Travel Coaching

Travel coaching is the use of travelling experiences as educational material and personal development tool, enhancing critical thinking, innovative creativity and cultural empathy, providing powerful inspiration and insightful food for thought, exposing our minds to new possibilities and challenging our perspectives. It makes an invaluable tool for strategic foresight and innovation workshops, prompting us to rethink our present and reframe our future.

Travel Coaching offers a holistic framework which encompasses the ability to critically observe the world around us, trying to perceive as many of its layers as possible, understand their relevance to us, transform our way of thinking, and then actively apply these discoveries for the improvement of our own self, our workplace, our communities, and our environment.

The Travel Coaching process can be further learned and honed as a skill, helping us to enrich our journeys and broaden our minds. We gradually become more aware travellers, discovering in every step something new, something meaningful, something unique and extraordinary, as long as we bother to explore with minds wide open. Even in our own country, our own home town, or our daily route through our neighbourhood.

The principal aims of Travel Coaching workshops is to advance strategic thinking, foster innovation, develop critical soft skills, and help build foresight capabilities.

Travel Coaching workshops take place over “Journeys”, which are carefully designed routes in particular destinations, led by a facilitator. These can be as broad as a country or as targeted as a city neighbourhood. For optimal results, the ideal is to undertake a series of 6-8 Journeys in total, each with a different destination and theme.

Each Journey may be further associated with specific “Pursuits”, which are the underlying themes and goals of each workshop, as defined by the participants or the organisation. Note that multiple Journeys may share similar Pursuits, and vice versa.

There are four phases in each Journey.

• the exposure phase, where participants focus their observation on selected highlights, called coaching “Breadcrumbs”, which provide initial inspiration and food for thought.
• the discussion phase, where these topics are actively processed and openly debated, enabling participants to perceive deeper and hidden layers.
• the transformation phase, where the findings lead to meaningful insights, increased awareness, and development of new perspectives.
• the engagement phase, where participants create innovative and practical applications for these calls to action on a personal, business, and community level.

Meaningful travel it’s not just about seeing the sights. It’s about how seeing these particular sights will transform you as a person.

The principles of Travel Coaching requires that we ask the right questions. Travelling should not be just about the “where”, but also about the “how”, and even more importantly about the “why”. How we can connect more deeply with the destination and its people? Why we want to travel to that particular destination? What we hope to achieve while doing so?

Travel coaching is about unlocking our mind, enabling us to travel further of our horizons. It doesn’t matter how near or how far, what’s important is how deep. Connect with the destination, discover the layers of its stories, test the limits of our comfort zone, and challenge our perspectives. Therefore ideally turn every trip into a transformative journey.

We have already stopped collecting souvenirs, and started collecting memories. The Travel Coaching process takes us a step further, to no longer wonder about “what” we saw or did but “how” these experiences will help us grow as a person. And even more importantly, to apply these lessons from our journeys to the betterment of our communities and our world.

Travel Coaching in combination with Futures Literacy

WHAT IS UNESCO’S FUTURES LITERACY PROGRAMME

Futures Literacy is a skill, which helps us unlock the potential of our imagination, and build a better, more diverse, and more successful tomorrow. And like all skills, it can be learned and nurtured.

Futures Literacy helps us discover why we think the way we think, and (most importantly) how we can think differently. Simply put, is learning to think outside the box (or without a box whatsoever!). But beyond just that, to discover how we came inside the box in the first place, and who/what drew the box’s lines which confined us.

Through a carefully designed and structured series of workshops, the Futures Literacy process guides us towards awareness of our own assumptions and inhibitions, holding us bound to specific norms and frames of mind. In addition, Visual Literacy unlocks the how and why we create perceptions that lead to our assumptions. Ultimately we will learn how to deconstruct these inner walls, allowing us to break free of our mental chains, and emerge to a future of endless possibilities. And more importantly, discover ways to use our newly found knowledge for the betterment of our society, personal life, business and natural environment.
https://en.unesco.org/futuresliteracy/about

WHAT IS VISUAL LITERACY

We are surrounded by a complex and multi-layered world. Images, words, sounds, ideas, often contradictory, often subliminal, all broadcasting messages for us to decipher. Visual Literacy is the ability to critically read between the visual lines of our world, sort through the noise, acknowledge the different messages, understand the ideas behind them, and develop our imagination and critical reasoning.
https://www.ouc.ac.cy/index.php/en/university/unesco-chair/the-chair

Futures Literacy and Visual Literacy workshops are conducted in affiliation with Dr. Vicky Karaiskou, UNESCO Chair holder on Visual Literacy at the Open University of Cyprus.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicky-karaiskou-19b07a55/