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Hi. I'm Jessica Grace Coleman, and welcome to the first-ever episode of the Travel Transformation Podcast! Every week I'll be bringing you encouragement, motivation, and inspiration to get you travelling and to use travel as a tool for transformation. This episode is just going to be a brief intro to me, what I do, why I do it, and how I know how transformative travel can actually be.

I am recording this right now in the smallest room I could find in the house where I'm currently cat sitting. I am a digital nomad, which means I roam around and work remotely from wherever I want. Basically, as long as I've got my laptop with me and an internet connection, I'm good to go. In terms of where I live, I like to mix things up. Like, right now, I'm doing some cat sitting, so I've done lots of house sitting, dog sitting, and I love animals, so that's perfect for me. I stay in Airbnbs, in hotels or hostels, and I've recently started staying in coliving houses, which thankfully are becoming more and more common, as well as visiting friends and family all over the UK. It's great because when you don't have to be tied down to one particular place for the vast majority of the year, you're able to easily visit people all over the country – and the world – who you might not have seen in months or years, which I find is a major benefit.

At one point I might try van life, who knows? But I haven't quite got around to that yet. I do have a friend who has converted her car into her own home on wheels and she can just wake up and drive wherever she wants, usually somewhere beautiful in Scotland, which I love the sound of, but the practicalities have been putting me off a little bit. But I'm learning more and more about that as well.

Okay, a brief little bit about me.

I run Coleman Editing and I have been doing that since 2014. I'm self-employed in the UK as a sole trader. I basically do proofreading, editing, and ghostwriting for all kinds of clients and all kinds of projects. I get a lot of self-published authors and people who want to write their autobiographies for their family, so that's pretty cool, and I also write and self-publish my own novels and my own books. I've recently been getting into nonfiction books so that is really fun too. This allows me to work from wherever I want, which this year I have fully made the most of after thinking about doing it for several years.

I have always been into travel for as long as I can remember. I'm very lucky to have had annual family holidays growing up, from caravanning in Cornwall to having weeks in France and even a road trip in America. These trips fuelled my passion for travel from a young age and I realised how privileged I am to have had them. We went to some great places, but the thing I remember the most from these family holidays were when we'd be driving around in the car, a cool box full of Coke bottles in between our seats – those small glass ones with the metal bottle caps, which I thought were really cool for some reason – listening to one specific album on repeat as my dad drove us from place to place. We'd choose one CD and listen to it over and over again, to the point where I still relate certain albums to certain holidays. The music brings the memories flooding back: All The Pain Money Can Buy by Fastball and Garth Brooks’ Greatest Hits… no doubt where my love of country music first came from. I find that music can be so evocative and I've made sure to incorporate it into my Flip the Script Travel Transformation Framework, which I will be talking about in upcoming episodes, as well as running Coleman Editing. I have just started running Flip the Script Travel Transformation Services, which includes coaching sessions and my Digital Nomad Academy, which is an online hub of courses and resources for people who want to do what I do: make money from the road. And I am currently taking a certification for travel coaching, so I've got a lot going on, but one thing I've always wanted to do is start a podcast and now just seems the right time.

Anyway, after those family holidays, I grew up and went to uni, and my love of travel never left me. At university I did a joint degree of Film Studies with American Studies, which was a mixture of American Literature and American History, and it also included a year abroad at a US college and I chose the University of Colorado in Boulder. It's still to this day one of my absolute favourite places, and that year was one of the best of my life.

After uni, I worked at several dead-end office and retail jobs, and then I landed an admin role at a local NHS trust. One of my best friends got a temp job in the same office, actually. And although the work was okay, it was more or less minimum wage and it wasn't exactly fulfilling work, which is why we decided to quit our jobs and go travelling for a while, much to the annoyance of our boss, as he only had a small team and two of us quit at the same time. Oops. Fortunately, anyone can put people into IT training sessions, which is what I'd been doing, so he quickly found replacements.

So, that year, me and my friend left to backpack around China, South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in some group tours, but mostly on our own, and I loved it. My favourite places were Thailand, Vietnam, and New Zealand. And in New Zealand we hired a car from Juicy Car Rentals, and the model was called El Cheapo, which tells you a bit about our budget, and we drove around for a week. My favourite part of that trip was when we went to a kiwi farm when it was out of season, had a group tour with two other people, and then climbed to the top of a giant kiwi fruit that looked out over the road. Had to be done.

