Travel and Personal Growth

8 Ways Empathy Can Improve Your Travels…And Your Life

by Daniel Noll

On your next trip, don’t forget to pack your empathy.

Whether on stage or on the page, I often assert that, “travel can not only improve each of our lives, but it can also make the world a better place.” I suggest this instinctively, but then I have to step back and ask myself, “Well, how exactly does travel do that?

One of the pathways in my experience is through motivating a practice and expression of genuine empathy, or “the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective.” Listening to, understanding and connecting with the feelings, thoughts, and stories of others — especially those entirely different from your own — can not only enrich and improve your experience at hand, but it can also simultaneously improve your well-being.

An Adventure Manifesto: Adventure Is a State of Mind

by Daniel Noll

Think of this as an “Adventure Manifesto” in progress. A way to think about adventure so we might infuse it more happily into our everyday lives.

How Travel Is The Classroom

by Daniel Noll

I recently came across an article about experiential learning that featured a list entitled 12 Things You Might Not Have Learned in the Classroom. The principles were adapted from a book entitled Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto. The list was preceded by the phrase “Really educated people…”

“Wow, that’s a pretty presumptuous lead,” I thought. Then I continued reading and found myself nodding in agreement through much of the list.

Being Present in Travel: 6 Reasons Why, 4 Ways How

by Audrey Scott

Travel is like a good, challenging book: it demands presentness—the ability to live completely in the moment, absorbed in the words or vision of reality before you.
– Robert Kaplan

10 Ways Travel Helps You Let Go

by Audrey Scott

Travel. It places us in situations we couldn’t otherwise imagine. It often spurs us to do things we thought we couldn’t do. It provides perspective on our lives and our place in the world.

Amidst all this, travel also offers freedom. Among those freedoms, the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to let go.

Sounds about right, doesn't it? But what does “let go” really mean?

How to Motivate Yourself: 9 Steps from Doubt to Doing

by Audrey Scott

Have you ever told yourself that you weren’t able to do something? That you couldn't motivate yourself? Then one day you just got up and did it? This is that story. It shares how I motivated myself to run and changed the narrative in my head. However, these nine steps can be applied to anything you want to motivate yourself to do that you've been resisting getting started.

Finding the Good Way: How to Meditate While Trekking at 15,000 Feet

by Audrey Scott

This is a story of our re-discovery of a few of life’s truths amidst a seven-day trek in the Himalayas.

“One foot in-front-of-the oth-er.”

Inspiration to Dream, Motivation to Do, 44 Chunks of Wisdom: A WDS 2013 Recap

by Daniel Noll

This is a story of advice and inspiration and quotable quotes. And how, at the end of the day, the only way our quotes live is if they help spur others — and ourselves — to action.

Oh, and it's about a new commitment we're making to put some skin in the game.

Building a Story-Filled Life: What is your “What if?” (Our TEDx Talk)

by Daniel Noll

What is your “What if?” that will lead you to write your next chapter?

This was the message we recently brought to TEDxWarsaw, the 4th largest TEDx in the world. It was both an honor and a thrill to be on stage in front of 800 people.

The Danger Map of the World: Fear vs. Awareness

by Daniel Noll

This is about fear and awareness and how recognizing a distinction between the two can improve your travels…and your life.

At the extremes, we have two choices in life: a) sit back and be afraid of absolutely everything and never leave the couch, or b) proceed recklessly and lean blindly into situations that will likely harm us.

Or, there’s a third way.