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Hi, and welcome to the Travel Transformation Podcast with me, Jessica Grace Coleman, where we talk all things travel and transformation. Now, this episode is inspired by a blog post I wrote called How Unplugging and Getting Back to Nature Can Help You Achieve Your Goals, which I wrote right after I got back from a sort of mini break I took with my friends in Wales. These are the same friends I went to New England with on our Halloween road trip, if you listened to that podcast episode.

Anyway, we went to Wales for five nights a few weeks ago and we stayed near Powys, and we stayed in an amazing Airbnb called Shepherd's Rest, which was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, surrounded by rolling hills and fields and sheep and farms. It was the perfect place to sort of unplug and relax.

Now, we usually do holidays together where we do lots of stuff. We have road trips or we explore, all that kind of stuff, and we intentionally went into this one with the idea of doing not much at all – which, honestly, is exactly what I needed. After months of travel, and sorting out my belongings and what I'm doing, and moving out of my rental, and just figuring out what I was doing and pivoting in my business, it had been a lot. So, this was a really good chance to just go away with a couple of friends and just chill out.

Luckily, we got really good weather. It was very sunny, and very warm the entire time we were there. It didn't rain once, I don't think, and we were really lucky in a few aspects, actually. It was sort of a dark sky area, so we could see, well… we were meant to be able to see a lot of the stars, but we were also there when it was the supermoon, and the supermoon was so bright, we actually couldn't see a lot of the stars. So in one way it was good and another way… not so much.

There was also a hot tub; we like booking places with hot tubs. This was a wood-fired hot tub, which I'd never actually used before. Basically, you have to set a fire and keep it burning and get the water up to a certain temperature. They give you a little temperature gauge.

And we had some issues with this, I think it was because it was sort of in a bit of a heat wave and it was very hot anyway. So, we actually got them – the people who owned it – to do it for us before we got there. You could pay for a service for them to preheat the hot tub for you – and I know how middle-class that sounds!

So we did that, and we got there, and it was sort of 38 degrees in the hot tub, and it was maybe 33 degrees generally. The weather and the sun were beating down on us, and we tried to get in the hot tub, and it was too hot. We were boiling alive. It was basically a giant soup pot, so we had to get out, wait for it to cool down, and wait to go in at night when it was a bit cooler and the sun wasn't sort of right above us. Anyway, first-world problems – my hot tub is too hot.

But, apart from that, it was a really cool break and we did lots of nice relaxing things. We unplugged as much as we could, but this is me, so I always take lots of photos and videos, so I didn't totally turn my phone off or anything like that. We did have a couple of Netflix nights, just relaxing in front of the telly and watching Never Have I Ever on Netflix, which I find really funny. But, apart from that, we basically unplugged.

I did a lot of reading; I got through several books while I was there. We would get up early – or early for me anyway – and have a cup of tea outside, looking out over the countryside, which was beautiful. We saw lots of nature, lots of animals, we went for a walk or two. We went to the beach and collected pebbles and things like that. We did yoga, we made s'mores – or attempted to make s'mores. We didn't have the graham crackers, so we used digestives, and it was a bit weird. And we just had a really, really nice time.

I'm just looking at the blog post I wrote now. Yeah, we cooked together, ate together, we sat outside under the twinkling lights, we watched the supermoon go across the sky. We did do some star gazing before the supermoon showed up and blocked out the night sky. We even each saw a shooting star at three different separate occasions, which was very cool. I think there was a meteor shower going on, although it was sort of on the cusp of a meteor shower. And I made a wish on the shooting star, as you do. We saw hares, woodpeckers, cows, butterflies, swifts, sheep… sheep were everywhere and they were very, very loud, so it was very relaxing, but occasionally you just get… baahhhh! That was probably really loud, sorry! It was beautiful and idyllic until the sheep started making the noise.

When we went to the beach, we collected some pebbles, one in the shape of a magic wand, a perfect sort of writing pebble to write on other pebbles. I started writing out affirmations and things I wanted out of life. I'm not sure why I started it, but then my friends started doing it as well and throwing them into the sea as a kind of wish thing.

We also did some stargazing, as I said. We got outside at midnight. We lay down on the lawn under blankets. I had a hot water bottle, we had hot chocolates, and we would, you know, try to make out the constellations twinkling above us. I used one of those apps to figure out which constellations were which, the ones we could see without the supermoon right there.

Anyway, it was just very sort of old school. We didn't use technology a lot. We got a food delivery to the house and we ate at the house every day. Food, wine. It was great. It was just a really nice relaxing time.

Now, there's a thing I call a magical movie moment, which I talk about a lot in my online Academy and which I will do an episode of in the future for this podcast. Basically, it's just a moment in time that I've had often while travelling, where it's like a moment from a movie, one of those perfect moments where there's like a great soundtrack and it's really emotional. I'll go more into it in the podcast episode, but I use the example of the Tiny Dancer scene from Almost Famous when they're on the bus, if you know what that is. That's a sort of perfect movie moment to me.

