Growing Up, Family Travels and Going to College
I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as an only child with a single mom. Vacations to us looked like my entire family (aunts, uncles and cousins included!) piling into the family van and driving from Milwaukee down to the southern tip of Texas to visit my grandmother, then going over the border to visit her family in Mexico. The only other trip I remember taking was driving from Wisconsin up across the Canadian border to visit my grandfather’s family in Montreal. But because I was so young, I don’t remember most of that. I wasn’t in a family that talked about travel so it just wasn’t something I thought about.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class family, so money was often tight. Sometimes we would use food pantries in the hopes of finding something to eat for dinner. Because my mom worked a lot, I would stay with my grandparents often and if I didn’t eat there, I wasn’t going to have food until the next day. I grew up watching my mom struggle for a really long time, so things like money and vacation and holidays just never really were on my radar.
Throughout school, I was never someone who knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had so many friends in high school who knew what path they were going to take, what college or university they were going to go to, and whether they wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, dentist, veterinarian, or teacher. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to get away from the cold of Wisconsin, so I decided to move across the country to attend Arizona State University. Because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to major in yet, I took a lot of general courses like psychology. I struggled for a long time before ultimately deciding to study business and journalism, which I did enjoy.
Two years into my studies in Arizona, my mom was going through a divorce, so I decided that I was going to change schools and move back to the Midwest. I decided to move to Chicago as it was a bigger city and had more to offer me than Milwaukee could offer me at the time. I explored different university options in Chicago and came across a hospitality and tourism program within a smaller school. Even though I hadn’t had much travel experience myself, I thought, who doesn’t love travel? So I applied, and I got in.
My mom and myself.
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An Alternative Path in the Tourism Industry
On the first day of my international tourism course, my professor had us all go around the room and introduce ourselves, talk about where we’re from and how many countries we’ve visited. I was so inspired as I listened to my fellow classmates’ stories, many of whom were from Europe and Southeast Asia. I was amazed to hear how easy it was to travel from country to country. So there I was, sitting with a classroom full of people who have traveled to 10+ countries and I was just in awe. I said to myself, I want to be able to do that.
However, reality hit that I was a broke college student living in Chicago and I had no idea how to make this happen. In addition to paying rent, I was helping my mom financially and didn’t have someone to turn to to help me fund my travels. I was okay with this though, as I was so used to being able to figure things out on my own. That’s always kind of been my motto, “I’ll always figure things out”.
On that first day of class, I decided I was going to change my mindset around money and my time, so I set a goal that when I graduated, I wanted to travel. In high school, I had always heard about people backpacking Europe, and my best friend at the time and I were always talking about taking a gap year between high school and university. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out in our friendship, so those plans fell through. Being an only child, however, I was totally okay with going by myself despite never having traveled anywhere by myself, especially abroad.
Saving For Travel as a Broke College Graduate
After university, I started working in the restaurant industry, which was very lucrative for me, and I was also working flexible jobs like flipping furniture I found in our recycling room or selling my art pieces. I also did a lot of babysitting and nannying in between my restaurant hours for families that had pretty deep pockets.
I was doing a lot of staffing agency jobs, too, so I got to choose what events I wanted to work which allowed me to gain exposure and meet people within different companies and hotels. I got to work conventions and work with a wide range of companies. Ultimately, what I did was I took a look at my schedule and I filled it as much as I could with really lucrative jobs and fun jobs. I changed how I made and managed my money as well, which allowed me to save $20,000 – $25,000.
As a 22-year-old recent graduate, I started getting questions like:
- What are you going to do now?
- Who are you going to work for?
- What kind of job you’re going to have?
Truthfully, I had none of those answers.
While I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my degree, I also knew what I didn’t want. I knew that I did not want someone dictating when I could take a vacation and when I couldn’t, because I had dealt with that in the restaurant industry.
The restrictive nature of the corporate world wasn’t for me. I yearned for flexibility and opportunities to learn through exploration after having been institutionalized all my life.
However, as someone who has struggled with anxiety and depression, the pressure of finding clarity and adult responsibilities left me struggling mentally. Even though travel is not a cure for anything, I had an intuition that I wanted and needed to get away.
My First Time Overseas Turned into a Decade of Globetrotting
I remembered the idea of backpacking Europe, so I bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. I chose Ireland as my first stop in Europe for two reasons.
One was I had connections through a guy my mom was dating at the time. He had friends in Ireland that he used to work with, a very nice family and they said I could stay with them. Secondly, I wanted to work my way toward mainland Europe. I had an idea mapped out of what countries I wanted to go to, but no strict plan. I bought a Euro rail pass which gave me the flexibility to check out about 21 different countries.
I started traveling, and I thought I was going to go for a month and a half, but I fell in love with what travel was doing for me. I came back home for the holidays and I told my mom I was off again, this time I would be headed down to Central and South America for two months. I wanted to go somewhere warm where I could speak Spanish, a place that I had seen in magazines and on TV, somewhere with beautiful rainforests, colorful birds and animals and beaches. Costa Rica fit the bill and became my first stop in Central America.
This was the beginning of the next ten years I spent hopping around the globe. Over the course of that decade, I knew that I wanted to make the most of my experiences.
People often ask me, how are you able to fund it? I learned to travel on a strict budget, and I never worked while I was traveling because I wanted to be fully present during my time away.
I would come back home in between my trips, which were usually no more than two months at a time. I would go back to Chicago and work in restaurants and save my money again and work all these odd-end jobs.
I had also worked in fragrance sales since I was 16 and my boss was understanding of my lifestyle, so they would give me hours whenever I was back in town.
The Rise of Social Media and “Figuring it Out” at 30
I traveled during a really prime time in the travel industry.
