Crafting Your Environment

When we have big, lofty goals such as a career break it can be a roller coaster of emotions as you move towards achieving that goal. It’s really easy to get de-railed, frustrated, and to give up. How do you combat this in order to insure you hop on that plane, train, or boat and take off? By crafting your environment!

Start by surrounding yourself with like-minded positive influences to achieve your goal and remove yourself from negative influences. You won’t be able to accomplish your goal if you have people or things dragging you down. You need people and resources that will lift you up and inject you with inspiration.

Join An In-Person Community

Online communities are great, but in person relationships are still the most powerful you can have. In just about every city around the world you can find fellow travel lovers. Get out and engage with those people on a similar journey. You will share your goals, dreams, and concerns with them. Verbalizing these things are therapeutic and will keep the dream alive; hearing it come out of your mouth is more powerful then simply writing it or thinking about it. Words bring action.

• Meet, Plan, Go! Meetups: Check to see if there is a local meetup in your city. And if there isn’t? Start your own!
• Meetup.com: Search for “Travel” in your town/city and see if there are any groups meeting in your area. If you didn’t find one in your city, then you can start your own – it’s simple to hold your own meet-up group.
• Travel Massive: A global initiative to connect people in the travel industry locally, bringing together travel bloggers, brands, startups and socially engaged travelers
• Tripping: A global community of travelers, expats, and locals. This is your place to connect with travelers and locals for travel tips, shared cups of coffee and homestays in over 135 countries. Tripping is safe, free and good for the world.
• Couchsurfing: A worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.

Eliminating Negative Human Influences

Crafting your environment is not only about surrounding yourself with people of similar mindsets and goals, it also means that you may have to change your relationship with people who don’t support your goals. There will be people in your life that don’t understand why you are doing this – then what do you do?

Simple – ditch the haters. OK – maybe it’s not that simple. What if they are friends or family? You don’t have to disown them – but consider not sharing this part of your life/plans with them. As long as you have other supportive people to share with, then you simply can change how and what you engage with the non-supportive people about.

Remember – staying motivated and achieving goals is about surrounding yourself with supportive people. One of the most important things you can do in order to stay motivated and moving towards your goal is to craft your environment to be supportive.

Books

Here are some of our favorite career break and travel-related books.
• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
• The Lost Girls by Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, Amanda Pressner
• Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
• Escape 101 by Dan Clements and Tara Gignac
• Escape from Cubicle Nation by Pamela Slim
• Reboot Your Life by Catherine Allen, Nancy Bearg, Rita Foley, Jaye Smith

Songs

A road trip isn’t the same without a great playlist to keep you going. So why not create a playlist before your break to keep your travel plans moving forward!

Some songs that get our travel juices going include Weather with You (Crowded House) – Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills & Nash) – Africa (Toto) – Sand in My Shoes (Dido) – and Island in the Sun (Weezer).

World Hum compiled a list of their Top 40 Travel Songs of All Time. And Matador Network lists 30 Songs That Capture the Spirit of Travel.

So fire up your iTunes, start cranking some music, and motivation will be flowing in no time.

Basic Training

We cover more on how you can stay motivated in Career Break Basic Training, which includes interviews, more resources and helpful homework assignments.