Travel as learning and personal growth experience.
Travel as a Learning Experience
Travel experiences are a powerful tool for personal development, as long as we take care to explore with minds wide open. Travel Coaching workshops are ideal for business organisations, executive training, educational institutions, cultural associations, wellness groups, and any individual seeking to enrich and learn from their travel experience.
The benefits of the travel coaching methodology apply to a variety of key contemporary target goals, called pursuits, such as change management, sustainable development, cultural empathy, human empowerment, innovative creativity, and inspiring leadership.
A Travel Coaching workshop consists of an exposure phase, where the participants focus on selected highlights (“coaching breadcrumbs”) along a carefully designed route, a discussion phase, where the topics are actively processed and openly debated, and a transformation phase, where the findings lead to further insights, perspective awareness, and personal development.
Workshops are available as immersive facilitated workshops or inspirational seminars (in-class or online), based on specific itineraries around Athens, Greece, and the World, each route focusing on the uniqueness of each destination, and tied to particular themes and target goals. Workshops can be further developed as a series of itineraries, on different destinations and concepts each time, providing an even wider array of coaching breadcrumbs to discover, and insightful questions to challenge our perspectives.
Travel Coaching Workshops
Indie Horizons provides a variety of tailored coaching activities for groups and organisations, as either facilitated or self-guided itineraries, aiming to familiarise a wider audience with the methodology and benefits of Travel Coaching. These experiences can be destination specific or thematic, with a variable duration from a few hours to a full week or more, usually in 4 hour increments, whether in combination with a trip or not. Immersive workshops are ideal for smaller groups (5-10 people), while inspirational seminars can accommodate a larger audience (10-25 people).
Our unique destination itineraries are embedded with inspiring coaching breadcrumbs, based on our meticulous firsthand research and years-long coaching experience, highlighting particular points of interest which provide insightful food for thought, challenge our perspectives, develop cultural empathy, and stimulate personal growth.
Workshops take place in the neighbourhoods of Athens, the countryside of Greece, and selected destinations in every corner of the world, highlighting the cultural uniqueness and natural diversity of different places and people. Although Indie Horizons already offers a wide selection of destinations and itineraries, we can always research new ones according to the needs and specifications of the participants.
Travel Coaching Activities
Facilitated workshops
suggested duration: 4 hours
ideal destinations: Athenian Wanderings (neighbourhoods of Athens)
ideal group size: 6-12 persons (small groups)
ideal for: business organisations, educational institutions, individual travellers
The immersive in-person facilitated workshops is the ideal method of travel coaching, under the helpful guidance of an experienced coach, leading participants along the process and dynamically responding to their questions and interests. A facilitated workshop is ideal for small groups, combining active exploration and open discussion, each route usually tied to particular concepts, focusing on the uniqueness of each destination. Although a facilitated workshop can take place in trips of any duration and any destination, they are especially suited for half day routes at the neighbourhoods of Athens. As an alternative or follow-up activity, an in-class workshop will allow the participants to go even deeper into the questions at hand, using additional innovative coaching tools, maximising the targeted results.
Inspirational seminars
suggested duration: 2 hours
ideal destinations: World Expeditions (Around the World in 80 Trips)
ideal group size: 16-25 persons (large groups)
ideal for: business organisations, educational institutions
In a TED-like experience, the selected destination comes to life through the use of evocative audiovisual material and firsthand accounts, highlighting the main points of interest and coaching breadcrumbs of each itinerary. Although in-person travelling is always the best way to experience a destination, an in-class lecture or online seminar can also provide powerful inspiration and stimulate thinking outside the box. This experience is ideal for larger groups, educators looking to unlock the imagination of their students to a wider world, and organisations aiming to enhance critical thinking, harbour innovative creativity, and cultivate the ESG mindset of their members and stakeholders.
Self-guided itineraries
suggested duration: 1-4 weeks
ideal destinations: World Expeditions (Around the World in 80 Trips)
ideal group size: 1-4 persons (solo)
ideal for: individual travellers
All workshop destinations are also offered as self-guided itineraries, with participants receiving a guide with coaching breadcrumbs to provide food for thought along their journey, and detailed information to explore and enjoy the destination on their own. It is ideal for people looking for a more private and introspective experience, under the freedom and flexibility of independent travelling. However, we highly recommend travellers to complement their self-guided itinerary with a personal coaching session once they return from their trip, to discuss in depth their revelations and insights.
Personal coaching sessions
suggested duration: 1-2 hours
ideal destinations: World Expeditions (Around the World in 80 Trips)
ideal group size: 1-4 persons (solo)
ideal for: individual travellers
For individuals preferring a more freestyle travelling approach, a personal travel coaching session can be arranged, before and/or after their trip. We will explore together your travel goals, discuss the particularities and uniqueness of the destination, and discover ways to make the trip a tailored transformative journey. After the trip, we can discuss the journey and its immersive experiences in depth, and discover new or additional elements which made a profound impact with you. But even more importantly, we will focus on how you can use these insights for your personal, business, and community growth.
