How to Create a Travel Goal

Adventure is a State of Mind

Setting an attainable goal can make a huge difference when it comes to whether or not you actually achieve that goal. This is true whether you are setting career goals, fitness goals, or travel goals.

What Don’t You Want?

When we hear the word “goal,” most of us start thinking about what we want. Where do we want to go on our next travel adventure? What do we want to do when we’re there? The author, Mark Manson, suggests that just as important as what you want is what you don’t want. To every achievement in life, there is a cost. So the question is what cost or struggle are you willing or unwilling to accept? As he states, “What we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire, but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.”

The most obvious travel example of this is how much money you are willing to spend for your trip. Obviously, we all have limits to both our time and our money. There are less obvious struggles, however, that we need to consider in setting our goals. For me, this is easiest to identify when it comes to camping.

My husband, Greg, and I both love nature, although his tolerance of the discomforts that come with some nature experiences is significantly higher than my tolerance. Early in our marriage, Greg took me tent camping…once. I very quickly identified that sleeping on the ground and squatting in the woods instead of enjoying the glories of modern plumbing were not struggles that I was willing to accept.

A few years later, I was willing to reconsider camping when we bought a small popup camper and Greg promised to always camp with me in a campground with at least some sort of toilet. (Initially, I held out for toilets with running water but later gave in and agreed to stay in campgrounds with, at minimum, vault toilets.)

Recently, we bought a camper with not only a flushable toilet but a shower! Now I’m all in for the camping trips Greg wants to take. Wouldn’t I enjoy hiking into a remote area and camping somewhere far away from everyone else in a beautiful expanse of undisturbed nature? Sure…but not enough to squat in the woods.

Which Struggles Can You Accept?

When you’re thinking about your travel goals, identify what discomforts you are willing to put up with. This will help you to narrow down your goals. Also keep in mind, however, that if you are unwilling to tolerate some discomfort, you are also unlikely to have any travel adventures.

Everything in life comes with some discomfort or difficulties that we have to overcome. The question is not how to eliminate all of those struggles but to instead decide which struggles you are willing to cope with in order to achieve the amazing adventures you want to have in your life.

When Greg and I go camping, I still have to deal with unpredictable weather, limited showers, and bugs, but those are all negatives that I’m willing to accept for the price of experiencing the beauties of nature. As Mark Manson says, “our struggles determine our successes. So, friend, choose your struggles wisely.”

Limit Your Goals

Someone once told me that they hadn’t really traveled much because they couldn’t decide where to go. That is indecision at its finest! Limiting your goals doesn’t mean that you can’t dream — I usually have three to five possible trips (goals) floating around in my head at any given time — but it does mean that at some point, you have to pick one goal to actually work toward.

For some people, the fear of making the wrong choice and missing out on something better keeps them from committing. If this is you, remember that avoiding making a choice is actually making a choice. It’s a choice to miss out on everything! Deciding to focus on just one goal at least lets you achieve and enjoy that goal, even if you have to miss out on other possibilities.

The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.

Benjamin E. Mays

Set Goldilocks Goals

Just like Goldilocks wanted her porridge to be hot but not too hot, it’s important that your travel goal be specific but not too specific. If your goal is too vague, such as “I want to visit a beach,” it is difficult to make your goal into a reality. How do you figure out transportation if the only goal is “a beach?”

On the other hand, you are likely to encounter friction and disappointment if your goal is too specific. If your goal is to visit not only a specific beach but to stay in a specific room in a specific hotel on that beach on a specific date, there is a risk that at least some element of that goal is not going to be attainable. What if someone already booked that room before you for that date?

A Goldilocks-just-right sort of goal is one in which you have a vision of where you want to go and what you want to do, but there is also some flexibility in that goal. For example, you might want to stay on the beach in Aruba, but you can either be flexible about which hotel you stay in, or if you know you want a specific hotel, you can be flexible about what floor you stay on or what dates you stay there.

Your goals can also be activities that have some flexibility to them. For example, you may know that you want to eat a lot of good French food when you’re in France, but you’re aware that the menus can change seasonally and you’re open to trying many different types of food. Or maybe you know that you want to be outside and active, but that could be hiking or biking, depending on what’s available where you are staying.

Goals That You Control

An extremely important lesson to remember in life is that we can control our actions, but we can’t control the outcome. Part of this is because of things completely outside of our control, like the weather. We can control whether we dress warm enough for the weather, but we can’t control whether the sun is going to shine. Similarly, we can’t control others. How they act, including how they react in response our actions, is not under our control.