After that, it was back to reality, back to England, and back to a string of dead-end jobs that I hated pretty much. I never made much above minimum wage, mainly because I didn't stay at one job long enough. I would get easily bored. I did a lot of temping, a lot of short contracts, just figuring out what I did and didn't like and hoping I'd find something I loved, which I didn't. By the time I was 27, I was working as a team leader at my local cinema. Most of the other staff were a lot younger than me, and I'd been there for longer than I'd been in any other job.

Basically, I didn't want to be there. I had started doing some proofreading and editing on the side. I'd been writing and self-publishing my own fiction books for a couple of years by this point, so I was already registered as self-employed for that, and I wanted to try it full-time, but I was scared. Then, in 2014, after many years of not having one, my parents, my brother and I went on a family holiday again, a week in Menorca. I had a great time, but the whole week I was there, I was just dreading going back to England and back to my job. I was thinking about it the whole time, unable to totally relax and have fun at any point.

The idea of my job was like, lurking under the surface every time I took a walk in the Spanish sun, or drank a pina colada, and I love pina coladas. So, on our last day on the island, I talked to my brother. I told him how I wanted to try proofreading and editing full time, and how I'd managed to get a couple of my own clients through Facebook ads as well as working for an agency. He told me to go for it and that he'd help me with Google ads if I wanted. And as I looked out on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea, I made a decision. As soon as I got back, I was going to hand my notice in at the cinema, and I did exactly that.

Unfortunately, one of the other women handed her notice in that same week. It seems to happen to me a lot, but I worked my notice period and was a bit scared, but excited to be 100% self-employed. And, for the next eight years, I did proofreading, editing, and ghostwriting under my business name, Coleman Editing, like I said – and I still do some of that work today, actually, as I'm still pivoting into the travel industry.

The majority of my income comes from writing, proofreading, editing and ghostwriting for other people, which I can do from anywhere at any time. And it works really well for digital nomading. I'm really proud of what I've achieved with Coleman Editing, but there was something else I wanted to pursue, another passion I'd been ignoring.

In 2014, when I became fully self-employed, I knew that if I wanted to, I could work remotely from anywhere in the world. And this is obviously way before the pandemic, and before working from home was more of a thing. I didn't have a boss, I didn't have set hours. Basically, the world was my oyster, but I never quite got around to it for various reasons.

Then, in the summer of 2019, I suffered a herniating disc and excruciating sciatica. I can't even explain the pain. Honestly, I was in horrific pain, twenty-four seven. I couldn't stand, I couldn't walk, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even sit down. Just that position… I just couldn't do it. I even had to temporarily move in with my parents because I couldn't stand up long enough to get food from myself or to boil the kettle for a cup of tea, which is a big problem for me because I love my tea.

For a while I had to stop working because the pain was so bad.

I couldn't concentrate on my laptop screen, or on anything for that matter. I became housebound and pretty depressed. I tried physios and personal trainers and doctors and acupuncture, all kinds of painkillers… and, after a while, which felt like forever, I started to get a bit better. So I went back to my house, and then something triggered it and it happened all over again, and then I ended up at my parents’ again. That happened a few times, and then the pandemic happened.

Lockdown came while I was staying at my parents’, so I was there a lot longer than I'd planned. I did get a little better so I could start working properly again, but I had to do all my typing lying down, as I still couldn't sit down without being in a lot of pain. I could do some standing up with a standing desk, but I couldn't stand for long either. So, I got used to working lying down on my laptop. And in that time I decided I should be doing something extra because my editing work was drying up a little bit due to the pandemic and people wanting to save cash. So, I decided to write a book – this time, a non-fiction book.

It was called Write Your Life: The Ultimate Life Hack For Achieving Your Dreams, and it was all about goal setting, mindset, personal development, and planning the big goals you want to achieve by writing yourself into a story where you overcame all your obstacles and accomplished your huge dream. I'd been getting into self-development for a while before that, and I thought with the pandemic and the lockdown and being in pain and everything, it was a good chance to write it.

