Give Yourself Permission to Change (Part 6)

What does giving yourself permission to change have to do with slow travel?

Quite a lot, actually.

When people think about traveling long-term, one of the biggest fears isn’t money, visas, or learning a new language. It’s leaving behind everything that’s familiar.

Friends.

Family.

Your job.

Your routine.

Your identity.

For many people, that fear turns into pressure.

Pressure to make traveling work.

Pressure to prove that leaving was the right decision.

Pressure to succeed because everyone back home is watching.

I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

When we left in 2015, we never told people that we’d never come back.

We never announced that we were leaving forever or that we’d found the secret to life.

We simply went on a journey.

If traveling wasn’t for us, we’d come home.

There would have been no shame in that.

Sometimes I think the easiest way to feel free is to stop creating expectations before you’ve even taken the first step.

If you’re thinking about traveling, don’t tell everyone that you’re leaving forever.

Tell them you’re going to find out whether this lifestyle is right for you.

If it isn’t, you’ll be home sooner than you expected.

That single change removes an incredible amount of pressure.

It gives you permission to explore instead of feeling like you constantly have to prove something.

Over the years, I realised something else.

The people who knew us before we started traveling also knew the version of us that existed back then.

They knew our jobs.

They knew our routines.

They knew the lives we’d built.

The people we met while traveling knew none of that.

They met us exactly as we were in that moment.

There were no expectations.

No assumptions.

No history we had to live up to.

That gave us an incredible amount of freedom.

When Free To Use Sounds was born, almost nobody from our old lives knew what we were doing. We weren’t worried about whether someone from my old workplace would understand why I was recording birds or sitting beside a railway line for three hours waiting for a single passing train.

We simply tried things.

Some ideas worked.

Many didn’t.

We made mistakes.

Changed direction.

Started over.

And nobody expected us to have all the answers.

That freedom allowed us to discover who we really were.

If we’d worried too much about what everyone else thought, I’m not sure Free To Use Sounds would exist today.

Every now and then, Libby and I watch old videos from our first years of traveling.

I usually end up saying the same thing.

“Was that really me?”

It was.

But it was a version of me who still had so much to learn.

I’m not the same person I was eleven years ago.

Neither is Libby.

And honestly, I’m grateful for that.

Travel didn’t just change where we lived.

It changed how we think.

It changed what we value.

It changed the people we became.

Maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts slow travel has given us.

Not the countries we’ve visited.

Not the memories we’ve collected.

Not even the business we were fortunate enough to build.

It gave us the time and the space to grow.

To question old ideas.

To discover new passions.

To change our minds.

And to become people we never would have become if we’d stayed exactly where we were.

If there’s one thing I’d tell anyone thinking about taking a similar journey, it’s this:

Don’t feel like you have to become the person you imagined before you left.

Allow yourself to become the person you haven’t met yet.

Because sometimes the greatest destination isn’t another country.

It’s the version of yourself that’s quietly waiting to emerge once you finally give yourself permission to change.