travel broadens the mind speech

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Traveling Opens Your Mind: Here's How

Raised in the small suburb of Schaumburg, Adriana Perez knew there was more to life than a white ...

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Mark Twain said it, your travel advisor said it, even you've told it to yourself—traveling opens your mind. But what exactly does that mean? What does that look like in your day-to-day life abroad?

Panoramic view over the city of Barcelona seen from Parque GuellPhoto credit to Natalia Sleszynska

Yes, travel CAN broaden the mind, but it's up to the traveler to tune in, pay attention, and simultaneously practice humility and self-reflection. Here's our take on how travel broadens the mind.

What is relativism?

It is a fancy way of saying to keep an open mind and be aware that how you see the world is not how everyone else sees the world. Priorities, morals, values, every possible social aspect of a culture are unique and open to interpretation depending on who is experiencing it.

The opposite of relativism is ethnocentrism. While the word has a negative, racist connotation, it just means being unaware of the other cultures around you and not accepting the differences in how other people may see the world. Sometimes ethnocentrism is intentional, but more often than not is purely ignorance, which can be easily fixed with knowledge.

How is this different than culture shock?

Culture shock affects some people more than others, but no matter how tolerant or learned someone is, that initial contact with a new culture is always eye opening. It is one thing to read about a culture, how it is different, and to keep an open mind. It is another thing entirely to experience firsthand a conflict of cultural norms. Many assume that the greater the difference, the greater the culture shock. This is not always the case, though, and sometimes having only subtle differences can be just as disarming because they are so subtle that they no longer appear as cultural differences; rather they come off as potential personality traits or character flaws.

A few examples of how traveling opens your mind

In Barcelona, it is very common for a waiter to be taking your order and if he sees that you are slow in saying what you want, or hesitant and uncertain at the last minute, to walk away from you and begin to take care of another table. This is a subtle difference in cultures that happens frequently, and is very normal, but to an American traveler may come off as rude or impatient. These feelings are ethnocentric, but feel valid because the cultural difference is so subtle that it is not as obviously a cultural difference. It is important to understand and be ready for these subtle differences in culture, because someone may interpret an experience like this negatively, and let it negatively impact the rest of their day and ruin what should have been a nice evening.

Another example of this is riding on public transportation. In many cultures it is considered rude to stare, but in Barcelona it is not taken quite as offensively. Because of this, many people commuting will be faced with looks or intense stares. Some can interpret this offensively and let it bother them the rest of the day, perhaps cause them to think there is something on their face or they had been doing something wrong, but that is not the case. It is a common occurrence, and should you be stared at, shake it off and do not take it personally. Perhaps join in on the cultural habit and stare at others as well, gauging how they respond to it.

On top of a mountain in Cape Town, South AfricaPhoto credit to Hillary Federico

It is a lot harder to experience events like this and think, “I am in a new culture, it is different from mine, and they see the world through a different lens than I do” than if the difference was more obvious.

But just like a photographer packs many lenses for his or her camera, it is just as important for a traveler to pack some cultural lenses, and prepare themselves for seeing the world in a different way than they are used to doing.

Travel broadens the mind if you are open to it

Life and the encounters experienced are all based off of how they are interpreted and perceived. Someone walking down the street that gets pushed can either interpret it as an act of hostility or as an accident. These interpretations are what create experiences, and experiences vary internally from person to person, even if the actions that occur are the same externally.

Traveling is a unique experience, and it is over before you know it, so it is crucial to take advantage of every moment and make everyday a positive one. Feeling upset or irritated are normal human emotions, and it’s impossible to not feel down every once in awhile, but it is good to minimize feeling these negative sensations when they can be controlled. Including a relativistic view of the world and the cultures within it can help in reducing these negative sensations, using knowledge and an open mind as a shield from potential emotional threats.

Any experience can be a positive one if you have the right mindset. Whether you are heading to the other end of the world, or to Barcelona, it is important to note the cultural differences and be prepared for what is to come. Everyone always warns you about the big cultural differences, but the subtle cultural differences can be just as important to take note of. Some you can read about and be prepared for, but no matter what there will always be those that catch you by surprise. Remember to pack a relativistic mindset, and every experience abroad should be a learning experience for you, opening your mind in ways that you never imagined were possible.