And, as I was writing it and the pandemic chaos continued across the country and the world, I realised I wanted more outer life. I wanted to try something different business-wise. I love editing and writing, but it takes a long time, it's not very scalable, and I just needed a change – and I wanted to just go somewhere, move. I didn't want to feel stuck in my house in my hometown anymore, which I'd obviously felt during the pandemic, like many people, and for the year or so before that with my back issues. But, above all, I wanted to travel.

It was another couple of years before that happened, both because of the pandemic and my back, which was still healing, but then I went for it. In my Flip The Script academy, I talk about flipping the script on your life and writing yourself a new story. Well, I definitely flipped the script on mine. Or, as my brother said, I burnt the script – just got rid of it completely. I handed in my notice on the house I was renting, I was so over living alone and working at home alone all the time, and I put all my stuff in a storage unit.

I signed up to stay in a coliving house run by a great company called Sun And Co. in the Basque Country in Spain for a month, and a few weeks later, I took an EasyJet flight from Manchester to Bilbao. I met up with an awesome couple who were in Bilbao at the same time as me, and together we got the train and then a taxi to what would be my home for the next month, a huge villa in a little village called Gautegiz Arteaga. And sorry if I totally butchered that name – I probably should have figured out by now how it's pronounced.

Also, their village crest – or the sign that they have on the side of the road when you get there – it’s kind of weird, and I still haven't figured it out. It seems to involve two seals or dragons, not sure, puking at each other while a couple of cauldrons hover around them. If anyone knows what this means, please message me and let me know. And if I go back, which I'm hoping to, I will definitely ask the locals about that.

So, this villa, in this really small community in the heart of the Basque Country… that was the start of my travel transformation. I had stayed in a coliving place before, pre-pandemic. I'd actually spent two months in a writers’ house on Koh Samui in Thailand, which was called the Content Castle, which sadly isn't there anymore. And during that time I came face to face with a rather strange burglar hiding in my bedroom, which I'm sure I will talk about on a future episode.

But this villa in Spain was different. This time I had left my house. Everything I owned was either in my small storage unit in the Midlands or in my admittedly huge suitcase. And the villa, well, it was amazing. Huge rooms, a beautiful garden, a swimming pool, and set in the stunning Basque countryside. Honestly, it was just bliss.

I stayed there for the whole month. It was a sort of pop-up that the company were trying out, as they usually have their house in Javea, Spain, which I went to afterwards, but this was on for a month. I stayed there the whole time, but most people were there for either the first two or the last two weeks. We had people from Spain, France, Ukraine, the United States, Denmark, South Africa, India, Germany, Finland, Croatia and probably a load of other countries I can't think of right now. We had self-employed people, students, researchers, writers, coaches, coders, consultants, and loads of other occupations. It really opened my eyes to the amount of ways you can make money while on the road, so that in itself was transformative for me.

Every weeknight we'd split into cooking teams and have a family dinner, usually starting around eight or nine, though being on Spanish time means whenever, really, and usually lasting until eleven or twelve, depending on how many bottles of wine were opened during dinner. We worked together, we socialised together, we went on day trips and hikes together, we ate and drank together, we stayed up late discussing all kinds of things, and because we were in such a remote location where there wasn't a lot to do nearby, we ended up bonding a lot, very fast and very easily. By the end of two weeks, when a lot of my housemates left and were replaced by others, I felt like I had known them for months or years. The same at the end of the month as well, with the second lot.

I know I've made friends for life with a lot of them, and I've already met up with several people I met in the main Sun And Co house in Javea, and I've got plans to meet up with more of them in January when I go to South Africa; one of the awesome women I met in Spain is from Cape Town and we're going to visit her. Six of us are staying in an Airbnb together for two months and we're all digital nomads who'll be working most of the time with her. I've never been, and honestly, it wasn't on my list of places to go to anytime soon, but that's what happens when you start travelling around and meeting incredible people. You learn all about amazing other places and you actually get to go there. Without that, and without her, and without knowing that all the people were going there in this Airbnb, it would not be a thing I would book.

So I love that about travel as well. None of this would have happened if I hadn't decided to go to the Basque Country, and I nearly didn't. Yet again, it was actually my brother who encouraged me to go. So, thanks, Dave!

