How to Become a More Confident Traveler

Adventure is a State of Mind

Brave and Wise

How does one become brave? Many of us think of courage as a trait that you’re either born with or you’re not, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Being brave is actually a skill that any of us can learn.

When I’ve talked about various trips I’ve taken, occasionally people describe my adventures as brave. They make comments like, “How were you brave enough to do that?” or “I wish I had the courage to do something like that” or “I could never do that. I’m not brave enough.”

I always find such comments surprising, in part because I don’t see the types of trips I’ve taken as particularly dangerous or requiring courage. I admire travelers who are willing to tent camp in a jungle, explore a cave, or hitchhike in a remote area… even though none of those are things I’m willing or even that interested in doing.

If I take a step back from my life, however, I realize that my younger self might have had a different view of some of my trips. In high school, could I have imagined that I would travel to countries where I couldn’t read or speak the language or that I would eat foods that I had never even seen or heard of at that point in my life? Could I have imagined being willing to reserve someplace to stay, not knowing anything about the area? That I would feel comfortable riding the metro system in the largest city in the world? That I would fly by myself?

Coming from a rural town surrounded by wheat fields and with only one stop light (and that was just a single blinking red light) I’m pretty sure the teenage version of me would have said that all of those things take a lot of courage.

Scaffolding

So if the younger me would be scared of some of the things the current me loves and feels comfortable doing, what changed? How did I get from there to here? The answer is scaffolding.

Scaffolding is a term used by educational professionals. Similar to the scaffolding used on the side of buildings when they are being built or repaired, scaffolding with learners provides support until they are able to use the skill on their own.

Examples of scaffolding in a classroom include giving hints and prompts, role modeling, asking questions (“What do you think would happen if…?”), breaking tasks into smaller steps, giving feedback, and having students work together in groups. Each of these strategies helps students gain skills to move toward mastery. And with mastery comes confidence.

If you are wanting to become a more confident independent traveler or if there is a specific adventure you would love to take but have been too scared to try, scaffolding is a strategy you can use. Here are some scaffolding techniques as they can be applied to travel:

1. Role Modeling

You’re actually already using this strategy. By reading this blog and other travel-related or personal-growth blogs, you’re learning how others do some of the things that you’re wanting to do.

You can also learn from people in real life. If you have friends (or even strangers you meet) who have taken trips similar to what you want to take, ask them about their travels. Ask what they did, what they saw, what they liked, and what they would do differently if they were doing it over again. Ask them details about the planning — for example, how did they decide where to stay or what transportation to use?

You can also travel with someone with more experience than you and learn from them. The first time I traveled to Europe, I was meeting my childhood friend, Heather, in London, and we planned to travel around England and Scotland as well as go to Paris for a few days. Heather had already been living in England for several months, so I was relying on her to take the lead and teach me about international travel, such as how to use the rail system. While my trust in her travel experience meant I wasn’t very prepared for my initial arrival (as I’ve written about here), once I connected with Heather, she taught me a lot of the travel skills that I have continued to use over the years.

Similarly, when Greg and I traveled to Japan a few years ago, for the first part of the trip we stayed with my good friend, Helen, and her family who had been living there for several years. They met us at the airport when we arrived and taught us about things like buying tickets for the train and metro and ordering ramen. By the time we said goodbye to them and headed off to Tokyo on our own, we felt significantly more confident about our ability to travel in Japan than we did at the beginning of the trip.

If you don’t have any friends who are more experienced travelers than you are, you can watch travel videos and television shows or you can join a tour group and learn from that experience. Just keep in mind, with a tour, you are less likely to learn about some activities that are common to independent travel, such as using public transportation. You are also less likely to have an opportunity to observe the behind-the-scenes planning that a friend can share with you, such as how to buy train tickets.

2. Hints and Prompts

There are many, many resources out there that can give you hints and prompts in planning the adventure of your dreams. Most travel guide books give advice about places to visit and ways to get there. The internet is also filled with articles and blog posts providing sample itineraries. If you do a search along the lines of “ten days in Ireland,” you will easily find these suggestions.

Some people take these itineraries as a blueprint for their trip, but I think they are more useful as hints and prompts. This is because we are all different and have different interests and priorities. One of the greatest things about traveling independently is you can tailor your trip to your specific interests and priorities. For example, if the itinerary you find after searching for “ten days in Ireland” has you visiting a different castle every single day, but what you really want to do is sit in a pub and drink Guinness and listen to live music, you might follow just a couple of their suggestions for where to go. Then add in some towns that are well-known for the live music in their pubs and create your own unique itinerary.

You can find information about your specific interests in the guidebooks or with an internet search. Alternatively, talk to friends who have visited the area before you. For example, I recently recommended the town of Doolin to a friend who is planning a trip to Ireland because of Doolin’s traditional music sessions in the pubs there.

3. Group Work

Obviously, participating in a tour is one way to use the scaffolding technique of group work. But, you can also create your own group experience. As the saying goes, “there is strength in numbers.”

Even if you and your traveling companions have similar levels of travel experience or are all new to an area, you can still divide the planning duties between all of you. Perhaps one of you has more interest in some aspect of travel or a location for your adventure. That person can take on those parts of the planning (and guiding once you’re on the trip), while another person can take on different aspects of the trip.

