Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
How to Enjoy Vacations: Rethinking Travel
Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming about your next vacation, painting a grand picture of perfection in your mind - a picture that reality often fails to match?
I'm going to help you reshape those expectations and truly savor each travel experience. From understanding the 50-50 structure of life that extends to our vacations, to the traps of idealized illusions, this episode is a must-listen for both seasoned and novice travelers alike.
Traveling stirs up many complex emotions - excitement, anticipation, and sometimes, anxiety and disappointment. I'll share insights on how you can navigate these emotions and make the most of your travel experiences. It is all about how we adjust the language we feed ourselves about vacationing to create a vision of our trips.
Let's journey together into reshaping our travel expectations and amplifying our joy of exploration.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Applying tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognisably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Afzir. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:The topic of today's podcast is inspired by passion for travel. There are a lot of people in the world that love traveling, like myself, and then there are people who wonder how do people do that? How do they love traveling? How are they always getting up and going? So I decided to create this podcast for people who want to enjoy more of what traveling is about, and for people who already enjoy that but want to up level their game.
Speaker 1:Before the pandemic, alhamdulillah, I had a chance to travel a lot internationally. Since then, I've dedicated the better part of my time to building my coaching practice and it has brought benefit to a lot of people, including myself, alhamdulillah, and one of the product of that dedication is this podcast. But in the upcoming months I have a few other travel plans that I'm looking forward to. Don't worry, there won't be any breaks in the podcast weekly publishing schedule and actually by the time this podcast publishes, I will probably be done with most of the traveling, but I spend a lot of time reflecting how I can enjoy each travel experience and I wanted to share some insights with you, thinking that traveling can be anxiety provoking experience for some and disappointing it sometimes because of a lot of unmet expectations.
Speaker 1:It also contains a lot of anticipation and excitement, along with a sense of adventure. There are a lot of mixed emotions involved, so how do we navigate such complexities? Examples like flight delays, lost luggage, tiredness, missing people in your life. If you're traveling alone, feeling like a burden, if you're traveling because of work, long road trips, family complaints because they're tired, your own needs or your family's needs that interfere with your plans. All of our expectations are thoughts and all of our emotions, regardless of what they are anxiety, disappointment, dread, excitement, anticipation, anything relating to the vacation all of the emotions come from our thoughts.
Speaker 1:You might be someone who takes a lot of pleasure and pride in planning the trip exactly, or you might be someone who goes away and does activities as the day unfolds, regardless if you're a planner or more of a spontaneous enjoyer vacation, trips, going away, a retreat, conference nothing changes the 50-50 structure of your life, regardless of how you approach it planning, pre-planning or leaving everything to spontaneity. The 50-50 ratio of good and bad does not change while you're away or traveling. Planning life will have some problems and some benefits, regardless whether you're home or if you're away. Maybe you're getting these pre-traveled jitters because you're wondering how you're gonna keep eating halal, or maybe you have to go vegetarian for a few days, or thinking about the needs of people you're traveling with your spouse, your family, your friends or other travel companions that you might be traveling with, and you're worried about their snoring habits, stocking up on earplugs. The 50% good and the 50% bad ratio of life does not change.
Speaker 1:On vacations. You trade in some challenges for good and ease, but then you end up gaining a whole new set of problems and challenges. And then, as multi-passionate women, we always worry about our kids, wondering if they're just gonna spend the whole trip being fussy because everything's going to be new and unfamiliar, or if your child is anxiously attached otherwise and does not like to leave you alone, then going away on a trip with them is not going to change these dynamic overnight. So, keeping this in mind, you have to remember that vacation is not to be used in escape for human experience. You cannot take an exit ramp from the human nature of your life just because you're traveling or just because you're on vacation and expecting everything will fix itself is usually the source of disappointment and stress for women planning traveling. Other stressors, like potential language barriers, international travel let's face it you're pretty much the go-to crisis manager of your family and if you leave, things will fall apart behind you. And then there is this nagging worry about what the family and friends gonna say, especially if you're traveling alone or if the world's a bit upside down and you plan on vacationing.
Speaker 1:But all of it does not mean that you cannot fully enjoy a vacation. You might totally picture yourself chilling in this absolute beautiful spot that you picked, crunching on some super tasty food, taking in all the amazing views around you, imagining just kicking back by the pool or laying on the beach if that defines your perfect vacation. Either way, you're just imagining letting all the stress melt away and just feeling relaxed and on top of the world. All of it sounds dreamy, right? While this sounds like a prime reason for vacationing, this is actually part of the problem, which is what I call idealized illusions. I also talk about it in podcast 109, when I talk about New Year's resolutions. Idealized illusion is a future-based vision of the mind when everything will be perfect. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist, but with setting a realistic vision of the future vacation, we can actually come very close to enjoying it.
Speaker 1:So, regardless of how you're traveling vacationing, taking a trip, planning or being more spontaneous all you have to do is monitor yourself. And again, this is the function of the metacognition, your ability to think about your own thinking. And if this concept is new or difficult for you to understand, I will tell you that you engage in metacognition more than you realize. You might just be unaware of it. It's basically you thinking about how you feel and being able to verbalize it. You turn in words, you figured out what you were thinking and feeling and you put it in your own words. That is the process of metacognition.