And if you're wondering what a day in the life of a digital nomad is like, when staying at a coliving house, it goes something like this: You get up whenever you want. The people there are from all over the world and they're working on different schedules and in different time zones, so you get the early risers and the people working late into the night as well. Some people would exercise first thing, go for a walk or head to the beach to watch the sunrise when we were in Javea, but I'm not a morning person, so I didn't do that.

When I was in the Basque Country, I would get up and have a nice cup of tea, usually sitting outside on the deck to have it overlooking the pool and the garden. Very, very nice. I then got to work either in the main living space or in the focus room, which was a room that had been set up with desks, chairs, extra monitors, that kind of thing. This is where you worked if you needed quiet and no interruptions. I'd stop for tea breaks, for lunch – again by the pool when I was in the Basque Country or out at a cafe or somewhere when I was in Javea… that's a sort of town, so that had a lot more going on.

Then, at some point, the inevitable message would come through on the villa WhatsApp group chat like, who wants to go for a walk? Or who wants to go to the cheesecake place? As a side note, the Basque Country has amazing cheesecake, and there was a cafe bar a few minutes’ walk from the villa that had actually won awards for its cheesecake, and we went there a lot. Or the message would be like, who wants to go for a drink before dinner? Sometimes I resisted these messages. Most of the time I didn't. Well, you need to have some breaks from work, right? And, honestly, the cheesecake really was that good.

Most days there would be some kind of professional event as well, either over lunch or around five before people started cooking dinner. This could be a skillshare workshop, a presentation, a mastermind – which is where one person states a problem they have and everyone else gives them ideas and input on how they can solve it – or a roundtable, where one person chooses a topic and everyone joins in a big discussion. Then, around six or seven, that day's cooking team – usually three or four people – would start cooking dinner for everyone while the rest of the house carried on with work, grabbed a drink, or just chilled by the pool.

We would then gather in the main room at Spanish time, whenever dinner was ready, where there was a long dining table. Though, with 15 or 16 of us, we often had to add another table to the end of it, and we'd all have dinner together. And those dinners… that food… amazing! So many people loved to cook and we'd enjoy tasty dishes from all around the world. There would also be lots of wine, for those who drank, and our after-dinner conversations would usually last until around midnight or one, sometimes later. At one point there was a ‘3:00 a.m. Club’ of people who wanted to stay up super late talking and drinking wine, but most of us were in bed by one or two.

By the end of my time there, we'd started doing themed dinners, including costumes and dinner games and things like dining in the dark, which were really fun too. Of course, some evenings we would eat out, and on the weekends we'd go on walks or day trips to places like Bilbao and San Sebastian, or Altea and Denia in Javea. In Javea, there's a lot more eating and drinking out as there were a lot more places within walking distance.

But, honestly, I preferred the Basque Country villa, living in our own little bubble and having just a couple of local bars and our beloved cheesecake cafe to go to. It meant we got super excited whenever we made the trek to nearby Guernica, which was an hour's walk along the river – a very nice walk – where we'd be faced with so many shops and restaurants we didn't know what to do with ourselves.

And even going to the supermarket became exciting during the last couple of weeks, when no one really had a car and we found ourselves kind of really cut off from civilisation. But we did have some other stuff nearby. In the village there was an animal sanctuary, a graveyard, oh, and a bird centre that had a big sign outside saying International Airport for Birds.

So, you know, there was some stuff!

We also did non-professional skillshares such as wine-tasting nights and poker nights, which was one of the most fun nights I had while I was there, mainly because no one knew what they were doing and it was hilarious. And sometimes we just chilled in various parts of the house, reading or writing or listening to music. Sometimes we'd venture further out and go to a bar or we'd have a movie night in with wine and snacks.

And, of course, there's the usual cultural exchanges you get when you're living in a house with people from all over the world – mainly learning swear words in many different languages.

Anyway, back to the transformation thing. I’ve transformed my life through the people I've met while travelling. As I said, I've now got new friends, and I'm sure they'll be lifelong friends, from all over the world who I wouldn't have met otherwise. I've had several invitations to go and stay with people in the States, in Switzerland, in several other European countries, and this alone would have transformed my life. But there were so many other things as well.

