Last month, I completed a three-and-a-half-month-long travel trip around the world. Five continents, six countries and ten cities later and I’ve returned to my beloved England. As you can imagine, a trip like this doesn’t come without revelations, experiences, ups and downs, but it teaches you a lot all the same.

Travelling has never been on the forefront of my mind until recently; yes, I had been on holiday multiple times, mostly in Europe and less frequently further away, but I never understood just how much it helps you grow as a person. And that you don’t have to go far to step out of your comfort zone.

Because that’s what it was for me: A step out of my comfort zone.

As an anxious person, I tend to stay in my bubble of comfort. I may be an expat in England and thus have taken the step of moving countries, and yes, I may have taken one or two risks in the past couple of years, but generally speaking, my comfort zone is my favourite place to be.

When you’re going travelling, however, you’re most likely leaving that comfort zone, therefore automatically progressing. You know what they say: ‘All progress takes place outside the comfort zone’. And on any trip, whether it’s down the road or far abroad, there will be times where you can’t escape situation you’d much rather flee.

Unexpected situations: Fight or flight

When I arrived at my very first destination – Cairo in Egypt – I checked into a hotel that immediately made me feel utterly uncomfortable. Goodness knows why I booked it in the first place, being the strict planner and review-reader that I am, but this hotel was in an area that had never seen a Western tourist before, let alone a white, blonde woman.

This is not supposed to be about cultural differences, but as you can imagine, the clash of cultures was a hard one. Add a dirty room, complications with the booking, an unusable and unsafe outside area, and a 15-minute captivity due to non-working handles in the bathroom, and I had accepted that this wasn’t the right place for me to be.

Of course, the internet did not work, either, so I switched on the mobile data on my phone, booked a room in a different hotel and left.

This was not the only time a situation came up that I could not have foreseen, which made me feel very uncomfortable, but it got solved, anyway.

It’s not easy in the moment, but once you’ve done it, there’s an entirely newfound horizon of trust.

Trust within yourself, that is

You may sometimes believe you can’t do something. You convince yourself that you’re incapable of achieving something and put it safely away to the back of your mind. But when you’re confronted with a situation you cannot avoid, where there’s barely any choice but to fight and solve it, you gain so much trust in yourself that it might make you feel like superwoman for a moment.

We’re all superwomen

In a society where women’s abilities to achieve anything is often undermined, going on a travel trip will show you just how much you can do. It doesn’t have to be far, but I encourage everyone to take a trip to an unknown destination some time.

It will reveal so much about yourself to you: Strengths you didn’t know you had, abilities you didn’t know you possessed, and possibly one or the other characteristic you had forgotten about.

But most of all, the memories will stay with you forever

The world is too vast, too beautiful to only stay in your comfort zone. Explore your country, explore your continent and, if you can, explore the world. Every new place will teach you something, whether it’s through the people, through nature or through experiences.

Written by Lisa Gust, also writes over on lisakristinx.co.uk and can be found as @lisakristinx on Instagram.