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Excerpt from Travel That Can Change Your Life

There are many good reasons why you might be planning a trip. You may feel the need for a break in your life, a respite from the daily stresses you encounter at work or home. Perhaps you need to get away for awhile just to break up the predictable schedules that rule your life. Or you may want to spend time with your family, to escape winter weather, to pursue a romance, to learn something new, to create excitement through adventure, to explore unknown territory, to seek spiritual enlightenment, to solve a personal problem, to act out a fantasy, to attend a wedding or funeral, to conduct business or attend a conference.

It would appear in each of these cases that the traveler's motive is somewhat unique. Indeed, if you were to look around the cabin of any airplane you would find a group of people who may all be heading to the same destination for radically different reasons. Look deeper, however, and what you will find is that underlying most people's stated reason for the trip is another, often unconscious, desire to change something about themselves and their lives. On some level, each of us uses travel to promote personal transformation. This is true whether you are after a major shift in lifestyle or a minor adjustment in the ways you do business. Regardless of your stated agenda, change of some sort will inevitably result. The only question is whether these changes will be intentional, deliberate, and constructive-- or accidental, random, perhaps even dangerous.

Why I Wrote This Book

I change people for a living. I am a therapist, a teacher and supervisor of other practitioners, an author who writes about the transformations that participants undergo that are part of the therapeutic process. This includes not just students and clients, but teachers and therapists as well.

Throughout much of my professional life, I have often felt like a travel agent. After all, my job has been to help people take holidays away from their daily, often impoverished, lives. I encourage people to visit new places and explore new territory, metaphorically speaking. I help them to plan these trips, make appropriate arrangements, and then offer the support that is often needed for those venturing into the unknown.

Like most teachers and therapists, I am both fulfilled and frustrated by my work. I love seeing people change, but the process often happens so slowly. Or worse yet-- I see people change in my office or classrooms but notice that the effects are often quite transient.

It is sheer arrogance to believe that people in my profession have cornered the market on promoting lasting personal changes. Bartenders, hairdressers, taxi drivers, even friends, have been known to help people grow as a result of their interactions. I've wondered if real travel agents don't do the best job of all.

One thing that traveling can bring out in us are parts of ourselves that can't be accessed any other way. Always looking for more efficient and effective ways to promote personal changes, it occurred to me that most of the constructive growth I've undergone in my own life has not come from books, or the classroom, or even therapy, but from traveling, especially the kind of trip that involves not just the search for new experiences in the world, but also of looking within.

What This Book Will Do For You

Everyone knows how to travel. What's the big deal? You see a travel agent, make an airline reservation, or hop in the car, and then you're off. You've done your homework. Read a few guidebooks. Talked to friends who have been in the vicinity. Studied a map. Plotted out what you will do and when you will do it.

Of course, you'll have a lovely time. You've worked hard to pay for this trip, or you'll pay off the your credit cards after you return. What you're after, mostly, is time away from daily pressures, a chance to relax and see some sights.

If that is indeed what you're after, then this book is definitely not for you. There are already whole bookstores devoted solely to providing the prospective traveler with guides about where to go, what to see and take photos of, where to eat and sleep, which places are best avoided, what to buy and where to get the best deals. These books are indispensable. However, their intent is to help save you time and inconvenience. The purpose of this book, however, is not so much to inform as to transform you. The goal is to help you explore your motives for traveling and to create the type of trip that will most likely accomplish your preferred objectives.

More specifically, you will be encouraged to examine what it is you are looking for and where you might find it, whether in an isolated cabin in the woods, a luxurious resort on a pristine beach, a swirling, congested Third World city, or a dog sledding expedition in the Arctic. Here aer some of the questions we will consider:

Should you go alone or with members of your family?

What steps should you take to plan a trip that is most likely to encourage permanent changes in your thinking and behavior?

How can you structure things in a way to produce unexpected growth and learning?

What aspects of your travel experience would be most crucial to focus on?

How can you handle the inevitable things that will go wrong?

What meaning can you construct from what you experienced?

How do you follow through on your resolutions and maintain your momentum once you return home?

Travel offers you more opportunities to change your life than almost any other human endeavor. People who structure their journeys in particular ways consistently report dramatic gains in their self-esteem, confidence, poise, and self-sufficiency. They enjoy greater intimacy as a result of bonds that were forged under magical and sometimes adverse circumstances. They become more fearless risk-takers, better problem solvers, and far more adaptable to ever-changing circumstances. They become more knowledgeable about the world, its fascinating customs, and diverse people. Finally, travel teaches you most about yourself-- about what you miss when you are gone and what you don't, about what you are capable of doing in strange circumstances, about what you really want that you don't yet have.

Regardless of what exactly you are looking for, and where you hope to find it, may you return from your journey never the same again.