Staying in co-livings really opened my eyes, as I said, to all the amazing ways you can live and work these days while travelling. These people really think outside the box in terms of their careers and their lifestyles, and they show me that anything is possible. They inspire me and motivate me to visit new places and try new things.

And, really, they pulled me out of the little world I was living in back in my hometown, working alone and living alone and never really doing anything because I'd already done everything in my hometown and was getting a bit bored with it. And they showed me that there's an entire world out there that I could see if I wanted to, and I do want to.

I transformed in terms of general confidence, self-confidence, and confidence in my abilities.

You can't really not when you're solo travelling, because you see how capable you are of doing stuff, and action breeds confidence. So you can't not transform in that way, I don't think, when you're travelling.

I've always loved organising and planning trips for me and my friends, but this time I'd organised an intensive solo trip and I'd actually gone on it. I found I was far more capable than I gave myself credit for. I was capable of solo travel. I was capable of making new friends, I was capable of sorting things out if anything went wrong. I was capable of changing my plans and adding new places to my itinerary as I went, which I did. I was capable of showing up on my own to group tours, and I was the only solo traveller there – which, before living in the co-living houses, I would have been a bit nervous about – and I made great friends. I was capable of working and travelling, I was capable of making money on the road, and I was capable of becoming a better version of myself, which I did.

I am a big introvert and I came out of that initial few months of travel more confident, more self-assured, and less self-conscious than I've ever felt. If I could do this, I could do anything.

Little things that used to worry me didn't seem like such a big deal anymore. I had definitely grown as a person and I was a lot happier than I used to be. But even that wasn't my main transformation.

All those things are great forms of growth and personal development, but I didn't plan or intend on doing any of that. They're just by-products. They naturally came with travel, especially solo travel, which is one of the reasons I love it so much.

The biggest transformation for me came in the form of conquering a fear. Actually, my biggest fear I've had ever since I can remember, and a fear I started my journey determined to overcome. What was that fear? Well, I'm sure some of you can relate. My number one fear was public speaking. I'm sure this won't feel like such a big deal to some of you because there are far scarier things out there in the world, but to a shy, quiet introvert with probably mild social anxiety who hates being the centre of attention and freezes up whenever the spotlight is put on her – that's me – believe me when I say it was the worst possible thing I could ever imagine.

I always hated having to give presentations at school. I hated it still in university. I hated it even more in my office jobs. Even if I was at a party in a group of people and the attention suddenly turned to me and everyone was staring at me and waiting to hear what I had to say… horrific. I would dread school presentations for weeks beforehand. I would have nightmares about them. I would sweat and get all red-faced and feel like I was going to faint or puke or both. I would tremble. My hands would be shaking as I tried to hold my notes in front of me.

I hated people looking at me, especially when I'm trembling and sweating and red-faced… you don't want that. I thought they must be judging me for being so terrible at public speaking. Even if all I had to do was read off a piece of paper, I still hated it. And after it was done, I didn't even really feel relief; I'd just feel embarrassed. I'd slink back to my desk, my face still burning, and sit down in silence, trying to forget the past however many minutes had ever happened, and then I'd start worrying about the next presentation, so I'm sure you get the idea.

Public speaking was my absolute worst nightmare, and it had been holding me back all my life. It held me back from giving good presentations at school and at work, it could have held me back from promotion – the one job I stayed at long enough for that to be a possibility anyway – and it definitely held me back from putting myself out there for my business, such as going live on Instagram or Facebook, doing videos, trying to collaborate with people, or just telling people about my business. Everything just held me back from being myself, and it held me back at parties, socialising. It was just holding me back all over the place.

So, when I booked my month-long stay at the Sun and Co. pop-up villa, and I knew that there would be, like, skillshares and roundtables and all kinds of things to get involved in, and I told myself: no more. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to step outside my comfort zone as much as humanly possible, slay my limiting beliefs, and conquer my fears of public speaking and being the centre of attention. And, as it turned out, the villa in the Basque Country was the perfect place to do that.

A few days after I arrived, I gave a skillshare, which was a workshop presentation entitled ‘Designing your Life Purpose and Leaving a Lasting Legacy’. Things that I'm really into and passionate about. I had slides, I had quotes, I had a script. And I was terrified. Like, you have no idea how big of a thing it was for me to put myself forward for this, but I did it. I felt sick and I thought it would go terribly wrong, but I did it anyway. I think it helped that it was a pre-dinner workshop and I encouraged everyone to drink wine while we were doing it, so I could hold a wine glass in my hand, which somehow helped; it made it more fun.