Travel Coaching Pursuits
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Change Management
Change is inherent to human progress. However, change is assumed to happen (and easier to digest if happening) in small, “affordable” doses. Ideally in careful steps which include understanding, planning, implementing, and communicating change.
Imagine your favourite radio station, playing your familiar favourite tunes. Every now and then adding a new track, leaving behind some others, and over time, slowly, creating a new playlist. Change is gradual, familiar, achievable.
But what happens if the radio station suddenly closes? Or is taken over and changes its playlist completely? That’s non-anticipatory radical change, turmoil, it is unknown and unfamiliar. How do we deal with that kind of change? How prepared are we for it? And how can we develop our mental skills to be more flexible, react quicker, and learn to adapt?
Travelling can help us enhance our change management skills, especially in non-anticipatory situations. By exposing ourselves to challenging new perspectives, immersing in diverse cultural environments, learning to overcome barriers and break free of our comfort zone, we become aware of the existence of a far wider variety of possibilities and outcomes, that is usually provided by our familiar culture and daily rhythm of life.
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Sustainable Development
The future belongs to all of us. In an increasingly interconnected world, the actions of each of us affects every one of us. Travel Coaching can help organisations achieve targets of sustainability, diversity, inclusivity, and good practice, in alignment with UN 17 goals, as the adoption and implementation of ESG policies and qualitative criteria becomes equally important to hitting quantitative financial targets.
https://sdgs.un.org/goals
For the Environmental aspect, travel reveals to us how different countries and cultures understand and develop diverse conservation methods, how precious are basic natural resources we often take for granted in the Western world, and how much damage pollution and climate change can induce to the local communities.
For the Social aspect, travel brings us into contact with foreign places and people, exposing us to the vast diversity of the world, and helping us develop cultural empathy. Travel shows us how human rights issues such as gender, ethnicity, and labour are handled by different cultures, how much freedom we have achieved, and how much further we can progress our own policies.
For the Governance aspect, travel reveals the vast variety of practices and ethics around the world, so we can learn and adapt from the best, recognise and avoid the pitfalls of the worst, while realising the far reaching impact of our decisions.
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Human Empowerment
Travel Coaching helps build confidence, appreciate ourselves and each moment, achieve life balance, learn new ways to overcome obstacles, and motivate to positively affect the world around us.
Travelling brings us into contact with people from all walks of life, with different systems of values, and different ways of coping with diverse difficulties. Coaching helps us understand their point of view, open our minds to different perspectives, and shift the question from “why” to “why not”, prompting us to find our own voice and develop our inner strength.
Travelling helps us inspire and motivate both ourselves and others, becoming the leaders of our own destiny, and learn to contribute to our communities as valuable teamwork members.
It makes little difference to distinguish for example between female empowerment, gender issues, racial injustice, or socioeconomic discrepancies. We are all human, so we should focus on human empowerment instead. The techniques, the tools, the effort, is common to us all, and travelling with minds wide open is one of the best investments we can gift to ourselves.
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Visionary Leadership
Who is going to lead us into the future is as critical a question as what future are we heading to. Travel Coaching helps nurture the necessary skills and qualities to transform managers to leaders, and leaders to visionaries.
There is difference between travelling for relaxation, for exploration, and for learning. When we immerse into an unfamiliar destination beyond our horizons, and dare to travel beyond our comfort zone, we discover valuable lessons about ourselves. Travel Coaching opens up our minds, challenges our perspectives, and facilitates personal growth.
Unfamiliar travel destinations and situations require problem-solving, and thinking outside the box. New sights and experiences cultivate our creativity and innovative approach. We become more flexible, more adaptable, but also more organised and more focused. We develop our social skills, our non-verbal communication, and our cross-cultural understanding. We learn to accept other people and respect their point of view, which may be radically different to ours.
But the most important these days, is that by travelling we find work-life balance, and ways of motivation well beyond our base materialistic instincts. We learn to dream. We learn to smile at the sun, touch the earth, and appreciate the beauty of this vast and wondrous world around us.
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Innovative Creativity
Unfamiliar travel destinations and situations require problem-solving, and thinking outside the box. New sights and experiences cultivate our creativity and innovative approach. We become more flexible, more adaptable, but also more organised and more focused.
By becoming acquainted with new systems, societal values, and intriguing ideas, we start moving away from blindly “follow the rules”, to “question the rules”. Slowly we proceed to “bend the rules” which no longer serve us, even daring to “break the rules” which keeps us behind, and finally envision and create new roads for our personal, business, and community growth.