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How Traveling Can Broaden Your Horizons

If you’ve never traveled then the world out there can seem incredibly intimidating. You hear these stories about people getting kidnapped, crime waves hitting foreign regions and natural disasters to boot and think ‘not for me, thanks’. And really, that’s an understandable response. All the same, if that’s how you’re looking at this, then boy are you missing out!

The truth is, it’s not half as dangerous out there as you might think it is. The main reason why there is such a big difference between how it is and how you perceive it as being is down to the modern news cycle. There are a bunch of channels competing for viewing numbers 24 hours a day. And disaster attracts more viewers than happy stories do. That’s just the way it is.

A much better way to know where to go is to look at how countries rank . Doing so will show you that the UK is at 74 and the US is at 84 th place, with there being a host of other countries which are far safer.

Even better, if you do go you’ll find that you will learn invaluable skills which will help you throughout your life – including helping you manage dangerous and difficult situations. Here are some of the most noteworthy advantages.

Travel Boosts Your Emotional Intelligence

You’ve probably heard of IQ. Just as important for our success, however, is your EQ or emotional intelligence quotient . That defines how well you understand your own emotions and those of others. And that’s a big deal, as your emotions decide how you’ll react, while knowing the emotions of others will make it easier to react appropriately to them.

The reason that travel is such a great tool for growing your emotional intelligence is because it lets you realize why people feel the way they do. You see, people everywhere are driven by the same forces and drives. Sure, these things might have different names, wear different clothes and speak different languages, but deep down they are still the same.

The more you travel, the more obvious this becomes and the better you become at understanding where somebody is coming from – whether you speak their language or not. This, in term, makes you better at responding appropriately to what these people are doing. You know what people are really after, how they mean to get there and whether that will help or harm you.

Travel Will Make You More Creative

There’s no getting around it. Travel sparks creativity. This is mainly down to the way that travel makes you see things in a different light and from different angels. Why? Because culture is a box in which you reside. Even worse, when you don’t travel you don’t even realize the dimensions of that box and how it funnels your thinking. You end up thinking are black and white when in fact there’s a whole range of other colors they can be.

Travel breaks you out of that box. It allows you to realize how people think different, act different and have different values. This, in turn, allows you to understand the world’s many different colors that much better.

Even better, learn some different languages while you’re there. The shopping list of mental benefits that doing so has is just tremendous. As an extra bonus, a whole lot of employment options open up when you can translate to multiple languages.

It Makes You More Open Minded

In fact, travel affects a lot of the big five personality traits in a positive way. It makes you more open-minded, less neurotic and even boosts how agreeable you are. These are often incredibly useful traits, whether you’re trying to start a business or just get along with your friends and family.

What is just as true is that the people you meet on the road are also stronger in these attributes. And so, you’ll often in that even if they’re from the same area as you are, they’re more open minded and friendlier than the people you meet at home. This is because travelers self-select. Those who like it are more easy going, while those who don’t often aren’t.

It Makes You Understand What You Have

And finally there’s how it changed how you view home. This is not to be underestimated. You might think that you fully understand what you’ve got. The thing is, you probably don’t. Most us don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone. The great thing about traveling is that you can get something to go away for a little while and then return to it. That means you get the best of both worlds. You get to both experience the world without these things and then return to them when you realize how much you miss them.

From my own experience I can tell you that when you get them back – be it the love of a sibling or the enjoyment of a hot shower – these things are better than they’ve been in forever. And that, in fact, make it worth the time you spent away.

Author Bio:

Margaret Reid is a self-driven specialist who is currently working in the company The Word Point and trying to improve herself in the blogging career at Writersquad.co.uk . She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That`s why Margaret develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help and inspire people.

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Travelers may find it difficult to empathize with locals, according to experts. Here, tourists in 2016 buy fruit juice at a market stall in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Travel is said to increase cultural understanding. Does it?

While researchers say travel does affect the brain’s neural pathways, true empathy remains an elusive destination.