And, yeah, I got to the end of it and I could not believe I'd done it. I'd been dreading it ever since I got to the villa, but actually, I'd been dreading it ever since I knew I was going to do it, which was about two weeks earlier when I put my name down in the pop-up Excel spreadsheet we had, which was there to organise our social and professional events ahead of time. I was actually one of the first to put my name down to offer a skillshare, something I really didn't want to do.

And, to my surprise, there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in it, which is why the organiser scheduled my event as one of the first, and I was immediately terrified. So I was very, very relieved when it was over. I was actually happy that it was only a few days in, because I'd got it done so early in the month that I wouldn't have to do any public speaking of any kind for the rest of my stay, because no way was I going to put myself through that again, right? Just no.

But, as the month continued, I did more and more things that were totally outside my comfort zone, because I made myself do them. I took part in other people's masterminds and roundtable discussions, I attended workshops, I took part in group exercises – some of which were totally out of my comfort zone – I had a life coaching session during which I got very emotional, and I pushed myself to take part in anything and everything that made me feel awkward or uncomfortable, which for me was pretty much everything. And, because I'd gone in with the intention of conquering my fear and putting myself out there, I forced myself to do this stuff.

I also did something else during my time there. I made a note of all the amazing things we were doing, all the skillshares, all the workshops, all the professional and social events, all the funny little things that had happened, all the quotes that were flying around, little bits of info about my housemates and that kind of thing, and – as we came to the end of our stay – I started writing a poem including all these things, because I didn't want to forget any of them.

Now, believe me when I say I am not a poet. I've dabbled, but I'm not even sure if my poem actually qualified as a poem. I just wanted to keep a written record of our time there, and just for myself, definitely not to show anyone else. But as I wrote it, I kept thinking I should share this with the others – which, believe me, was not a normal thought for me. Remember when I said public speaking was my number one fear? Well, the type of public speaking that terrifies me the most is the idea of reading my own work out to people, and especially a poem when I'm definitely not a poet. So I kind of ummed and ahhed about it, and right up until about 09:00 p.m. on our last night together, when we'd all gathered on the deck for a last-night party, I still wasn't sure if I was going to read my poem. Remember? It's pretty much my worst nightmare. But then I realised something.

I wasn't actually terrified at the prospect of reading my poem to this wonderful group of people. I wasn't even nervous or worried about what they'd think. If they didn't like it, who cares? After putting myself out there and stepping outside my comfort zone for an entire month, I'd say I got rid of maybe 90-95% of my fear just by taking action and doing things even when I was scared, over and over again, for four weeks.

So, once everyone was sitting at the table on the deck, I said I had an announcement to make. I stood up, I read out my poem, and I got a pretty great reaction, actually. There were laughs where there should be laughs. I think there might have been a few tears, but maybe that was me. There was some hugging, and we had a toast at the end.

Honestly, it couldn't have gone any better. And as I sat down and continued drinking my lemon beer – which is something me and my friends drank a lot of in the Basque Country – I sort of just thought and marvelled about how unscary the whole thing had been, compared to a month before when I was giving my workshop. And that wasn't even me reading out my own writing; that was me reading out notes and having slides, and everything was very structured. I had been terrified.

And when I was reading out my poem, I actually kind of had fun. A month previously, you couldn't have paid me to stand up and read out a poem I'd written to a bunch of people, but now it seemed like no big deal. That's the power of stepping outside our comfort zones and pushing ourselves to do things that normally scare us. In as little as a month, you can totally change the way you react to certain situations and to fears that have plagued you your entire life, and that feels pretty damn awesome.

But there's a P.S. to this public speaking story. Being in that villa for a month – pretty much cut off from the real world, in our own little bubble – while awesome, it wasn't really the same as doing something like this in my, quote, ‘real life’. And I was sure that, over time, this newfound confidence in public speaking would begin to wane. I mean, as they say, if you don't use it, you lose it.

