10 Ways to Experience Empowerment With Slow Travel

1. Overcoming your fear of missing out

Overcoming your FOMO while you travel sounds counter intuitive. It seems that if you live the slow travel experience, you would have time to see everything.

Well, that’s partly true. You will indeed have time to see the main attractions you would find in travel guides. However, a place has so much more to offer than its main tourist attractions.

When we take the time to learn about something; the more we know, the more we realize we’re very ignorant on that topic. The same goes for traveling.

FOMO is not a sustainable way to live. Hence, so many people on automatic pilot are stuck with it. If you don’t get rid of your fear of missing out, you will spend your entire time in your head. You won’t enjoy the actual place you’re at. It’s true for every area of life, including traveling.

The more you get to know a place, the more you realize how much more there is to discover about that place.

Hence, you have to let go of the idea that you will see every corner of the places you travel to. When traveling slow, especially as a woman solo, you have to get rid of that FOMO to make the most of it.

The good news is that when you live the slow travel experience, you will naturally overcome that fear. Or at least, a big part of it.

2. Getting out of your comfort zone

Traveling solo as a woman, especially when it’s your first time, gets you out of your comfort zone in many ways.

I have a lot of experience in traveling alone. But still, so I find myself in situations where I’m uncomfortable. Well guess what… I learn to deal with it. And so will you. You will HAVE TO.

I am no better or stronger than any other woman. Some experiences are still very scary to me. I just have the courage to try (safely).

Once you put yourself in uncomfortable situations, you learn a lot.

First, you learn about yourself and how you react in survival mode. If you learn from every uncomfortable situation you face, you will either: know how to deal with it or avoid it the next time it happens. That is sooo important in the healing journey.

And if you’re a people-pleaser, believe me you will find yourself a lot in situations you would like to avoid. But you will learn from it. Because you will decide that you don,t want to tolerate this anymore. Hence, you will start breaking your patterns.

3. Breaking your old patterns

I just talked about how getting out of your comfort zone makes you learn and grow. Getting out of your comfort zone is actually a mandatory step to break patterns. You need to do something different, most likely uncomfortable, to change.

Patterns are what we have learned growing up. We repeat them over and over again because that is the only way we know. Patterns are comfortable because we are used to them.

But comfortable doesn’t mean good, neither safe.

You can only break a pattern if you change something about the way you make your decisions. When traveling alone, you are constantly making decisions. It’s not always easy, and you certainly do not always make the right ones. And for every bad decision you make, there is a price… but you learn and grow for it

When traveling, the price of a bad decision is often feeling unsafe.

It’s not about life threatening situations. It’s about life and people. No matter where we are, it will happen. We will always meet people that we do not feel comfortable with. That we feel unsafe with.

When we are traveling alone, we learn faster from it. We realize that to avoid feeling unsafe again, we NEED to make different decisions. So the next time, we are able to recognize a situation and do something not to repeat it. And that’s how we break patterns.

No matter where we are, the same challenges will keep showing up over again in the form of different people, until we learn the lesson and change the way we make decisions.

When we travel alone as women, our first priority is safety. We’re in survival mode. And when in survival mode, we are very tuned in with our instincts. Listening to our intuition, our gut feelings, seems very much easier then.

4. Tuning in with your intuition and trusting yourself

When living the slow travel experience as a woman, we are constantly getting our of our comfort zone. We want to feel safe and sometimes turn into survival mode. Hence, we are very much more likely to listen to our gut feeling.

Our intuition speaks louder when we are alone and traveling. Or actually, maybe we just give it more space. We are so used to shutting down the gut feelings when we are in known territory. Again, getting away from home, out of our comfort zone, naturally makes us want to listen to what our body has to say.

When traveling, the consequence of not listening to our intuition is finding ourselves in uncomfortable situations.

And most of the time, these are very vulnerable position. It doesn’t mean that it is life threatening, but it is definitely not good for us. Most of the time, it has something to do with the people we choose to spend time with.

We get to realize that if we don’t listen to our intuition, we cannot choose ourselves. And when we are not choosing ourselves, we are pleasing others. Which leads me to the next benefit of traveling alone as a woman in a way to heal: overcoming people-pleasing.

5. Overcoming people pleasing

When traveling for a long time, and especially when experiencing slow travel, we reach a point where we need to stop making decisions for others.

So, as we travel, we still experience the ups and downs we always have been experiencing at home. Every month, every week, and every day. Even if everything seems surreal, life doesn’t stop because we’re traveling.

When traveling for a long time, we can’t always be running at full speed. At some point, we’ll need a break. We’ll NEED to slow down, even if we’re not trying to live the experience of slow travel. We need time alone. We need to connect and be grounded with ourself.

Maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you’re thinking well, when I travel for 2-3 weeks I like to get as many things done as possible. I’m full of energy; I wake up early and do activities every day. That’s true. When we finally get our 2 weeks of vacation a year, we’re on a hype.

But how exhausted are you when you come back home? 

We can’t keep rushing full on energy for a very long time without getting exhausted.

The irony in traveling alone is that we are always surrounded by people. There’s always distraction, and if we don’t take time for ourselves we can find ourselves always doing stuff. Wherever we go, there will be new people to meet, new places to visit, new food to try, new activities to do.

So, to be able to recharge your batteries, you’re going to need to choose yourself over other people. You’re going to have to make decisions in line with your preferences, your mood, your journey. To live the slow travel experience at its fullest, you will have to overcome people pleasing.

The good news is it’s much easier to let go of the people pleasing with strangers than with people you’ve known for a long time.

6. Become better at making decisions

Okay, we said that slow travel will help you to face the fear of missing out, tune into your intuition and overcome people pleasing.

