Life Lessons from a Globe-Trotting Family

This episode brings forth the inspiring story of a family that chose to change their lives by traveling the world. The discussion revolves around the motivations behind their decision, the planning process, the experiences gained during the journey, and the impact of their adventures on their family and future.

Charles Achampong

•  Instagram: @aroundtheworldinfamilydays 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesachampong
• Website: https://www.charlesachampong.com
• Email: info@charlesachampong.com

• The decision rooted in early experiences and reflections on life 
• Emphasis on valuing experiences over material success 
• Years of planning culminated in an adventure amidst a pandemic 
• Specific destinations chosen for their educational and sentimental value 
• Addressing concerns about education and health during travel 
• Adjusting back to life post-travel and insights gained 
• Plans for the upcoming book and its themes of adventure and growth

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Chapters

• 0:03 Deciding to Travel the World
• 12:21 Returning Home After World Travel
• 18:23 Life's Pauses and Failure Immunity

Transcript

Voiceover: 0:03

Tales from the wild, stories from the heart. A journey into the mind and soul of fired up business professionals, where they share their vision for the future and hear from a different non-profit organization every month as they create awareness of their goals and their needs. Dive into a world of untamed passion as we join our host, Shireen Botha, for this month's episode of Friends from Wild Places.

Shireen Botha: 0:36

Right. So it sounds like you had a good corporate life and it was going strong. So what was it that suddenly motivated you to make that specific choice to just up and leave everything behind, take your beautiful little family with you and go and travel the world? I mean, that is a massive decision that I'm sure a lot of people in your in you know, in your position, that might have a really good paying job and have a beautiful family at home would find that a really hard decision to make and many times the pressure of knowing that they put the food on the table would prevent them from making such a risky choice.

Shireen Botha: 1:20

So, yeah, share with us a little bit about that.

Charles Achampong: 1:23

Sure, of course. I mean there are a number of things that we did. So this, I think, the biggest thing that we I really tried to emphasize to folks is that this isn't something that we just decided on a whim and then decided to say you know what? Let's, what are we doing? Next weekend? Let's decide to go on a trip around the world with our family and uproot them and take that time away.

Charles Achampong: 1:42

This is a decision, you know, I really have to credit my spouse, janice it was, you know, we had taken our honeymoon to Rio de Janeiro, in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, many years ago, and we had both, and I don't think at the time we didn't realize it, but we both watched this elderly man with, I think, what looked like to be an oxygen tank, climb those last few steps to get to the feet of Christ, the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. There's this amazing view of the entire city down below, and so later on at dinner, we both kind of talked about what you know our experience when we saw we were again on our honeymoon and that's where my wife had suggested that we you know, life is short this gentleman here is what looked to be his last few days or weeks. You know, it just seemed to be health-wise, quite in a lot of ailment. And so you know, we said, you know she had suggested why don't we take our future kids on a trip around the world? Like I want to make sure that we live life and experience life? And for me I was like, oh my gosh, like we're on our honeymoon here. I almost kind of like, are you crazy? Like we haven't even. We haven't even found a place to live permanently. We haven't bought a house. You know our work. We just started working. We don't have any kids. We're already planning on taking our future kids on this trip around the world, the kids that don't even exist at this point. So, but I have to say, the kids that don't even exist at this point.

Charles Achampong: 3:03

But I have to say, like it was really her who came up with the idea and kind of planted that seed to say I really want to make sure that our life is built on experiences and not things. And so you know, her suggestion sparked that idea of a 10-year journey of saving and planning, from our honeymoon time to doing that. And you know we squirreled away money for this grand adventure, but I'll admit I treat it more like a fantasy fund more than an actual travel budget. It's one of those aspirational goals, like when people say they want to become fluent in Spanish or build their own pottery studio. It sounds wonderful, but I really feel that it rarely happens. So, you know, we went ahead. I made that gesture to show that I was committed to secretly, you know even though I secretly thought that this was not going to actually happen.