Innovative creativity is associated with production of new ideas and radical solutions. Although adaptive thinking is usually the norm in the business environment, innovators act as a catalyst, spearheading change and progress, driving organisations towards different futures.
https://www.apm.org.uk/blog/adaptive-or-innovative-what-kind-of-thinker-are-you/
https://barbara-wilson.com/adaptive-versus-innovative-creativity/
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Cultural Empathy
Travelling helps us develop our social skills, our non-verbal communication, and our cross-cultural understanding. We learn to accept other people and respect their point of view, which may be radically different to ours.
In practice the main lesson from travel coaching is quite simple: we are not so different after all. All people should be free to pursuit human happiness. All people should be respected, all people have the right to be heard. This helps us avoid the “danger of a single story”, and train us to search and listen to both sides of any argument.
https://www.wikihow.health/Teach-Cultural-Empathy
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
DEIB is a key concept in modern society and workplace, namely Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Of course cultural diversity comes in many forms, covering issues of gender, race, age, religion, and socioeconomic status. Inclusivity is often portrayed as the key to business and societal growth, as people from different cultures bring together their own diverse ways of thinking, adding to the overall strength of the organisation.
https://www.wilsonhcg.com/blog/what-does-deib-mean-wilsonhcg
https://www.qooper.io/blog/what-is-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Strategic Foresight
While we cannot actually predict the future, we can certainly develop the necessary skills to cope and anticipate whatever challenges the future may hold. Travel experiences help us get in touch with the wider world, exploring different cultural perspectives and new environmental challenges, while learning valuable lessons from the stories of civilisations past. Travelling helps us envision and refine our Future mission statements, which is the answer to the simple yet incredibly deep and complex question “how I want to change the world”.
Strategic foresight is a key skill in both business and personal level, especially in the ever-changing volatile world we live in today. It is essential to learn to anticipate change, read patterns of possible futures in the present, and turn those signals into action. We need to break free of the decision-making bias of our assumptions, work on different futurist scenarios, and focus on delivering solutions and perceiving the greater picture. The point of course is not to create a new rigid framework, but allow business evolution by integrating transformational change into the mindset of the organisation. Great tools, such as Megatrends analysis, Dator’s Four Futures, and the Thing from the Future, are often used in coaching workshops to facilitate creative thinking as well as challenge the perspectives of the participants.
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/megatrends.html
https://foresightguide.com/dator-four-futures/
https://thing-from-the-future.glitch.me/
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Agile Mindset
Travel Coaching helps us develop agile and lean management practices, adding flexibility to our thinking, teaching us to embrace uncertainty, and guiding us towards discovering what is more valuable to us. In addition, travelling sparkles our imagination to create better user stories, expands our mind view, and nurtures empathy and cross-cultural communication skills.
Agile focuses on value delivery, stakeholder collaboration, people empowerment, teamwork, and openness. Its principles may have originated from the IT industry, with Scrum the best known framework, but in essence Agile is a mindset which can be applied to any business, or even at personal level. Business agility helps us managing better through times of uncertainty and turbulence, and strengthen the ties within our organisation. Agile also draws heavily from lean management practices, which focus on excellence and continuous improvement.
https://www.agilebusiness.org/business-agility.html
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/the-agile-manifesto/
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/12-principles-behind-the-agile-manifesto/
https://www.scrum.org/learning-series/what-is-scrum
https://businessmap.io/lean-management/what-is-lean-management
https://www.mindtools.com/asnydwg/managing-in-a-vuca-world
Travel Coaching in pursuit of Holistic Wellbeing
Holistic travel is all about embarking on a transformative journey, engaging in profound life-changing experiences, pursuing balance, discovering yourself and your goals in life along the process. The holistic wellbeing way of life strives to create a balance between body, mind, and spirit, promoting longevity, happiness, a sense of fulfilment, a sense of purpose, and inner peace. Far beyond the tourist bubble, holistic travel focuses on immersive experiences and destinations which have the potential for personal growth.
https://www.scitechnol.com/peer-review/holistic-tourism-motivations-selfimage-and-satisfaction-lGwo.php?article_id=5141
The concept of holistic travel is well connected to slow travel, part of the growing slow movement, which aims at immersing deeper into a destination and the local culture, appreciate the journey and the little things, and de-clutter from the noise of the hectic modern life.
https://www.sloww.co/what-is-slow-travel/
https://www.intrepidtravel.com/adventures/slow-travel-movement/
In a sense, if done right, holistic and slow travel can be a form of practiced mindfulness and moving meditation. We learn to focus on the moment, be fully present and aware of our surroundings, unleash our curiosity and discover valuable insights in the process. We reduce stress, enhance our performance, and connect empathically with the world.
https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/