Empathy is commonly defined as “putting yourself in another person’s shoes” or “feeling the emotional states of others.” It’s a critical social tool that creates social bridges by promoting shared experiences and producing compassionate behavior. But can empathy be learned? And can travel help facilitate this learning? The answer is complicated. “Research has shown that empathy is not simply inborn, but can actually be taught,” writes psychotherapist F. Diane Barth in Psychology Today . While past research has indicated that empathy is an unteachable trait, newer research—including a 2017 Harvard study —suggests that the “neurobiologically based competency” of empathy is mutable and can be taught under the right circumstances. Whether seeing the world actually opens travelers’ minds—that it makes travelers more empathetic—is up for debate. In a 2018 Harris Poll of 1,300 business travelers, 87 percent said that business trips helped them to be more empathetic to others, reports Quartz . And in a 2010 study , Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky found that travel “increases awareness of underlying connections and associations” with other cultures. While self-defined empathy and awareness are unreliable measurements, it stands to reason that cross-cultural exposure through travel would at least create conditions for checking conscious and unconscious biases. “If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds,” writes Helen Riess, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of the 2017 report.

But the coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the global Black Lives Matter protests have forced an uncomfortable reckoning—that all the travel in the world might not be enough to engender the deep cross-cultural awareness people need now.

“There’s this false adage that travel opens minds, but that’s not [a built-in] fact about what travel does,” says Travis Levius, a Black travel journalist and hospitality consultant based in London and Atlanta. “Travel does not automatically make you a better person,” nor does it clue you into “what’s going on in terms of race relations.”

Black Travel Alliance founder Martina Jones-Johnson agrees, noting that tourism boards have made it “overwhelmingly clear that travel doesn’t necessarily build empathy.”

The lack of diversity within the travel industry itself suggests that there’s much work to be done to make the industry as inclusive as the world of travel consumers. According to a 2019 annual report by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in the leisure and hospitality industry were overwhelmingly white. Consumers, meanwhile, say they want to spend their money on travel companies whose employees reflect the world they work in, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council .

Additionally, companies that embrace inclusivity may have a better chance of avoiding tone-deaf messages , such as using “free at last”—the line is from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” speech—to caption a billboard depicting white children jumping into the Florida Keys. The advertisement, which has since been taken down, launched in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis that sparked worldwide protests against police brutality.

(Related: Learn why it’s important to have diverse perspectives in travel.)

Karfa Diallo leads a tour of sites related to the slave trade in Bordeaux, France

Karfa Diallo leads a tour of sites related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Bordeaux, France, in June 2020. Participating in activities that amplify marginalized voices and experiences can go a long way toward developing empathy, say experts.

A road paved with good intentions

Interestingly, modern tourism has fairly empathic origins. In the 1850s, Thomas Cook used new railway systems to develop short-haul leisure travel as respites for hard-working British laborers, according to Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, a senior lecturer on tourism management at the University of South Australia.

A hundred years later the United Nations declared reasonable working hours, paid holidays, and “rest and leisure” as human rights . By the 1960s, spurred by related movements to increase holiday time, the leisure sector had coalesced into a full-fledged professional industry.

Since then, the World Tourism Organization and international aid groups have championed tourism as both “a vital force for world peace [that] can provide the moral and intellectual basis for international understanding and interdependence,” as well as an economic development strategy for poorer nations.

But not everyone agrees that the travel industry has lived up to these lofty goals. In recent decades, it has been accused of doing just the opposite. As Stephen Wearing wrote nearly 20 years ago : “tourism perpetuates inequality” because multinational corporations from capitalist countries hold all the economic and resource power over developing nations.

(Related: This is how national parks are fighting racism.)

These days, inequality is baked into the very process of traveling, says veteran Time magazine foreign correspondent and Roads & Kingdoms co-founder Nathan Thornburgh. “Your frequent flier status, the stupid little cordon separating the boarding lines, the way you take an Uber or cab from the airport after you land, not a bus or colectivo or matatu —those all reinforce divisions, not empathy,” he writes in an email. “And that’s just getting to a place.”

