When was the last time you did something new? Or let us be more specific - when was the last time you met someone new? If you’re a freelancer/ an entrepreneur, there are chances that you met someone unfamiliar quite recently thanks to the nature of your job. But our question is to all the salaried employees out there, those who meet the same colleagues almost every day. Do you remember? Chances are less, again, because of the nature of your job.
To you, we would like to suggest something.
Step out of the only world you know.
Your first question might be - why? When you’re happy with the comfort familiarity gives you, why bother to do something different, right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Spending most of your time with like-minded colleagues, family members, and friends, who share similar dreams, struggles, and routines has its pros.
But once in a while, a new perspective can help to break the monotony. To introduce a sense of novelty in your otherwise mundane life. And one way to get new perspectives is to meet new people. No, you don’t have to randomly say hello to someone on the street. If that’s you, awesome!
But here we’re recommending travel - one of the easiest ways to form new bonds!
Meet people you would never meet in daily life.
Can you imagine meeting a designer in your accounting firm? Or a manufacturing marketer in your advertising firm? Absolutely not. But think of all the new information you could get and share with people from such varied industries!
The best part about travel is this access to different kinds of people you would otherwise not meet in your daily life. During such trips, there will be discussions about the work each one does. Maybe you’ll hear exactly what you wanted to hear, maybe they’ll nudge you towards the path you always wanted to take, or maybe you’ll end up loving your job more when someone helps you see it through a different point of view. Your manager might actually like the renewed enthusiasm you go back to work with.
Also, what if you find your next mentor, employee, or employer on your next trip? Who knows what can happen if we look beyond our conventional approach to work? Because, sometimes, you meet the best people at the least unexpected places.
Learn new skills without investing in courses.
Of course we don’t mean a full-fledged understanding of a topic. What we mean is, you’ll get a chance to meet people belonging to different cultures, speaking different languages, and having varied skill-sets. Even by spending some time with them, you can learn a little about their background, one or two sentences in a different language, and maybe the basics of calligraphy they learnt from a course! And trust us, this will definitely help you at work in some capacity.
For example, next time you meet a client whose cultural background or mother tongue you’re aware of thanks to the kind stranger-turned-friend you met on a trip, you’ll be in a better position to keep them engaged in a conversation. There’s no better feeling than knowing someone really gets you (clients are humans after all).
Yes, such tiny details can be Googled too, but wouldn’t you choose a fun-based travel setting where it won’t feel like you’re making efforts to learn?
Hone your communication skills.
When you’re running your own business, it’s a given that you’ll interact with a lot of new people frequently. Doing that consistently will inevitably improve your communication skills. But in a typical office setting, unless you are in the leadership teams/sales/marketing teams, you’ll spend a lot of time in internal meetings with people you already know. So when you actually have that big conference meeting coming up with external stakeholders, you don’t know where to bring that confidence from!
Again, traveling with strangers will help you here. With them, you’ll feel encouraged to initiate conversations and engage meaningfully. You’ll understand what interests people and how to keep them hooked to your story.
Be you and not what your job role demands you to be.
People who know you have opinions about you, which is natural. But when given a chance, what if you find out you’re someone completely different? Maybe the person they know exists only in a particular setting or with a particular group of people.
You can experiment and find out for yourself while traveling with strangers - a group of people who know nothing about you. Maybe you can survive a day without having everything planned, maybe you aren’t so serious after all (only excel sheets bring that version of you), or maybe you are not an introvert with the right set of people.
With strangers, you have complete freedom to be whoever you want to be. So, go, learn a new thing about yourself, and feel more like yourself when at work. Of course, you don’t have to change anything about your professional image if you don’t want to, but there’s comfort in knowing yourself better.
Why we are stressing about this so much is because we have seen it happen during our trips. Women from different industries interact with each other, share work-life hacks, go back with new plans and collaboration ideas, and so much more.
Travelling with strangers is a vast meadow of opportunities you don’t know exist, and will never know if you spend time only with the people you know. Of course, don’t ditch those family plans completely, but at least once a while, keep time for personal travel and choose to have it with a group of people you never know, but might end up making a lifetime connection with.
And the bonus? Once you go back to the office, you’ll have a unique story about what you did for the weekend!
A little change harms no one. Don’t have the slightest worry about being uncomfortable with unknown people. On our trips, we ensure everyone feels at home, and have activities planned according to people’s comfort. You can be you. There’s no pressure at all. Travel is the time to know yourself. So you can choose to enjoy it the way you like to! To know about our upcoming trips, follow us on Instagram.
Contributed by:
Freelance Content Writer & Copywriter
After a short stint as a software engineer at Capgemini, she decided to go back to her first love - writing. She started her journey as a content writer in 2019 and considers it one of the best decisions of her life. Today, she cannot imagine doing something else for a living than coming up with the right words that will justify and bring to life her clients’ ideas. While her agency experience gave her exposure to writing for multiple sectors, her heart lies in topics related to women, mental health, career counselling, employee wellbeing, travel, personal development, and lifestyle. If she's not staring at the blank Google doc waiting for inspiration to strike, you'll either find her lost in a book or practising for her next dance routine!