So, when my parents threw a garden party for their Golden Wedding anniversary – 50 years, amazing! – and asked my brother and I to do a toast, I was intrigued to see what would happen. Would I channel my former villa self and be totally cool about it? Or would I spend the whole week before absolutely dreading it, then throw up in front of my entire family and most of my parents’ neighbours? Well, I thought back to the villa, and the first thing I did was to write a poem – that seemed to go well at the villa. And even though, as I said, I am definitely not a poet by any stretch of the imagination, I do enjoy writing them. I then broke the poem up into specific lines for me and my brother to read, and we did a quick practice on the day.

So far, so good. No nerves, no dread, no counting down the hours and minutes until it was all over. No puking like those seals on the Gautegiz Arteaga sign. It seemed to be going well. Well, the time came to give the toast, everything went quiet, all eyes were on us, and… I felt fine. I wasn't scared, I wasn't freaking out, I wasn't even really that nervous – although that could have been the wine. The poem made people laugh, though that also might have been helped along with the day drinking that was happening. My parents seemed to like it too.

I even enjoyed it, like I had in the villa. And I didn't throw up, I didn't faint, and I didn't faint while throwing up, which is always good.

Now, I'm not saying at all that I've completely cured myself of my fear of public speaking. I'm sure that will be tested a lot in the future, especially if I do any kind of professional speaking on stage, which will be a whole other thing, but it's a pretty great start.

So there you go. Two months after reading my poem out to my housemates on the decking of the villa in Spain, I read another poem out to a whole host of friends and family in my parents’ garden. A real-world test and a real-world example of how solo travel and co-living can help you slay your fears – as long as you make the decision to make the most of any and every experience that comes your way. Which I think we should do in life anyway.

After the Basque Country and Javea, I went to Valencia, which wasn't planned, but someone told me how amazing it was, so I cut my stay in Javea short by a few days and went there on my own. And because I was on my own the first night there, I booked myself onto a group tour. I treated myself a little bit. It was a tour of the City of Arts and Sciences, which is incredible if you haven't seen it. And then it was a wine and tapas evening on a penthouse balcony overlooking Valencia, which, as I said, I treated myself to.

It was very nice. I met some great people and I even met these two Texan sisters who were there on a trip in Valencia and Paris. And I happened to be going to Paris after that on the exact same day they did. So we ended up meeting and hanging out, like many, many times during my trip in Valencia and Paris. We went to dinner, we had drinks, we went to a jazz night, we did some tours… it just goes to show that solo travel doesn't always have to be solo.

Just going on that one tour, the night I got to Valencia, meant I wasn't alone for the entire next week and a half. So I went to Valencia, then Paris, and I got the Eurostar back to the UK, because I had several things booked in the summer in England. I have booked South Africa, and after that, I hope to go back to the Basque Country – and there's lots of other colivings I’d like to stay at. There's one called Cloud Citadel in France, Chateau Coliving in France, and Anceu in Spain. Meeting all these people and hearing all their experiences in these different places, you end up with a long list of places you want to go that were not on your list before. So that's another great thing about travel.

I am loving the freedom, knowing that I can work from anywhere, and I just love that I went out there and did it after eight years of thinking I should be doing it when I became fully self-employed. But hey, better late than never. This is just the start of my travel journey, but I've already grown so much and I'm excited to see what happens in the future – what I'm going to make happen in the future – and that includes this podcast. Without my month in the Basque Country, this probably wouldn't have happened either.

Sorry for the rambling nature of this first episode; I just wanted to give you some background on me so that, going forward, you'll know why I'm talking about what I'm talking about – and I promise the next episodes will be a bit more structured! I'm going to go through some of the things I talk about in my Academy, hopefully I'll get some guests on of my travel buddies that I've made along the way, and I'll be talking about how we can transform in life through travel and through lots of other things as well.

Well, that's it for this episode. If you made it to the end of my ramblings, I salute you. Hopefully, this will give you some insight into how travel can be transformational and why I'm so passionate about helping others transform through travel as well.

If you have any questions about me, solo travel, intentional travel, being a digital nomad, or anything else I talk about in these podcast episodes, please email them in to info@traveltransformationcoach.com or DM me on Instagram at traveltransformationcoach and I'll answer them in an upcoming episode.

Okay, that's it! Thank you for listening to the Travel Transformation Podcast and, until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side. Bye.

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