Charles Achampong: 3:56

But over time we just began setting aside money for this trip around the world and I'd say you know, we wanted to ensure, as we got closer towards making that decision, a few things kind of got in the way of derailing. That you know, covid, again we touched on earlier. But this idea that we were all in a close knit quarter with our immediate family and this idea of traveling seems so remote or foreign to all of us at the time, thinking that we would never leave. Right, but if anything, we were very fortunate in the fact that we were both working in great jobs, jobs that we enjoyed, because we weren't spending a lot of money like many people staying at home. We were able to save a little bit more than we had anticipated, so we were able to accelerate this idea and what was going to be maybe you know, a few weeks or a few months in a particular location, just kind of grew and grew and grew. I think the pandemic made us think that you know what. Rather than take off a few weeks or a month and go to a particular place, let's dream big. We have the opportunity to do so.

Charles Achampong: 4:54

So it was extremely challenging because you know, your identity, as you said earlier, is tied to your, especially in the Western world, is tied to who you are and what you do for employment and for work right, and so we wanted to make sure that, if we started telling everyone that we put in place the safety nets that we needed to ensure that we were going to succeed in terms of pulling this trip off, there was concerns and worry about what our parents would say. My parents are immigrants to Canada and this is not something that they ever anticipated. You work hard so your kids can do well and succeed and thrive and all of a sudden it seems like you're quote-unquote throwing everything away and taking your kids on the trip around the world. So that poses a bit of a challenge or an issue there, so having to work through those issues. I mean, there was a sense of you know, a part of me was feeling kind of bad in terms of I didn't want to brag, I didn't want others to be jealous of what we were doing. I wanted people to know that this is the thing that we had been planning for a long period of time. So that was something that also kind of entered into my mind too as well.

Charles Achampong: 5:49

We worried about kids, taking them off of school. Was that going to be an issue? Would they be falling behind as a result of that? What would happen to our house, you know, while we were gone, for the seven months that we were gone. But again, you know, when you put all these issues and concerns out into the universe, it's amazing how quickly people gather around to support you and making that dream come true. We were able to rent out our house to a family just down the street that was doing a major renovation at the time, where the time periods laddered up exactly, so that provided some additional income, again, the kids being at a school. As a result of the pandemic, a lot of the material that they were doing was now available online. So before the pandemic, this was never the case, and now we were able to follow along and keep track with everything that they were doing at school and try our best to try and keep up with the things that they were doing so they wouldn't fall behind.

Charles Achampong: 6:36

Our employers were, fortunately, very grateful, gracious in terms of allowing us to do this as well. There are few individuals more sort of outliers in terms of saying what are you doing? You're throwing your career away. This is a huge gamble you're taking, but I really felt that you know, regardless of what was going to happen, that we would be able to find employment when we returned. Like we are so established in our careers, we had enough unique experiences that finding a job to me was never much of a concern. So I mean, those are all the things that we had to contemplate with deciding to leave and go on this trip. But I'm so happy that we did and I'm so happy that my wife, you know, put that idea in our head and we kind of followed through with it and we did it. We had a phenomenal experience.

Tanya Scotece: 7:22

That's so wild. And how did you choose where you were going? Like, was that, was that defined ahead of time, or did you kind of go and where did you stay? Like, did you do like your hotels, or you know what did that look like?

Charles Achampong: 7:36

so I would say that, um, there was a couple of things that we did. There were a couple of criteria that we were trying to follow in terms of deciding where to go. We knew that we wanted to really follow the sun, and so our whole thing at the end of the day, was to ensure that we're taking less packing half the amount of stuff and taking twice the amount of money follow the sun. So we knew that we were going to keep as few things as possible and carry warm weather clothing everywhere. So we decided on wanting to move westwards. We're based in Toronto. We were going to leave early in the new year, so we left about a year ago, early January, mid to late January 2024, and we wanted to spend time in warm destinations. So we would spend a lot of our time in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons, of course, are reversed from us here in the Northern Hemisphere. So we went to Australia and New Zealand, which I guess was really on our bucket list forever and are conveniently close to each other. So we wanted to spend the month in each of those locations. We decided on the Philippines because for us that was sort of a classic underdog, really the hidden gem of Asia and, if anything, that was a pleasant surprise there for the Philippines.

Charles Achampong: 8:50

Thailand for us was something, a place that we had gone to and traveled to as a couple my spouse and I before kids and we wanted to kind of that nostalgic return of returning 15 years ago when we were there and it was a bit different with kids in tow but it was kind of like re-watching your old favorite movie, but now with kind of this live commentary from two very opinionated critics being my kids, in terms of what we were seeing and doing. So we spent some time in Thailand as well. We've, of course, south Africa, shireen's hometown, home country, and because you know who doesn't want to see the Lion King come to life in real life, we really wanted to enjoy seeing a safari. We spent some time in Ghana as well, where my family is from. It was fun trying to explain to my kids why all these quote-unquote aunts and uncles are actually related aren't actually related but somehow are still family, so being able to introduce them to seeing my parents' family, extended family as well.