Being clear about what we can and cannot control is an important distinction to make when we are deciding on what we want our travel adventures to look like. For example, if we want to have lots of one-on-one conversations with people living in the country we plan to visit, we can’t control whether others will talk to us or whether they will even share a common language with us. We can, however, plan to learn some of the local language and to spend time in places that will increase our opportunities to have conversations, such as traveling by ourselves rather than with a large tour group.

While we are traveling, making moment-to-moment decisions that align with our goals and are within our control will make a difference in how likely we are to achieve those goals. For example, I love visiting with people who are local to the area I’m visiting as a way to learn more about their culture and language. When Greg and I visited the Azores with friends, one evening our friends had gone to bed and Greg was out late doing some nighttime photography. I could have gone to my room to wait for Greg, but I instead spent some of that time hanging out in the lobby where the night clerk, in between answering phone calls, talked to me about life on the island and some of his opinions about the quirks of the Portuguese language.

Attainable Goals

As mentioned before, we all have limited time and money, so it’s important to set goals that are realistically achievable. You are just going to end up frustrating yourself by trying to plan a trip that is impossible, whether it is because it’s beyond your financial budget or it’s beyond the amount of time you have available. For example, if you only have a week of vacation time to spend, I guarantee that you are not going to try to visit ten countries and still have a good time. Remember, it is often true that less is more!

Talk with your travel companions about what their goals are for the trip, but also discuss their priorities and how it is unlikely that every single thing that every person wants to do and see is going to fit into the time allowed for the trip. Being realistic about how much you can and cannot do can avoid a lot of frustration when you are on your trip and feel like you are somehow failing if you’re not checking off every single thing on your wish list. As Paula Pant, author and host of the podcast Afford Anything says (Episode #463), “the gap between expectation and reality is where disappointment lives.”

Put It in Writing

There is something magical in writing down a goal. What was previously a dream and somewhat amorphous becomes concrete and real when we put it on paper. Once you’ve made that written commitment to where and when you are going, it gets easier to figure out the next steps and to answer the questions you need to ask to start the planning process. Ask yourself and your travel companions what things you want to see and do, how you want to get there, how you’re going to get around once you’re there, where you want to stay, and how you want to structure your days.

Every new piece of information you’re able to write down leads to the next. Once you’ve answered where you’re going and figure out how long you want to stay, you can pick when the best dates will be for you to set off on your adventure.

Consider the Possible Obstacles

Last but not least, consider any possible obstacles to attaining your goal. There are many times in life that being able to plan for a possible problem means that it actually never becomes a real problem. For example, if you’re worried that the trip will be too expensive, plan to add a little extra to the money you’re saving each month for the trip. If you know that one of your traveling companions has more work commitments during certain seasons of the year, plan for a time when they historically have had fewer. If you’re planning to travel to an area that has a high probability of hurricanes, either travel during a time of year that this is unlikely or make sure that all of your tickets and reservations are refundable and have a backup plan for where you want to go if your original location is negatively impacted by a weather event.

Obviously, not everything in life is predictable, but often planning can give us options. Flexibility is also important. As I said before, you can’t control everything, so just accepting this fact can help you cope with problems or obstacles as they arise.

Enjoy the Process

Whether you are setting goals for your next travel adventure or for some other area of your life, it is important to focus not just on the goal. In other words, it’s important to enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Goals give us direction, but if you focus only on the end result, you may have to wait a very long time to achieve the enjoyment of that goal, and you’ll miss out on a lot of life in the meantime.

What if you are planning a dream trip but it takes you much longer than you expected to save the money you need for it? If only the goal matters to you, you may end up focusing on the disappointment of still not taking that trip and checking something off of your bucket list.

On the other hand, if you enjoy the process, even if it takes years before you can leave for your travel adventure, you will enjoy the dreaming and the preparation. You’ll look for opportunities to get just a tiny bit closer to that goal. For example, you’ll be excited when you read a book or watch a movie that takes place where you want to go, and you might see a delay in your plans as an opportunity to learn more of a foreign language that will help you when you do actually get to use your passport.

Have you chosen a travel goal? Do you know where your next travel adventure will be? Do you have goals for the experience? If you do, how do they align with the recommendations above? Are there any changes you can make to improve the likelihood of achieving your goal?