Speaker 1:So, while planning a trip, just be cognizant of the fact that you're not creating an illusion of a time and place where nothing will go wrong. This level of expectation is sure to burst your bubble. So if your thoughts are about creating a perfect getaway, maybe that means that you are away from home, enjoying a new cuisine, or that you have financial means and blessings to leave work, or that you have health to travel. All these thoughts carry more chances of you actually enjoying the experience compared to if you think that all the food and service will be exceptional regardless of where you go, or you thinking to yourself everything will be perfect, the hotels will have no issues, all the flights will be on time, the road trip will be without any hiccups. The solution is, as it always is, in the language you're feeding yourself about the vacation. To fully enjoy the travel.
Speaker 1:I'm not asking you to bring your expectations down of relaxation and fun. I'm just asking you to not set a trap for yourself, a trap of perfectionist future thinking of a place and a time where everything will be perfect, because there's always a chance that the day you want to enjoy at the beach, it will be thundering. Or let's say that the day is sunny, but you got stung by a jellyfish. Ma'a, alas, vanadala, protect us all. Brain will paint these grand idealist illusions. It will say plan your entire travel based on one ideal snapshot.
Speaker 1:Like you're in an exotic location, sun setting, perfectly, perfect weather, with the perfect breeze. You have a halal mocktail with a cute little umbrella, you're dooping your toes in the gentle waves, and I get it. Our brains daydream, and that's perfectly fine. But you also have the responsibility to take the disappointment out of the picture if your vacation doesn't meet all of these expectations. It is your responsibility to quiet the mind chatter and take the judgment out if something is not perfect. So, like I imagine eagerly anticipating a cultural exploration of Istanbul's shopping, turkish delights, the incredible food. But there is a plot twist. There's a local festival and the crowd is more than usual. Or maybe you visualize a serene moment of connection in the centuries old blue mask, but in reality your kids discover the echo of the main hall of the mask and start to treat it as their own personal concert hall. All of these might or might not be true in my case.
Speaker 1:Among all of these reality checks lies my own thinking, my own recognition of how I can control what I actually enjoy about this trip and what it actually looks like. With practice, I've trained my ever enthusiastic brain to navigate expectations. If it's in perfection mode and my vacation delivers it, alhamdulillah. But when I don't achieve it, I only use my perfection vision to draw inspiration of what my trip could actually look like, and I use my idealized illusions just to draw inspiration from and I also don't mean to make you think that all of the things that can go wrong will go wrong, because it's kind of like a pendulum that swings to one extreme to the other. The travel will be highly variable. It's up to your brain to make it enjoyable as the vacation unfolds day to day, hour to hour.
Speaker 1:What helps my thinking with my different travel plans is if I label it as a trip or a vacation. If I'm with kids, probably at some jam-packed theme park, they're on a mission to hop on every roller coaster and I'm keeping up with all of their requests. Or if we're hiking, taking the kids along, these are what I label as trips. They're energetic, action-packed and they make you feel like a good kind of tired at the end of the day, after which you can just crash into bed and rest. Then there are vacations. They are more relaxing. It's less about adrenaline and more about slowing down. Think about slow walks, relaxed atmosphere, meeting people in a chill environment, less about the thrill and more about rest and rejuvenation, and cruises are great for that, although most of our trips are the combination of the two. Some days are hyped up with jam-packed action and other days it's relaxing, enjoying restaurants and the downtown life. Our kids in the pool has grown up relaxed.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to convey to you is that magic is always in your mindset. So if you're thinking of it as a trip or vacation, or the combination of the two, it is up to your brain to make vacations enjoyable. It's up to you of how you want to tell the story about your travels. Was there a flight delay? Maybe it's an extra chapter in your travel life, an impromptu city tour, or sitting there and playing patty cake with your daughter, or you can treat yourself to a culinary adventure at a local restaurant. Maybe you have a flat tire during the road trip. It's an unplanned pit stop, a chance to stretch your legs, and I wanted to especially talk about women that choose to go on humanitarian missions. Maybe that travel is more along the lines of a trip, a soulful trip at that. You fuel your passion and purpose serving dharma, and while it's invigorating, it could be tiring. It's about giving and often about stretching yourself beyond what you thought your limits were, and I commend and deeply admire people that do that.
Speaker 1:Travel, like life, is an art. It's very much unpredictable, beautifully messy and, with the right frame of mind, every hiccup becomes a highlight. With that, I pray that all of you have a safe journey through life as it relates to this world, and may you have all of the safe travels. O Allah, lead us to honor our blessings, like travel and leisure, with dignity and gratitude, not from societal pressure but from deep respect. Ya Allah, the ultimate guide, guide all the travelers. Grant a serenity, patience, laughter and joy in the journey through this fine act. O Allah, grant us the wisdom to avail all of the blessings that you've granted us with a grateful heart. Protect us during our explorations of this beautiful world and keep our hearts firm in your remembrance. Whether our travels, our thrilling trips or peaceful vacations, guide our intentions and make them pure and purposeful. Make our choices of this world a reason for our success in the afterlife. Ya Allah, ameen. Ya Rebollah Ameen, please keep me in your doors. I will talk to you guys next time.