Charles Achampong: 9:49

Uh, we traveled to jordan and so, despite some initial hesitation about the region's stability, uh, the promise of floating in the dead sea, and going to petra and akaba was very enticing as well. And then we wrapped up the trip in in albania. It was probably the most entertaining random selection that we had made because literally we sort of stared at the map of Europe. We found it. We looked up a few photos and videos and said, well, that looks nice, so we decided to go there. So really, that was the. That was sort of the trip in terms of following the sun places that were affordable, places that were. You know, that would be an educational experience for the family and myself as well.

Charles Achampong: 10:30

So yeah, that's really how we kind of ended up deciding where we were going to go to in terms of our travel.

Tanya Scotece: 10:38

That's amazing. That's amazing. I just, I mean, everything is just like so, like positive as far as like how you're describing like the universal energy and law coming together. But I have one question. So, like in that type of experience with your wife and the two children, like you know, for example, like if someone takes ill, or like what do you do Medical care, like is that a concern, or is that something you think about ahead of time, or you just kind of go and you'll find out what you, how do you plan for that kind of stuff, or do you?

Charles Achampong: 11:06

yeah, yeah, yeah, you do plan for these things. I mean, one of the things that my wife and I are very good at is planning things in advance, like we are. Often we have friends who joke and say, oh, you know, well, we can't go with, you know, charles and janice and the family, because they've already figured out what they're doing in the summer of 2027. So, uh, there's no way we have to book several years in advance. I mean, we've always been planning because we like having things to look forward to or things to save towards.

Charles Achampong: 11:29

In the case of, um, you know, health care, we bought travel insurance before we left to make sure that we were fully covered for the entire trip and duration, um, and we had all the information available that we knew what we needed to do in case of emergency. Fortunately, you know, knock on wood but 95 percent of the trip went well. It was only, funnily enough, towards the last two weeks of the trip that we you know, my wife and kids got seriously ill. They had a stomach bug, stomach flu, and so they were not feeling too well towards the end of our trip. But, for all intents and purposes, we ate everything, drank, everything, experienced, you know, just a wide array of cultures and people and food, and it was just a phenomenal experience. And just to see how much my kids have changed as a result of it too was just fantastic. How we all change, but in particular, my kids too. So, um, and you know, travel is so.

Charles Achampong: 12:21

The idea of traveling around the world, even traveling in general has become so democratized. It's much easier than it was several decades ago. You know, low-cost airlines, information is available online, you know, and there's you can follow, along with other stories of individuals who've done similar things or gone to places that you want to go to. So the information, the experience, is there. It's really kind of the our own, our own handicap, our own sort of reluctance to try and do these things for fear of things going wrong or awry, which can happen anywhere. So you just prepare, you follow what others have done and use it as a guideline and a framework, and then off you go right I'm gonna.

Tanya Scotece: 13:01

What was it? Oh no, sorry. What was the reverse? Did you experience a reverse culture shock having returned to Toronto after this time away? And what was that like? What did that look like for you?

Charles Achampong: 13:31

seeing the sun, swimming, eating, it was just amazing. And so the culture, you know. It's amazing how quickly you become a culture, sort of a product of your environment, and so how quickly you acclimatize and assimilate back to everything, as if you know everything is. You never left. And so it was seven months, which is long, but not really that long. I mean, mean, the kids began school. If anything, they had the most seamless back to school experience that I can remember, and I don't know if it's as a result of the trip or the fact that they're older and more mature.

Charles Achampong: 13:58

For me, you know, I'm a very optimistic and glass half full. You know type of person and mentality. So there were a few instances when we would chat with people. Very rarely you chat with people and say, you know, oh, and mentality. So there were a few instances when we would chat with people. Very rarely. You chat with people and say, you know, oh, it's great to be back. And you know we'd embrace and talk and say like, oh, you know enough about us.