When we travel, my husband, Greg, is usually more interested in activities related to wildlife and the outdoors, while my interests lean toward museums and opportunities for people watching. For that reason, he took the lead in finding a fishing guide (known as a “ghillie”) in Ireland, and he arranged for an opportunity to hike in the Alps to observe Black Grouse when we were in France. We also have friends we travel with who are happy to put in far more research time than we are to find excellent restaurants in an area. We all end up benefitting from the efforts of the others in the group, and we also learn from observing how others do things.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anais Nin

The biggest benefit to group work is you don’t have to necessarily know someone in the country to which you are traveling or join a tour group, but you do have someone to metaphorically hold your hand and go through the learning process with you, much like students working on a group project in the classroom. The first time I flew as an adult (I had flown once before as a child but didn’t remember anything about it), I flew with a group of fellow college students. The next time I flew was by myself. I was nervous, but far less than I would have been had I done it by myself the first time.

4. Breaking Large Tasks Into Smaller Tasks

There are two ways to look at this scaffolding technique. First of all, planning a trip is a big project that can feel overwhelming when you start. Breaking the planning into smaller goals can help to make the process more manageable. For example, you can break the trip into segments based on where you will be staying and then plan each of them as a separate project. Or you can write out a list of tasks — decide on dates, compare airlines, buy airline tickets, find hotels, decide on activities, figure out transportation — and take on each task one by one.

Alternatively, you can identify ways to approach the big things that scare you by doing something similar but not quite as difficult. This is another approach to breaking large tasks into smaller, more manageable ones. This technique especially can be used to increase your travel confidence. For example, if you’re from the U.S. and you’ve never flown before but want to travel to Greece, perhaps you can plan on flying somewhere in the U.S. first. Dealing with the basics of airlines and airports without also adding in customs and foreign languages will help you to better understand the process and feel a little more confident when you later take that international flight.

Similarly, if you speak English and want to travel to a country where you don’t speak the language at all, you might first travel to another country where English is the official language or where you know English is widely spoken. Alternatively, if you speak at least a little of another language, just not the language in the country to which you are currently wanting to travel, you can plan your first adventure to the country where you speak some of their language and then later take a trip to the country where you don’t speak their language (except for the “magic words,” of course).

This is how I became more comfortable with traveling to places where I don’t know the language — my first adventures with foreign languages were in Mexico and France. I had taken college classes in both and was far from fluent, but I knew enough to be able to ask and answer some very basic questions. Through this process, I realized how much can be communicated through pointing and gestures and the occasional use of a translation dictionary. (This was before Google translate.) Since that time, through practice, my French has improved dramatically and consequently my confidence in using that language. My confidence in communicating when I don’t speak the language, however, has also increased.

5. Questions

This is something you’ve already experienced if you’ve read to the end of my blog articles where I usually ask questions to help you apply what you’ve learned to your very own adventures. You can also talk to someone with more travel experience than you and ask them to help identify any problems by quizzing you about the trip you are planning, such as asking about your itinerary. For example, they might spot that you forgot to plan in traveling time between two cities.

It’s also easy to ask yourself the same questions by mentally walking yourself through the itinerary and imagining it as best as you can without having been there. Remember those questions we learned to use in writing research papers in school? — Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? Those are excellent questions to ask yourself when you are planning a trip. Who are you traveling with? What activities are you doing? When are you going? Where are you visiting? Why are you doing those things? How are you making those things happen? Asking each of those questions about each part of your trip can help guide you in the planning.

6. Feedback

I hope that each adventure you take will increase both your confidence and your hunger to travel more! Feedback is important to help you learn from both your successes and your mistakes and improve your skills in planning your future trips.

Feedback can come from your traveling companions, but most importantly you should evaluate the experience for yourself. Pay attention not just to what you enjoyed but what it was specifically that contributed to your enjoyment.

I used to think what I wanted out of a trip was to see as much as was humanly possible. It wasn’t uncommon for me to stay someplace different every single night so as to be able to visit more places. Over time, however, I realized less is more. Part of what brought this realization home to me, other than the sheer exhaustion factor, was an experience Greg and I had of being in Greece, and a rainy day spoiling the outdoor plans we had for the day. We spent most of the day in a Greek taverna eating and drinking, talking with the owner and each other, and writing postcards home to family and friends. That memory is one of my favorites from that trip.

Over time I’ve come to realize that while I like learning about areas and visiting historical sites, I also enjoy slow activities like people watching in a cafe or visiting a local grocery store. I also know I’ve almost never thought to myself, “I wish we could have visited three more museums” or “the trip would have been so much better if we’d seen four more cities.”

Summing It All Up

Being afraid and inexperienced doesn’t have to prevent you from living the adventure you want to live, whether it’s a specific trip or your life in general.

Instead of looking at your fears as barriers to the things you want to do, use them as signs pointing in the direction of growth. If what you are afraid of is dealing with a foreign language, can you take a class in that language or travel somewhere first where language is not as big of an issue for you? If you’re afraid of plane travel or knowing how to navigate a metro system, can you take a domestic flight somewhere close or visit a city in your own country that has a metro system? If you’re afraid to do it on your own, do you have a friend with whom you think you’d be well-matched for travel and who’d enjoy teaching you all their travel tips and tricks?

How can you use some of the scaffolding techniques discussed here to increase your travel confidence? What adventure goal do you have, and which techniques can address the fears that have kept you from working toward that goal? What are some small steps you can take to become a Brave Wise Traveler?