How Travel Changed My Understanding of Why People Stay Stuck: Lessons From 73 Countries

In the fall of 2014, I was a junior finance major at Bentley University who'd barely left Massachusetts. Then I studied abroad in Barcelona - and in one semester, I visited 12 countries on a backpacker's budget, sleeping in hostels and surviving on cheap sangria. Something cracked open. The world was bigger than anything I'd been told, and I couldn't unsee it.

I went back to the US, graduated, and did what you're supposed to do. I took a consulting job at Grant Thornton. Then another at RSM. Good salary. Clear trajectory. And a quiet, growing certainty that I was building someone else's life. So I started building my own - nights and weekends at first, then full-time. A travel blog that would eventually reach over 10 million people. Then more businesses. Then location independence, working from co-working spaces and hotel rooms across five continents.

Over the past nine years, I've traveled to 73 countries. And somewhere between a cold plunge in Iceland and a breathwork session in Bali, I started noticing something that would eventually become the foundation of everything I do now.

If you've ever felt stuck in life and wondered whether a radical change of scenery might be the answer - or if you're afraid of change but can't stop thinking about it - this isn't a travel blog. It's a map of what I learned about the psychology of transformation by watching how the rest of the world does it.

Every culture has a different relationship with change. And most of them handle it better than we do.

Bali: Identity Beyond the Resume

The first thing you notice in Bali is that nobody asks what you do. Not at dinner parties, not in casual conversation, not ever. The question doesn't make sense to them - not because they don't work, but because work isn't the container for identity there.

Instead, they ask which village you're from, which temple your family belongs to, whether you've completed certain ceremonies. Identity is relational, communal, spiritual - not professional.

This wrecked me. Because I realized how much of my resistance to change was actually resistance to losing my professional identity. I was a consultant. Without that title, who was I? In Bali, the answer was obvious: you're a person. The job was never who you were. It was just something you did for a while.

If your resistance to change is tangled up with your identity - if you can't imagine who you'd be on the other side - you might be running what we call the Security Pattern. Not financial security. Identity security. And it's one of the hardest patterns to see because in most Western cultures, it's completely normalized.

Oman: The Art of the Transition

In Oman, I experienced a pace of life that made me physically uncomfortable at first. Nothing moves fast there. Tea is poured slowly. Conversations take twice as long as you expect. Meals last hours - not because there's more food, but because nobody's in a rush to leave. I stayed at The Chedi Muscat, one of the most beautiful hotels I've ever experienced, and even there the luxury wasn't about excess - it was about space. Space to breathe. Space to think. Space to just be.

In the West, we treat transitions as problems to be solved as quickly as possible. The gap between jobs is “unemployment.” The gap between relationships is “being alone.” The gap between who you were and who you're becoming is “a crisis.”

In Oman, that gap has dignity. It has purpose. Sitting with a shopkeeper in Muscat's Mutrah Souk, I asked about a career change he'd made years earlier - from fishing to trade. He looked puzzled by the question. “I wasn't becoming something new,” he told me. “I was just continuing.” There was no crisis in the transition. No identity threat. Just one chapter becoming another. Researchers have found that the ability to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty is one of the strongest predictors of successful life transitions.

This taught me that our obsession with “What's the plan?” and “What's next?” might be the very thing that keeps us from actually changing. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is sit in the space between and let it teach you something.

Iceland: Comfort with Discomfort

Iceland has a population smaller than most cities, weather that actively tries to kill you for six months a year, and some of the happiest people I've ever met. How?

Part of it is a cultural relationship with discomfort that is completely foreign to most of us. They swim in near-freezing water. They walk through horizontal rain without commenting on it. They have a phrase - “þetta reddast” - that roughly translates to “it will all work out.” Not with false optimism, but with a genuine shrug.

They've built resilience not by avoiding discomfort but by befriending it. Discomfort is just weather. It comes, it goes, and you're still here.