Charles Achampong: 14:16

How was, how was your summer? What have we missed? Oh, you know. You know well, we didn't have as much of an exciting time as you did, and it was almost this kind of competition and that was the thing that kind of saddened me a bit. I'm like this is not a competition. I'm generally interested in wanting to know how you're doing and how things have gone, you know, and what did we miss while we were away? So, um, you know, the kids missed their friends, so it was good for them to be back, but really I don't think there was much of a.

Charles Achampong: 14:41

The impact the biggest thing I you know to be very frank and transparent was my return was being able to take what we had learned as part of our experience and to see what we could do to embed that back into this new life of ours or what this life was going to be, and not to go back into our old routines of I don't know, just, you know, kind of sleepwalking through life and to make sure we're much more intentional and purposeful about everything that we do and spending time with people we wanted to spend time with and not just putting up with appearances. We just wanted to be much more intentional about the life we wanted to live and I think that that has been the biggest challenge of trying to infuse the sense of excitement and enthusiasm and just happiness for things in life and not revert back to the woe is me mentality? Not that we were like that, but I didn't want us to get sucked back into that kind of mindset or sort of that kind of framework. For me, the biggest thing was the fact that when I returned back, I learned that my employer had downsized to basically half and I knew that it was always a considered chance that I wouldn't go back to work. But that was the biggest thing for me not going back Because in my mind, as I came towards the end of the trip, I already had ideas about what I was going to do, the projects and people are going to work on places I was going to go to as a result of work, and to then be told that you're not returning back, it was a bit of a blow to the gut and so, for like the 24 to 48 hours after finding out, I was upset, disappointed, cranky, but you know, I just I just realized like we've just come back from this amazing experience.

Charles Achampong: 16:10

There's so much to tell from your experience of traveling around the world, your experience as a dad, as a husband, your own personal experience as an individual. You need to tell that story and so, yeah, I mean that's really for me was the fact that the work situation, but other than that, I think we've all done really well in terms of our re-entry back home to Toronto.

Tanya Scotece: 16:33

That's awesome, that's wild. Yeah, what a journey. What a journey. I just want to plot in here.

Shireen Botha: 16:39

Sorry, we have to put a little buzzsprout ad right in the middle here before we continue with Charles, but so Friends from Wild Places listeners is a place to share stories from other business owners and professionals like Charles, a safe space to show support for other business owners as well. We feature non-profits every month to try and make a difference or give a helpline to someone in need. Do you have a message you want to share with the world? Or maybe you want to think about something fun that you'd like to have your own talk show or podcast or radio show, because that's what it was when I was a little girl.

Shireen Botha: 17:20

Now times have changed and podcasting is now very easy and inexpensive and fun way to expand your reach online. So to start your own podcast, follow the link in the show notes. This lets Buzzsprout know that we sent you and it helps support the show. The team at Buzzsprout is passionate about helping you succeed. So, charles, because so I'm really interested to get straight into your book you mentioned how, when you got back, you didn't have your job anymore and you had had this awesome experience, but all this knowledge and power that you had now accumulated and a story that was obviously bursting from your wild heart. So tell us about your book and more about it. But when will it be released and where can we buy it?

Charles Achampong: 18:22

Of course. Yeah, thanks, shireen. So it's interesting it's just touching on in our conversation with Tanya about this idea of returning back and what I was going to do next and the fact that I wasn't returning back to my former employer, and so even before we left, I was trying to think of the best way to tell our story. Without you know, people are busy when it comes to social media. I am a neophyte when it comes to social media. I am a neophyte Even in terms of Facebook. It would be my spouse would pick up a picture of us celebrating my birthday and I didn't even know what my password was to get into Facebook or any of the other social media platforms, because I really couldn't be bothered, and so it was interesting. Before we left, I was like I need to figure out a way. I didn't want to take the pictures and all that. So I just thinking and I just realized like I really enjoy writing. It's not something that I was actively encouraged to do because, as the notion goes, there's no money in writing is what I was told, so I kind of moved on to other things, but I enjoyed being able to send updates to friends, peers, colleagues in terms of what we were doing and I tried to keep them as short and pithy and interesting as possible, based on our experience, and so I was blown away by the positive feedback I had received by the blogs. I was sitting back on our trip and along the way, a friend of mine that I grew up with, who runs a publishing company, had said you should put together a book. I was like I don't want to put together a book, even putting together these blog posts, as my wife reminds me, like I would spend a good day typing up and thinking about what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. She goes you spent so much time on that you would forget about enjoying the moment, right, and so it got easier as we went along. So it's not something, a muscle that I had worked on a lot, or I put it to the side and, just you know, I just got a lot of good feedback. She's like when you come back, let's talk about writing a book, and I thought I was going to return back to work. The book situation thing wouldn't be happening until like later down the road, if at all. You work none of the Friday 9 to 5, and the last thing you want to do is quote unquote write a book.

