HappyLifestyleJournal
Today, many successful people travel a lot and believe that travel plays an important role in becoming better in what they do and therefore more successful. While some see traveling as an opportunity to relax and do nothing, successful people see it as a chance to experience new cultures, learn new things and spread the benefits of travel not only to their personal, but their business life as well. Generally, people who learn from their travel experiences and the situations they have been in are able to grow and improve more easily than those who stay put all the time.
So what does travel do for people business-wise?
1. A traveler learns to adapt to different situations.
Though fairly predictable, traveling is not always right on schedule nor is it without unplanned situations. Plans change occasionally, and being able to adapt to new conditions is a very important thing, in life as well as in business. How can you be a successful businessman if you don’t know how to handle flight delays or if you lose your mind if your luggage gets lost? These situations can be very uncomfortable when you are hoping that everything will go smoothly during your travel, but they are useful because they teach the traveler in trouble how to deal with these kinds of things further on. These tedious situations actually prepare you to handle unexpected changes and adapt to new surroundings.
2. A traveler develops better communicative skills.
When communicating, it is not just important what you say, but how you say it, too. Which means controlling your body language and making a good impression is extremely important. Many people develop this ability when travelling. For instance, when you face a language barrier in a foreign country you use your body to express yourself and ask for things. In situations where there are language barriers and on top of that cultural differences too, you need to be creative in order to communicate. Such situations help a person develop better communication skills which makes them more successful when it comes to cooperation with coworkers or employees.
3. A traveler becomes culturally aware.
As in almost every business, companies communicate with other foreign companies, so it is expected that entrepreneurs should be culturally aware and able to interact with different cultures. Besides being able to see that we are not all the same, that there are different opinions, and they all might be right (being different doesn’t mean you’re wrong), people actually get the real feel of different cultures while traveling, so they begin to understand them on a deeper level.
4. A person who travels learns to work in a team.
When traveling, you often have to rely on other people and believe that they will do things right. For example, you are trusting that the travel agency will organize everything and you don’t have to worry about it. Moreover, a successful businessman and the founder of Roho Ya Chui (African safari provider) says (and we agree) that “New experiences in foreign environments allow people to grow in ways they never thought possible”. This is particularly the case when travelling in a group, where you surely have to make some compromises and learn how to function as a part of a group and not only as an individual. This can help people become less selfish and that often brings positive results in the personal as well as business sphere of life.
5. Those who frequently travel learn to manage their time well.
When travelling, you need to know how to manage your time or nothing goes well. You need to get to the airport on time, and mind the schedule. If you want everything to go perfectly smooth, you can never get too relaxed. The same goes for business, which means that those who travel frequently and have developed good time management skills are more successful in their business.
6. Travelers learn to work with what they have.
When travelling, you don’t have all the resources you would have if you were at home. This means you need to resourceful and learn how to use what you have and be satisfied with the results. You need to think wisely about what clothes you are bringing, because you surely can’t fit them all into one suitcase. You need to prioritize on all the things you will carry. You might need to stretch the money you are bringing into more days than primarily planned. Basically, you learn to adapt and accept that you can’t have it all immediately and that sometimes you have to settle for what you have. The same is with the business world. Sometimes you don’t have the right technology for what you need to do, but somehow you manage to do what you wanted. You work with what you have, and that is a skill that travelers develop more easily.
7. Travelers learn how to manage fear.
When you travel, you might get scared, especially if you are putting yourself in some kind of situation you have never been in, or a scary one (for example bungee jumping). But when travelling a lot, you learn to accept challenges and take action – move past the fear. This is a very good skill that helps you thrive at the workplace, because it makes you able to act progressively and not let the fear of failure prevent you from doing what you want or what needs to be done.
By travelling, people learn in a natural and easy way and develop skills they can use in many spheres of life, including business. Acquiring these skills makes a person more able to perform all the work obligations with more ease, which contributes to their overall success. All these skills combined make a person a better leader – in both traveling and business you need to make important decisions and interact with people.