Most resistance patterns are, at their core, sophisticated systems for avoiding discomfort. The Timing Pattern avoids the discomfort of uncertainty. The Obligation Pattern avoids the discomfort of disappointing others. The Failure Pattern avoids the discomfort of being seen trying. What if discomfort wasn't the enemy? What if it was just weather?

Sedona: Where Transformation Isn't Weird

I spent three weeks in Sedona, Arizona, and it changed my understanding of permission. In Sedona, talking about transformation is like talking about breakfast. Everyone's doing it. Everyone's in some stage of becoming. The energy healer and the retired Marine sit next to each other at the café and neither one thinks the other is strange.

What this creates is an environment where change is normalized. Where wanting a different life isn't a symptom of something wrong but evidence of something right. Where you don't need to justify your desire for change with a spreadsheet or a crisis.

Most of us don't live in Sedona. We live in environments where change is treated with suspicion, where wanting more is conflated with being ungrateful, where the safest thing to say about your dreams is nothing at all.

If you've been shrinking your desires because the people around you wouldn't understand, that's the Worth Pattern. And it thrives in environments that treat transformation as self-indulgent rather than essential.

Colombia: Joy as Resistance to Resistance

In Medellín, I met a woman who had rebuilt her entire life after the violence of the 1990s. She'd lost her business, her home, and people she loved. When I asked how she found the courage to start again, she looked at me like I'd asked why the sky was blue.

“Courage?” she said. “No. Joy. I didn't start again because I was brave. I started again because I refused to let what happened take my joy.”

She taught me that transformation doesn't always start with a plan. Sometimes it starts with protecting the part of you that still knows how to want things. The part that gets excited. The part that imagines. Most resistance patterns work by slowly dimming that part of you until you mistake its silence for maturity.

It's not maturity. It's surrender. And it's reversible.

Morocco: The Long Game

In the medina of Fez, I watched a craftsman spend an entire afternoon hand-cutting a single mosaic tile for a zellige table. Not because he was slow, but because that was the pace of the task. It took as long as it took. His grandfather had done the same work. His son was learning beside him.

We want transformation to be fast. We want the insight, the breakthrough, the moment of clarity that changes everything overnight. And sometimes that happens. But more often, change is the mosaic - one tile at a time, with attention, with care, and without rushing.

The pressure to change quickly is itself a form of resistance. It sets up an impossible standard and then uses your failure to meet it as evidence that change isn't possible for you. “See? You tried for two weeks and nothing happened. Better go back to what you know.”

Change that lasts is change that takes the time it needs.

This is also why I built Career Leap as a 30-day roadmap instead of a quick fix. If your resistance pattern is keeping you trapped in the wrong career, the answer isn't a snap decision - it's a mapped-out transition that respects the pace real change requires.

What 73 Countries Taught Me

Here's what I learned, distilled across continents and years and thousands of conversations:

Change is not a Western self-help concept. It's a human experience that every culture on earth has wisdom about. And most of that wisdom says the same thing in different languages: stop running from the discomfort. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop asking permission. Stop confusing your job title with your identity. And for the love of everything - stop pretending you don't want what you want.

If you want to understand the specific mechanics of how these patterns work, read our complete guide to the 8 resistance patterns that keep smart people stuck.

Your resistance pattern didn't form in a vacuum. It was shaped by your culture, your family, your specific set of fears and experiences. And it can be reshaped - not with more information, but with clear-eyed recognition of what it is and how it operates.

We wrote about why information alone doesn't create change - and what actually does - in Why You Can't Take Action (Even When You Know Exactly What To Do).

The Make the Leap assessment was built from this understanding - that transformation isn't one-size-fits-all, that your pattern is specific and personal, and that seeing it clearly is the first real step toward moving through it.

You don't need to visit 73 countries to change your life. But you do need to see the water you've been swimming in.

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The Make the Leap assessment identifies your resistance pattern in about 10 minutes. And if your pattern is keeping you in the wrong career, Career Leap maps your skills and values to specific directions with a 30-day plan.