Charles Achampong: 20:19

And so when we came back and didn't realize I wasn't going back to my former employer, I got in touch with a friend of mine and said listen, this idea of writing a book, how would it work? What do I need to do? I wrote down and she had actually encouraged me to write more than beyond the blog, so I had a whole section of things on the laptop, of other thoughts and ideas and suggestions and things that had come up along the trip my own musings that I didn't put in the blog because I thought it was too meandering and quite long. And she says you know, I hope you were taking additional thoughts and notes and writing additional content, because I think we could put together a fantastic story about what you did. And so I thought about it seriously. Let's work together in making this happen. And so I treated it like a full-time job from September through till just before the Christmas holidays of 2024. Furiously writing and going through and editing and staying up late, you know it. Just, it felt very strange to focus and pour my whole sort of life and soul into this idea of this book, and so this book that we put together or I put together is called Around the World in Family Days what we learned when we left it all behind and traveled the globe, and so it's really become a labor of love for me in terms of this book, in terms of putting it together, and I'm just so, so excited to be able to tell our story and bring it to life as well. And really, for me, it's a bit of a blend of a travel memoir and a guide to really embracing life's pauses and then improving your failure immunity. So we talked a little bit about this as well.

Charles Achampong: 22:00

But this idea of finding your pause and the power of pausing and the fact that you don't need permission to pause or you don't even need a passport to pause so we talked about gap years earlier. But really you have to think through, like what is the thing that brings you peace, like finding that time for yourself every morning or at some point in the day to just reflect and to pause is just reflect and to pause. We spend a lot of time in the morning, you know, working on our outer appearance, our hair, makeup, shower, shave, whatever it is, as part of your routine, maybe exercise and all that, but these are all things that you typically focus on for your outer you know, sort of being. What do you do to sort of focus on your inner person, your inner being? And so that's this idea of embracing life's pauses and taking time to breathe and to relax and to think and reflect, whether it's, you know, spiritually, through prayer, whether it's through meditating, whether it's through, you know, whatever your practice is.

Charles Achampong: 22:51

And I think that, for me, is really the piece that I touch on a little bit in terms of how I appreciate or how I enjoyed or the importance of life's pauses. And I also touch on this idea of improving your failure immunity, and so I talk about failure immunity from the perspective of not necessarily being immune from failure, but being immune from the feeling of making mistakes. In sports activities, engaging with people, they're much more outgoing, curious, inquisitive, and so all this is is in my book here around the world and family days where we talk about our experience, and so it's coming out, uh, january 28th um of this year, 2025, of course, and it'll be available on amazon, um, you can get it through my, you can purchase the book through my, my website, charles achampongcom, uh, so there'll be a link there for you to purchase the book through my website, charlesachampongcom, so there'll be a link there for you to purchase the book and available there. But I've been, I've been, so it's been almost therapeutic in many ways of telling our story and sharing our story. And, yeah, I'm so excited.

Charles Achampong: 23:55

I'm hoping to use that, this idea of the book, to be able to use it as a platform to be able to speak more publicly and tell our story about the importance of finding life's pauses and how, you know, by finding life's pauses you can also improve your failure immunity as an individual. So it's, it's exciting. I'm just. If you had asked me a year ago if I was going to write a book as a result of traveling the world, I would have said absolutely not. You know, go back, look at your crystal ball. There's clearly a typo there. You're not talking about me, you're talking about someone else, and so I feel very humbled and grateful to be able to tell her story through this book.

Tanya Scotece: 24:32

Right, right. Wow, what a beautiful, beautiful journey, beautiful, beautiful.

Charles Achampong: 24:36

Thank you.

Shireen Botha: 24:37

Tune in next week for part three of Friends from Wild Places.

Voiceover: 24:46

You've been listening to Friends from Wild Places with Shireen Botha. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast from the links to catch every episode and unleash your passion.