Why Adventurous Souls?

I have a background in all things human. That probably sounds pretty vague, but honestly, it’s a thing!

I love people. I love behaviour. I love trying to understand why we do what we do, why we react the way we do, why some things trigger us and others don’t, why we cling to certain stories about ourselves, and why sometimes it takes a complete life shake-up to finally see ourselves a little more clearly.

I’ve spent a lot of time delving into the depths of my own mind and behaviour. Sometimes willingly and sometimes because life has dragged me there screaming. I think, over time, that’s given me greater compassion towards people who perhaps haven’t spent quite as much time delving into theirs. It’s also given me more patience, more curiosity and a greater ability to meet people where they are rather than where I think they should be.

And trust me, this has not always been the case. It took a slap in the face from a beautiful friend to make me realise that I used to fall in love with people’s potential rather than where they actually were. That happened in way too many relationships for me to comfortably admit!

I’ve worked with people of all ages, backgrounds and walks of life. I’ve worked with migrants, lived around the world, speak a few different languages and genuinely love nothing more than being dropped into a country where I don’t speak the language and having to find another way to connect.

There is something beautiful about discovering how much communication exists beyond words. Facial expressions, tone, hands, laughter, food, eye contact, the universal language of pointing at something, pulling a confused face and hoping for the best!

Some of the most memorable connections I’ve had in my life have been with people I could barely speak to. I think that’s probably why I’ve always been so drawn to humans in general. I like meeting people where they are, without too much judgement. Some of my favourite relationships haven’t even been in English. Maybe words just mess things up sometimes!

I was brought up to believe that the Prime Minister and the garbo deserve the same level of respect. That has stayed with me. Status doesn’t impress me much. Character does. How people treat other people, animals and places matters to me far more than their title, salary, social standing or how important they think they are.

Although, if I’m being completely truthful, I do sometimes struggle to respect people who are blatantly self-obsessed. That’s still a lesson in humility for me. I don’t have to like everyone. I don’t have to invite everyone around for tea. I don’t have to become friends with everybody I meet or pretend I connect deeply with every human who crosses my path. But I can still remember that they are human and not be an arsehole to them.

Some of the most amazing people I’ve met in my life have had stories completely different from mine. Different countries, religions, cultures, beliefs, politics and ways of living. And underneath all of that, so often, we still want the same things. We want to love and be loved. We want to feel safe. We want connection. We want to belong somewhere. We want enough of whatever feels important to us in that moment.

Maybe that’s money, freedom, family, adventure, peace or simply getting through the week without everything falling apart. The details are different. The humanness isn’t.

I’m one of those people who will cross the road to pat a street dog if it makes eye contact with me and has a wiggle in its butt. I’ll play peek-a-boo with a crying child on a train until they start smiling. I’ll stop and wait for an elderly person so I can hold the door open. If someone is struggling with language in the street, I’ll do my best to help.

I talk to strangers, smile at people and notice people. Not because I’m trying to be some kind of saint. Far from it! It just feels natural to me, and I genuinely don’t understand why it doesn’t feel natural to everyone.

It isn’t hard to create tiny moments of connection in the world, and I really believe those moments are important. Maybe more than we realise. I think we are here to connect, to experience, to learn, to love, to screw things up occasionally, to change our minds, to laugh at ourselves, to be cracked open by life and hopefully become a little wiser, softer or braver because of it.

Without delving too deeply into my own life story, I’ve worked in a lot of industries, lived in a lot of places and somehow collected far too many stories for someone my age.

Actually, no. We can never have too many stories.

I joke with guests on my tours that I’m really 85; I just swim in magic lakes every week to stop the ageing process.

I think the stories might be one of my favourite things about being alive. The wild ones, the painful ones, the beautiful ones, the ones where you look back and think, what the fuck was I thinking? The ones where everything went wrong and somehow became a better story because of it. The people you never expected to meet, the places you never expected to live, the moments that changed you without announcing themselves as important at the time.

Life is there for the taking, and I’ve never really understood why we’re encouraged to make comfort the ultimate goal. Comfort is lovely. I like comfort. I enjoy a proper mattress, a hot shower and enough money in my bank account that I don’t have to panic when something breaks. But I don’t think we’re here simply to get comfortable and stay there.

Sometimes your soul wants something completely different from what society has told you to want. It wants movement, experience, connection, something that feels alive. And often, those things require courage.

It takes courage to leave somewhere that no longer fits. It takes courage to start again, to travel alone, to say, “Actually, I don’t want that life.” It takes courage to follow an idea other people don’t understand. It takes courage to make space for something new when you have no idea what the new thing is going to look like yet.

It is very easy to settle. To tick the boxes. To follow the expected path. To fill every spare moment with screens and distractions. To convince ourselves that life is happening to us and that we don’t really have much say in it.

That makes no sense to me.

I really believe life is ours for the taking. Not in the sense that we control everything, because we absolutely don’t, but we do have choices. We can choose what we move towards. We can choose what we keep holding onto and what we’re ready to let go of.

Sometimes, if we want something new to enter our lives, we need to create space for it first. That can mean letting go of things we’re clinging to simply because they’re familiar. Old identities, old stories, old expectations, relationships, jobs, possessions, ways of living, even ideas about who we thought we were supposed to become.

That has been a huge part of my own life, and I think that’s also where my passion for humanity comes from. I’ve lived enough different versions of myself to know that people are rarely just one thing.

We change. We contradict ourselves. We grow. We regress. We get scared. We surprise ourselves. We do things we once swore we’d never do. We become people our younger selves wouldn’t recognise.

I love this so much.

The world places a huge amount of value on logistics, money and success. I get it. I like being organised. I like having enough money. I would very happily welcome a much healthier bank account.

But they aren’t how I measure a life.

For me, success is connection, love and freedom. It’s being able to look around at my life and know that it actually feels like mine. It’s having stories. It’s having people I care about. It’s feeling something. It’s being moved by people and places.

That doesn’t mean being blind. I see the fear being created in the world. I see the division. I see how easy it is to become consumed by bad news, angry opinions, algorithms and endless reasons to believe everything is falling apart. There are very real problems in the world. I don’t pretend there aren’t.

But I also don’t believe fear is the whole story.

This is one of the reasons I love guiding so much. Guiding gives me this incredible opportunity to connect with people from around the world and remind them, in a very small way, that there’s still so much beauty and goodness here. Not by giving some inspirational speech, but just by living it with them.

Walking somewhere beautiful. Laughing around a table. Seeing animals in the wild. Swimming in the ocean. Talking to a local. Learning something. Getting something wrong. Sharing stories. Being somewhere new. Being present. Being human together.

That, for me, is the magic of travel and life.

I think that’s where the inspiration for Adventurous Souls has come from. It isn’t just about guiding, and it isn’t really about teaching people how to be more professional. It comes from my fascination with humans and from everything I’ve learnt through teaching, guiding, travelling, living in different places, studying behaviour, coaching, movement, breathwork, yoga, bodywork and, probably more than anything else, paying attention to my own life.

Adventurous Souls is becoming a place where I can bring all of those threads together: people, travel, self-awareness, connection, courage, curiosity, the inner world and the outer one.

I don’t think adventure is only about climbing mountains, jumping out of planes or travelling to faraway countries. Sometimes the biggest adventure is being willing to look at yourself, question the life you’re living, connect with someone completely different from you, let go of something you’ve outgrown, begin again, step away from the screen, look around and actually live a little.

That’s what I want my life to be about.

That’s why I’m here.