Your Life’s Purpose
By Zanny Steffgen
Travel can be transformative for everyone tourism touches, including travel professionals themselves. This theme comes up often in Soul of Travel Podcast conversations, as guests who represent all facets of the industry share the ways travel has shaped their lives. For many, external explorations have prompted internal ones as well, leading to a metamorphosis as they question everything they once took for granted about success, happiness, and even their life’s trajectory.
Whether that process is enjoyable, challenging, or both, it seems to lead travelers closer to living in alignment with their true selves. That is the power of travel, and a colorful thread woven through all five seasons of the Soul of Travel podcast. Let’s follow that thread and see where it leads!
Leaving the Corporate World
Despite the fact that the “traditional” path of adulthood—as in finding a stable job, getting married, buying a house, having children, saving up for retirement—seems to be on the way out, some parts of it are harder to break free from than others, like finding a respected and well-paid career. Climbing the corporate ladder comes with a slew of benefits, but it's not a great fit for everyone. Including several Soul of Travel guests, whose travel experiences watered seeds of doubt about their careers, growing into some major life changes.
Yulia Dinisyuk, Photo by Shelley Coar
During her conversation with Christine, Yulia Denisyuk from Season 3 spoke about what drew her to the corporate world: “You get on that path, you have a job, you are growing in that job, you are starting to become respected and listened to, and you have a nice salary… a 401k, health insurance—all of that. Those things, they draw you in. They keep you very much rooted to this lifestyle.” As an immigrant in the US, having a high-powered career was especially important for Yulia, who felt extra pressure to achieve all the conventional markers of success. Even so, she kept dreaming of a life built around travel.
When long hours at the office seemed to catch up to her and Yulia began having back problems, she saw it as a sign. Soon she was laid off, and rather than look for another job, decided it was time for a six-month trip around the world. Upon her return, she looked inward and asked herself a very important question: “What do you want, Yulia?”
The answer was to be a travel writer and photographer. She’s since built a thriving freelance photography and writing career and started her own group travel company. Yulia’s experiences helped her land on her own personal definition of success. “I couldn't wait for the weekend in corporate,” she told Christine, “and now when I wake up in the morning… I can't wait to see what this new day brings.”
She’s not the only guest who has felt this way. Jen Ruiz, now a full-time travel blogger and best-selling author, was once a successful lawyer, but hesitation crept in just before she turned 30: “I was panicked over approaching this big milestone birthday after having worked really hard and achieved professional accolades, but not really feeling like I'd done anything personally for me.” So she decided to travel somewhere new each month, even while working full-time.
Jen took 20 trips just that year.
In her conversation with Christine, Jen talked about deviating from the structure she’d once accepted: “For the first time in my life, I tossed the plan aside. I said: ‘Let's see what happens.’” Four years later, she reflected on her journey. “I can't believe some of the places that this decision has taken me, and I'm really grateful that I actually took that leap and bet on myself…versus feeling like I had to conform to what society expected of me.”
Photo provided by Jen Ruiz.
Leaving the security of a corporate job for a life in travel comes up again and again in Soul of Travel conversations. Shivya Nath, now a writer and founder of both Voices of Rural India and Climate Conscious Travel, was also in a full-time role when she convinced her boss to give her time off to travel—what she called “the starting point” of her journey toward a career path that felt right.
For travel journalist Lily Girma from Season 4, travel was a “way out” when dissatisfaction arose: “I thought, ‘Surely this isn't why I went to law school.’ I was doing a lot of pro bono immigration work, which made me happy and exposed me a little bit to the multicultural side of life again. But I realized it's not what I love to do.” In Habiba El Kasri’s case, traveling for work during her corporate career inspired her transformation into a professional travel designer. For Habiba and others, powerful travel experiences didn’t just prompt a major life change—they led to a career in tourism.
Inspiration to Better the Tourism Industry
The global tourism sector is a powerful force, and like many other industries in modern times, is going through a period of reckoning, addressing serious issues like inclusion, overtourism, and environmental impact. Many of Soul of Travel’s guests play important roles in that reckoning, inspired by personal travel experiences to change the tourism industry for the better.
Like Paula Vlamings, a seasoned tourism professional who had deferred her dream of traveling around the world with her husband until her 40s, then bought a camper and road tripped through Central and South America. As she told Christine in this episode from Season 3: “I'd been traveling professionally for years, but this was a way to really slow down and to get to know the communities—we shopped in their grocery stores… we struggled with many of the issues that these communities deal with on a daily basis.”
Her time on the road inspired Paula to “really engage in sustainable tourism and community tourism, knowing that those resources are so precious in those communities, and that we as travelers can't just take them, we have to give back to those destinations in order for them to thrive.” In the years since, as Chief Impact Officer of Tourism Cares, Paula has launched programs in destinations like Jordan, Colombia, and Puerto Rico, providing visitors with authentic, community-based travel experiences.
Photo provided by Carla Campos.
Sustainable travel is another hot topic these days, and one that Carla Campos knows well. After studying abroad in Australia, she began to understand the ways tourism impacts the local environment. That experience inspired her to return to her native Puerto Rico and serve as tourism minister, and Carla currently works as a travel and tourism strategy and sustainability specialist.
Soul of Travel guests are also filling in gaps in the tourism industry, like Becki Rupp, whose personal travel experiences formed the basis of her current coaching business, in which she helps people mentally and physically prepare for adventure travel. Or Tess Millhollon, a backpacker who created an app called Her House to connect solo female travelers with safe accommodations and background-checked hosts. In each of these cases, travel helped draw each guest to their true life’s purpose.
Living in Alignment
Living in alignment is that sense of shedding layers of expectations and obligations to discover what lies underneath, and in doing so approaching the true self. There’s something about travel that seems to make such a discovery possible—in their conversations with Christine, many Soul of Travel guests have explored this concept.
Part of the transformative power of travel is the way it compels travelers to be in the present moment. As Jen Ruiz said: “Actually living in the now is so difficult. It's easier said than done. And I found that travel was a magic way to make you live in the now, because when you're dropped somewhere new, you have no choice but to take in new sights, new smells, new sounds… And that feeling is so empowering.” Being present provides the opportunity for self-reflection, far from the worries and thoughts that normally cloud the mind. Maybe that’s why the cliché of traveling to “find yourself” exists.
It’s important to remember that travel is not inherently life-changing—as Lena Papadapoulos, a guest from Season 4, said, being transformed by travel is a choice: “If you use it as an opportunity to question things, then I think it allows you to be more in tune and connected with who you are outside of this construct.”
Photo provided by Sherry Ott.
Sherry Ott echoed this sentiment in Season 5: “I think when you challenge yourself is really when you grow. And that's how I've always kind of looked at travel—how can I challenge myself to try this new thing that intimidates me?” The thing about that kind of growth is that it often takes you on what feels like a detour: “It's hard to be different. It's hard to go your own way.” Maybe if that’s the price you pay for living in alignment, being different is worth the trouble.
Inspired by the transformations of Soul of Travel guests? You’re invited to reflect on the way travel has redirected your path. How are you being empowered by travel? What transformation are you taking on?
