And that’s the thing about travel. It presents you with choices you wouldn’t face in your everyday life. The choice could be voluntarily dropping 3 stories off the side of a cliff, or it could be singing karaoke in front of 35 strangers. Either way, it’s in these moments that you can stay where you are or take that jump. It’s in these moments that you bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be. That’s travel’s secret sauce. Many people will take the jump and many people won’t. The difference will come down to what story that person tells themselves while they’re standing on the edge.
Stories are the conversations, the ideas, and the beliefs we tell ourselves. They inform our decisions and create our identities. By changing the stories we tell ourselves we change our actions which in turn change our identities.
At the start of my Costa Rica trip, the story I told myself was that I wasn’t bold enough to do something like zip-lining or canyoneering. When it came time to sign the clipboard, I told myself a different story. It was scary being up in the air with nothing but some industrious rope between me and the rushing canopy below. It was scary being dropped from 3 stories into a shallow pool of water. It was scary singing karaoke for the first time ever – let alone in front of a large group. But I did those things anyway because I wanted to be bold. I wanted to be adventurous. By telling myself I already was, I became so.
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