We actually had one on the way back when I was driving my friend Vicki back to the train station in Wales, and I wrote it down for the blog post I did. I'm just going to read out the movie moment part.

So, we were on the road and we'd been getting constantly stuck behind tractors, which obviously usually happens in the country, and at one point we got stuck behind one pulling a huge load of hay bales – an absolutely huge truck full of hay bales. We happened to be listening to The Chicks at the time, one of my favourite country bands, singing along to their country classic, Wide Open Spaces. And we passed several horses on the side of the road, which were pegged out by a community of travellers passing through – all very country – when a huge gust of wind upset the hay bales and thousands of tiny pieces of hay showered down around us, hitting the windscreen of the car and floating in through our open windows, because it was a really hot day and I've got no aircon. And it was like we were in some kind of giant country snow globe, though I suppose it would be a hay globe.

The sun was shining, the music was blaring. We'd been having a great time singing along and watching the beautiful horses, and now we were surrounded by a flurry of freshly harvested hay that danced around us as we drove through the stunning Welsh countryside. It truly was a magical movie moment.

So even if the trip hadn't been as amazing as it was and as relaxing as it was, that would have been worth it anyway. But it's actually what happened after that that I want to talk about.

See, I love being productive, I love working, I love getting things done. And I kind of sometimes feel guilty if I'm not getting things done. Being self-employed, I often work evenings and weekends and move things around a bit, so I might have a day off in the week and then work on a Sunday or something like that. And I can sometimes feel guilty if I don't do anything for a few days at a time. So I really tried hard to relax on this holiday.

It doesn't come easily to me, not for that many days in a row, and I know that it is important to switch off and I know it's important to take breaks and to give your brain a rest. And this trip really showed me just how important that was.

Because I felt so relaxed and recharged after my mainly unplugged week off that, as soon as I was alone – and this was literally in the car, I dropped my friend off at the train station and I was driving back to my hometown, which I was staying in for some parts of the summer – I had all these ideas come rushing through, ideas for my business, what I should do next, a sort of different way I could pivot, as well as a newfound excitement for getting back to work.

The break had done me the world of good. Before my week away, I'd been flagging a bit, I'd been getting a bit… not bored, but a bit, you know how things get when you need a break. And as I drove away from the train station, it was like a download just happened and all these ideas started coming to me.

Now, I'd already pivoted my business to be more travel related. Before then, I was focusing on female business, women, entrepreneurship, that kind of thing, and now I wanted to make it more travel related, but I didn't really know – other than turning my Academy into a Digital Nomad Academy, – what I was going to do. And several things just came to me.

Travel transformation was one term, travel coach was another one, which I did not know was a thing; I didn't know it existed. Obviously, I know there are lots of coaches, but I'd never really heard of a travel coach – which is different to a travel agent. And travel transformation coach in particular came to me. And so, as soon as I got back, I googled that term and I found this website which is an accreditation for travel coaches and some of them are travel transformation coaches, which turns out, is a thing.

I'm not sure where the idea came from. If you've ever read Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, she talks about ideas and where they come from and all that kind of thing. It's fascinating. It's like it just dropped in my head and I know for a fact that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gone away and turned off my brain and unplugged for those five or six days with my friends in the countryside.

And I think a lot of it had to do with the nature I was surrounded by as well, because nature is very healing, it soothes our soul, it relaxes us. We were surrounded pretty much by panoramic views of the Welsh countryside and it was beautiful, it was green, it was sunny, and I think that just really sort of helped me reset whatever was going on with my brain before that, and it just made the space for those ideas to come flooding to me.

And it's interesting that it happened as soon as I was alone. It didn't happen hours later; it was like an instant download. It was very strange, I can't quite explain it very well, maybe it was The Chicks that I was listening to, but yeah.

So, I just wanted to make a quick podcast episode about it just to remind you how important it is to unplug, switch off, and surround yourself with nature if you can, and how some of your best ideas might come directly after you've had that big brain break. That was the start of my travel coaching and the travel transformation services and all of that. So I have a lot to thank Wales for and my friends.

And yeah, I'd love to know if you have had any similar experiences where you've had a complete brain break and then had a breakthrough in terms of business or life, or just having an idea that's just sort of appeared in your mind.

This happens to me a lot; I don't know where they come from. When I'm writing a book, for instance, I'll have ideas just pop into my head, and I guess that's what ideas are, really. But the way it happens, I sometimes find quite strange. And again, I recommend Big Magic, if you're into that kind of thing.

So that's it – just a quick episode compared to some of my rambling ones. Thank you for listening, and until next time, I'll catch you on the flip side, bye!

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