Visiting new places can be a lot of fun, and although you may need to take time out of work or education to do it, it can actually have benefits for your professional life too.
Whether you like to lose yourself in a bustling city or head for a hike in some mountains and hills, one thing you can guarantee is that you will come back with more than just memories.
One way that travelling can help improve your career and life, in general, is because it forces you to practice your interpersonal skills. This article will discuss what they are, how travelling helps them, and offer some practical tips that you can use to get the most out of your trip.
What are interpersonal skills?
Also called “people skills,” these are the skills we use when we are communicating with somebody face to face. This means that they are also the ones which we probably do not use today as much as we used to.
Asking for directions while abroad or communicating with stakeholders at an important meeting are both situations where interpersonal skills come into play. They are a type of “soft” skill where the benefits are not specific to a single environment.
travelling is a great way to practice and improve them, even if you are going somewhere where you do not know the language. Face-to-face communication skills include not only our words but nonverbal elements such as facial expressions and gestures too.
Some of the specific interpersonal skills are:
- Active listening
This means listening intently to others and demonstrating to them that you are paying attention. Asking and answering questions in the right places, as well as removing distractions like phones, are examples of active listening skills. - Verbal communication
This is the skill of speaking clearly and using an appropriate tone, level of formality and level of vocabulary for the situation. - Nonverbal communication
Your expressions, posture and gestures are some of the ways that you nonverbally communicate with another person.
Interpersonal skills are what help you build positive relationships with people, whether they are your colleagues or strangers that you have never met before. Being good at these skills can improve people’s trust in you and their willingness to help or listen to you.

How can travelling help my interpersonal skills?
The biggest thing travelling does is it takes you right out of your comfort zone. Even if you are a person who does not enjoy communicating with others, or if you do not think you are good at it, you cannot stay indoors in isolation.
By forcing you out into the world, travelling can help build confidence in your communication abilities. Breaking the ice with new people or successfully solving a new challenge will give you the confidence that you can do these things again in the future, in your professional life as well as personal. This may even help make you less stressful and more able to live a healthy and balanced life.
Here are some of the other ways that travelling helps your interpersonal skills:
- Meeting new people
Wherever you go, shops, bars, hotels and cafes will be full of new people. While you cannot strike up a conversation with everyone you meet, you will probably need to communicate with many people in some way, however briefly. If they are from a different background or culture to yours, you might find that you need to adapt your communication style to help them understand, and this is a great skill to learn. - Learning to read people
If you travel somewhere that speaks a different language, you and anyone you communicate with will probably rely much more on non-verbal gestures and expressions than you would usually.This can make you more attuned to picking up people’s emotional cues and understanding how they are feeling. It can also give you a better understanding of body language that you can use to help clarify your own feelings for others. - Improving your listening skills
If you are prone to nodding off in meetings or lectures, you had better kick your habit fast when travelling because the instructions you have to listen to are usually to do with your safety. By cultivating your listening skills you could also learn more about the places you visit and hear about things to do.
Including getting out of your comfort zone, those are the four main ways that travelling helps to develop your interpersonal skills.
However, travel can have other benefits when it comes to your career. Preparing for your trip can also provide valuable experience in doing research, planning and organizing.
Tips for communicating while travelling
Even when you know it could benefit you, communicating while travelling can be a daunting task. Prepare by learning a few basic words and phrases (hello, excuse me, yes, no, please, thank you etc.), always approach people with a friendly smile, and have the Google Translate app to hand as a last resort.