This bundle will automatically lead to to make more decisions for yourself. And, like anything else, the more you practise, the better you become.

Harsh truth: when you’re a people pleaser, you let people make decision for you. It’s easier. You’re scared of making a bad choice, so you don’t take responsibility for decisions. At least, if it ends up being the wrong one, it’s not your fault.

Trust me, I’ve been there.

When you have a tendency to feel inadequate, you prevent yourself from making decisions. You associate making a wrong decision with being inadequate. Or, as a people pleaser, you can’t make decisions that will not please EVERYONE in the group. So you freeze and let others decide. Instead of asking yourself what YOU really want, you ask yourself what does the group want. You ask yourself what decision should you make to please others? To be accepted and approved?

You want to fit in, to be accepted. So you’re willing to lean into the group’s preferences.

Traveling solo as a woman, especially slow traveling, will push you to make decisions. You will have to. Not to say you will always make the good ones. Of course you won’t.

But you will learn to deal with your bad decisions. Most importantly, you will learn that it’s okay to make a bad decision, and that it doesn’t make you a less likeable person.

7. Setting better boundaries

To set boundaries, you have to know your boundaries. That sounds simple but a lot of people (pleasers) are so disconnected from what they want that they have no clue what a boundary is.

You have to know what you want and what you don’t want. You need to know what you’re willing to tolerate or not.

When traveling alone as a woman, you will find yourself in uncomfortable situations. And if you don’t learn to set boundaries for yourself, you will constantly be taught the same lesson. Over and over again. Until you learn and change something.

We already talked about the feeling of safety. When traveling alone as a woman, it only takes a few situations where you feel unsafe before you learn the lesson. And a way to avoid finding yourself in the same situation over again is to set proper boundaries with yourself.

Here’s a simple example of mine:

So many times I have said yes to go on a adventure with a certain someone. Always, I was thinking it would be fun, while totally ignoring my weird feeling about that someone. Next thing I know, I find myself uncomfortable the whole time and don’t enjoy my adventure at all.

I learned this the hard way. We often do.

We’re unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of saying no. Instead, we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations that we tolerate for hours. That’s the price to pay for not setting boundaries.

Here’s an example of a boundary I set for myself when I travel alone: I do not go on activities alone with a man I don’t feel comfortable with, no matter how cool the activity is!

In other words, I choose peace and safety over fear of missing out.

8. Learning to assert yourself

Setting boundaries is a huge part of the healing journey. But learning to do it well takes time and practise. Showing someone is very different from expressing directly what we need.

Saying what we want is hard. And what we don’t want, even harder. We’re not even talking about being able to do it directly and respectfully. Learning to assert yourself directly and respectfully is a big one to tackle.

When experiencing slow travel alone, especially as a woman, we can practise being assertive with people we just met. Since there is an emotional distance, it is MUCH easier. Our fear of rejection is less because we have less to lose. We can then practise, hence become better at it over time.

When learning to assert ourselves, we will make mistakes. Because we don’t know how to do it, we might be rude, distant, too gentle or not clear enough.

But trying is the best way to learn, because we can do it better next time. And when we start from zero, meaning with no boundaries, it can be hard to do it with people that are close to us.

It’s hard to set new* boundaries with people close to us. We’re afraid people will wonder why the sudden change. That they will not recognize us. We feel like an impostor. We might think they will get mad.

*Those boundaries might not be new; but it might be the first time we realize we have them, hence we will have to set them for the first time.

We imagine that if we start setting new boundaries with people who already know us, they will stop loving us.

Which is, obviously, not true.

9. Overcome the feeling of guilt

Guilt is one of the feelings we need to overcome to heal people pleasing.

When learning to overcome people-pleasing, we learn to get rid of the guilt that comes with. The more we practise to choose ourselves, the less guilt we will feel doing so.

People-pleasers have a tendency to always feel bad for other people. Feelings of guilt is a huge block in choosing yourself. If you don’t feel worthy of love, you will believe that choosing yourself comes with the price of being rejected.

That feeling is less when traveling, because the stakes are not as high as with people close to you. The fear of being rejected by a stranger is a lot more bearable than the fear of being rejected by a friend. The feeling of guilt towards strangers are a lot less than the feeling of guilt towards a friend. When traveling alone as a woman, to feel safe we will need to choose ourselves.

When traveling alone as a woman, we will have to decide between feeling guilty and safe or feeling comfortable and unsafe.

Read more on guilt:

> How To Say No With Confidence and Freedom From Guilt

> How To Deal With Guilt in Toxic Friendships

> How To Be Free of Guilt When Speaking Up In Relationships

10. Become more resilient

The last but not least, the slow travel experience as a woman alone will make you stronger and more resilient.

When traveling, shit happens. And when traveling alone, you have no choice to deal with it by yourself. Now I don’t want to scare anyone here, there will always be people around to help. But the truth is, you will face situations that suck and will have to deal with it alone.

If you travel with anxiety, you will learn to deal with it. If you have a tendency to have FOMO, you will have to deal with it. Or if you have a tendency to make bad decisions, you will have to fix it. You get the point.

When experiencing slow travel, hard times will happen. But those moments are what makes us stronger. Because we learn from it. We learn that we are stronger than we think.

We learn that we can overcome almost anything. We learn how to keep ourselves positive in difficult times. Ups and downs are normal. That emotions are temporary, and that we are strong enough as women to deal with it.

Resilience is about overcoming obstacles in a constructive way. There’s no better way to build resilience than to get out of your comfort zone and face obstacles.

Traveling solo as a woman will get you out of your comfort zone enough to build resilience, while creating the best memories of your life.