Empathy’s downsides

Experts say developing empathy isn’t easy and comes with a host of problems. Joseph M. Cheer, a professor at Wakayama University’s Center for Tourism Research in Japan, notes that empathy inherently “others” another person.

In his 2019 study of westerners on a bike tour in Cambodia, Cheer found that despite the prosocial aspects of the experience—visiting local non-governmental organizations, interacting with local Cambodians—post-tour interviews revealed that the tourists didn’t understand the cultural context of the outing. The visitors leaned into problematic tropes like “happy,” “lovely,” and “generous” when describing locals or simply saw Cambodians as service providers.

This “othering” bias, Cheer says, becomes more noticeable the greater the distance between tourists and locals, and especially so in strictly transactional encounters, such as in hotels.

a waiter balances drinks at a resort in Bali

A worker at a resort in Bali. Researchers say visitors should make a commitment to understand local cultures by moving past transactional interactions.

Our individual travel experiences oppose our best intentions, says travel writer Bani Amor, who has written extensively on race, place, and power.

“The stated [positive] intentions are completely contradictive to what happens in the tourism industry and how oppressive it is to BIPOC [Black, indigenous, and people of color] around the world, how tourism laborers are being treated, and how they’re being dispossessed, not having a right to their own land and to enjoy our own places,” says Amor, who has worked in the tourism industry in their ancestral home of Ecuador.

“You can only really know your own experience,” adds Anu Taranath, a racial equity professor at the University of Washington Seattle and a second-generation immigrant.

“I think we can develop empathetic feelings and sort of crack open our sense of self to include other people’s experiences in it. We can only deepen our own understanding of who we are in an unequal world and how that makes us feel and how that motivates us to shift our life in some way or another.”

I think in its purest form, empathy is basically impossible. I can weep for you, but I can’t weep as you. Nathan Thornburgh , founder, Roads & Kingdoms

Or as Thornburgh puts it: “I think in its purest form, empathy is basically impossible. I can weep for you, but I can’t weep as you.”

Traveling deeper

While experts conclude that travel may not inspire enough empathy to turn tourists into social justice activists, the alternative—not traveling at all—may actually be worse.

“[B]ecause travel produces encounters between strangers, it is likely to prompt empathetic-type imaginings, which simply wouldn’t be there without the proximity created by travel,” says Hazel Tucker in a 2016 study published in the Annals of Tourism. It’s also one reason why it’s important to expose children to travel at an early age.

Yet truly transformational experiences require more than just showing up with a suitcase. It requires energy, effort, and commitment on the part of tourists, as well as specific conditions, says Higgins-Desbiolles. “Visitors need to be prepped for the interaction so that they are ready to engage with the people on an equal level,” she notes.

Taranath’s book Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World may provide some starting points. “It’s an invitation to think more carefully about our good intentions and where they really need to be challenged,” Taranath explains. “How do you think about identity and difference in an unequal world? What does it actually look like?”

Additionally, Tucker suggests embracing what she calls “unsettled empathy”: learning about the cultures you’re planning to visit and sitting with uncomfortable legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and displacement from which no destinations are exempt.

a Gullah sweet grass basket weaver at her stand in Mt Pleasant, South Carolina

Barbara Manigault, a Gullah sweet grass basket weaver, practices her craft in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. American tourists with limited travel opportunities can find many places in the U.S. to learn more about other cultures.

That background can be the basis for meaningful conversations, which Cheer found are “the key element that prompted empathy.” Thornburgh adds that travelers should seek out places where there is “an equal and humanistic exchange, or something approaching it, between the visitors and the visited.”

(Related: The E.U. has banned American travelers. So where can they go? )

Toward that end, experts generally ruled out cruises. Instead, immersive experiences like Black Heritage Tours that amplify historically marginalized voices provide better opportunities for meaningful connections.

Fortunately for would-be travelers, those opportunities can be found even in these pandemic times, when many countries are restricting international travel, especially for Americans.

“We are so lucky in this country that the whole world has come here to build their lives, in big cities and small, and that we have Black and [Native American] communities throughout,” says Thornburgh. “Go to their restaurants, lend your talents to their schools, help them raise money for their playgrounds.

“You want travel? You want to experience different cultures? Start at home. Start now.”