When I first started traveling, I used my flip phone sparingly so as not to get hit with Internet usage charges. I relied on paper maps to orient myself and would go door-to-door knocking on hostels and accommodations, asking if there was any availability.
I had to be resourceful and self-reliant. Eventually, Facebook and Instagram came along and really started to shape how people viewed and embraced travel.
When I was on the road, I would talk to travelers all around the world and ask them why they traveled and what they were looking for, but I still personally struggled to figure out my career path. I knew what was changing, I knew what was possible, but I still didn’t want to be a travel agent or advisor.
I didn’t want to work for a company as a freelancer just to make money to travel. I didn’t want to write blogs and write about travel. I had a blog that was relatively successful but I never monetized it and don’t enjoy writing. I simply used it to let my mom know that I was alive in countries where I didn’t have a phone or Internet access.
Eventually, my blog became a place where I would share tips on how I was traveling based on the questions I was getting.
Little did I know, this was the beginning of my travel coaching journey before I even knew what travel coaching was.
When I’d come home or people would reach out to me and ask,
- “How are you able to do this?”
- “How do you afford it?”
- “Aren’t you scared?”
- “Is it safe enough?”
- “ I wish I could do that…”
- “If I was your age, I would do that too…”
- “If I didn’t work in the corporate world, I would do that too… “
- “If I didn’t have a job, if I didn’t have a family, I’d do that too…”
I kept thinking that it doesn’t have to be that way.
It probably doesn’t have to be as expensive as I had heard these trips were that people were taking.
I also knew that corporate companies should offer more vacations and people should take them, but I wasn’t sure how to turn that idea into a business.
I decided to give myself a timeline to figure it all out. I told myself that when I turned 30, I would sit down and figure out my life.
When that time came around, I was in Bilbao, Spain, and I brought my laptop with me for the first time. I opened it up and googled, “How to start an online business”.
This was also around the time when Amazon and eBay were taking off, and Facebook and Instagram were continuing to grow rapidly. I had heard of people doing things like drop shipping, so I had some ideas of what I wanted to do. I knew I loved the accessories that I brought home as trinkets for people.
I wanted to make those available.
Despite tossing this idea around, I still had no real vision of what I wanted to do with my travel experience and knowledge.
My Travel Coaching Epiphany
Eventually, I started seeing the concept of “coaching” pop up on my Facebook feed. Coaches of all types – health, fitness, business, were coming up and it was clear to me that this space was really growing. I thought, well maybe I could be a travel coach, but I didn’t see that word anywhere and I’d never heard of anyone doing it.
My next thought was: what does a “travel coach” mean? So I started figuring out what I wanted to help people with, what makes me different and what I am passionate about.
To back my experience and knowledge up, I started doing research on how healing travel can be and collected documents, studies, research and data on the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and wellness benefits of travel.
I started learning about the corporate world and vacation policies because I kept seeing people in Facebook travel groups talk about how they wanted to quit their corporate job to travel, or quit the nine-to-five to travel, or wish they could do it, or they envy those who are able to do it. And I said to myself, why there’s such a disconnect in the corporate world? Why are they not realizing that travel is so valuable to people that even corporate leaders with six-figure incomes are quitting to travel the world? I started studying and learning more about the problems in the corporate world like vacation policies, corporate burnout and why people were not using vacation days. This led me into the business travel industry.
I remembered sitting on a plane one time next to a businessman.
There I was, a dirty backpacker going from Thailand to India for no purpose other than just being drawn to the culture, sparking up a conversation with this man in a business suit, who had everything that people are told they should strive for.
Climb the corporate ladder.
Get a good title.
Have a great salary.
Have a family.
Get a white picket fence.
And get paid to travel for business.
Sounds amazing, right?
Well, he was miserable.
He asked me about my journey around the world and what I was doing, and I really had no answers other than saying, “I’m just backpacking, moving from place to place.”
I told him about places I’d seen in Thailand and he said, “I’ve been there many times, and I didn’t get to see any of that stuff. I didn’t do that. I wish I could have.”
He was envious of my life and my journey, and I remember thinking that it shouldn’t be that way. If we travel for business, we travel for a purpose.
That conversation sparked my desire to specialize in wellness travel coaching for business travel and corporate wellness.
The Travel Coach Network Today
When I started my travel coaching business, I had many people reaching out online asking, “what is a travel coach? I might be interested. I didn’t know it was a thing, or I actually might be doing it and didn’t know.”
I turned to Google after registering my business and searched “travel coaching”. My screen filled with pictures of coach buses. But instead of being someone who is like, well, it’s not a thing, I’m not going to do it, my mind went the opposite direction.
I decided to run with it because I believed in it so deeply.
I started the Travel Coach Network because I wanted to create a place and program for other people who I knew were in similar positions to me, who loved travel, and who had all this experience.
I mean, they don’t have to have traveled to 84 countries as I did, but they had to have some sort of love for travel. I wanted to empower them and teach them that they could do more with their love of travel beyond blogging and bookings.
This message is as true today as it was then.
You don’t have to fit within what the industry has told you is possible: a travel agent, flight attendant, hotelier, business traveller, influencer, freelancer, or even travel writer.
There are other options out there. Each day, the industry continues to add more depth and meaning to why people travel. Watching the travel coaching industry grow has been incredible.
I’ve been growing both the Travel Coach Network and my Wellness Travel Coach business at the same time every single day for the past five years now and there hasn’t been a single day I’ve questioned my journey.
If you find something that you’re passionate enough about and you believe deeply in, you can turn it into anything you want.
Free Economy Class TCN Membership: Learn About Travel Coaching
Don’t have enough time to read this whole article?
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The Economy Class Membership for the Travel Coach Network includes:
– Travel Coaching 101 Masterclass
– Travel Coach Workbook
– Downloadable Beginner’s Guide to Travel Coaching
