Extending Your Comfort Zone. Antarctica With Karen Espley
The challenges of travel can help us expand our comfort zone enough to drive change in our lives. In this episode, Karen Espley talks about how a trip to Antarctica helped her change direction. Karen Espley is an author, speaker, and businesswoman. Her latest book is The Impulsive Explorer: One Businesswoman’s Accidental Journey of Self-discovery on an Expedition to the Antarctic. Show notes * What is it about corporate life that makes us want to escape? * The challenges of getting to Antarctica and difficulties living in close quarters * Finding perspective on life * The breathing space that travel affords one to consider life choices * Changing your mindset by changing the scenery * The importance of pushing our comfort zones back out since pandemic life has shrunken them so much * Recommended travel books You can find Karen Espley at KarenEspley.com Transcript of the interview Jo: Karen Espley is an author, speaker, and businesswoman. Her latest book is The Impulsive Explorer: One Businesswoman’s Accidental Journey of Self-discovery on an Expedition to the Antarctic. Welcome, Karen. Karen: Hello, Jo, thank you so much for having me on today. I’m really looking forward to chatting with you. Jo: It is such an interesting topic. I wanted to start because you spent many years in the corporate world, as I did, 13 years as an IT consultant, and I was reading your book and thinking: What is it about the corporate life that makes so many of us crave adventure and escape? Karen: It’s a really interesting question. Actually, I was pondering that one. For me, I think it’s a number of things. But I think it’s certainly when you get to a certain seniority, it’s just unrelenting pressure. It doesn’t matter how much you give, they still want more from you. So it’s just that endless treadmill of them wanting more, giving you less to do it. I had some really interesting jobs, but they are still routine. And it’s the never-ending-ness of it, I think. There are endless meetings, that daily commute into the office that we all used to have to do, and knowing that you’re not indispensable, and you also don’t really have a voice. So, for me, it was just that there’s no end to it. You rarely get praised, or if you do, you need to grasp it like jewels. Obviously, I was saved by the Antarctic, but it’s just you don’t often have time to think — Is there another way? What might I do differently? You said you did it for 13 years, I did it for 15, 16 years, it wears you down, I think. After a while, you go, there must be something else, surely. Jo: Yes. It’s funny you say relentless, and I used to put in IT systems. So, it would be this rollout and then this rollout, and then exactly the same thing over and over again in these different companies in different countries. And what got me was this: they’re just going to overwrite this system again in a couple of years with some other system and everything I do will disappear. How can I just keep doing that? I decided to write books because they have some longevity, at least. Karen: That was it exactly. Jo: Let’s talk about your escape then. Because you can’t just pop to Antarctica. What drew you to Antarctica? And what was that trip specifically about? Karen: I was really, really lucky. I was working for Standard Life Healthcare. And unbeknownst to me, Standard Life HQ up in Edinburgh was sponsoring this environmental trip down to a Russian base in the Antarctic. Robert Swan, who was the first man to walk to the North and South Pole,