Passport to Perspective: How Travel Transforms the Way We Work, Live and Lead
By Sheila Hunter, ex Cabin Crew and Business owner
There’s nothing quite like finding yourself baffled in a Tokyo train station at rush hour, clutching a map written entirely in Kanji and wondering, with increasing urgency, whether you’re heading toward Kyoto or a broom cupboard. It’s in these moments jet-lagged, humbled, and entirely out of your element that perspective quietly taps you on the shoulder and says: “You’re not in Surrey anymore, are you?”
Travel, in its purest form, is not simply about ticking countries off a list or collecting tiny shampoo bottles from every continent. It’s about the subtle recalibration of our internal compass. The sort of reset you can’t find in a strategy workshop or after a brisk walk and a flat white. Whether it’s navigating a Moroccan souk, being hopelessly out-haggled over a rug you didn’t want, or marvelling at the Swiss efficiency that somehow extends even to cows, travel offers a front-row seat to the grand theatre of human difference and occasionally, absurdity.
For those of us entrenched in leadership, business, or just trying to get the Wi-Fi to work on Teams, travel gently reminds us that the world is not designed in our image. And thank heavens for that. Encountering other ways of living, working, and problem-solving makes our own methods look either gloriously inventive or hilariously overcomplicated. (Usually both.)
In a Maasai village in Kenya, I once met a community elder who managed conflict resolution with nothing but storytelling, tea, and a level stare that could unpick your soul. No KPIs, no PowerPoints, no “circling back”. Just presence. It was a lesson in leadership more profound than anything I’d gleaned from Harvard Business Review.
Travel also gifts us what I call productive discomfort that glorious awkwardness of being a beginner again. When you can’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, and aren’t sure if you’ve just ordered a coffee or adopted a goat, you are forced to listen, observe and adapt. These, I’m told, are also key leadership skills albeit underexplored in most boardrooms.
But perhaps the greatest gift of travel is perspective. Not the Instagrammed kind that makes you feel inadequate because someone is doing yoga on a Balinese cliff at sunrise. No, I mean the quiet, grounding sort, the kind that reminds you that while your inbox may be full, the world is vast, generous and teeming with different ways to live a life.
So yes, by all means, chase new markets, optimise your operations and lead your teams to greatness. But do take the time to get a bit lost now and then. Miss a train in Naples. Order something mysterious in Hanoi. Get sunburnt in Scotland. You’ll return not just with stories and souvenirs, but with a deeper, more generous understanding of the world and your place within it.
And if that’s not excellent business practice, I don’t know what is.
