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Created by Louise Fowller for women over 50, The Travel Guide to Your Authentic Self™ is designed to be the ideal travelling companion. Image courtesy Louise Fowller.
Putting the phone away
A Q&A with Louise Fowller, Creator, The Travel Guide to Your Authentic Self™.
Briefly …
Not every travel tool needs a screen. A physical guide designed for women over 50 uses the space created by travel to ask questions before, during and after the journey – at the traveller’s own pace.
There is no shortage of technology promising to make travel easier. We can plan an itinerary, navigate an unfamiliar city, translate a menu or record almost every detail of a journey without putting down our phone. Sometimes, though, the useful tool is the one that asks us to put the phone away.
The Travel Guide to Your Authentic Self™ (TGAS™) takes a deliberately analogue approach. Created by Louise Fowller for women over 50, the physical guide is designed to travel with its user – beginning before departure, continuing through the journey and returning home with her afterwards. Its seven Compass Guides use questions, reflections and activities to explore what she notices about herself while away, without prescribing where she should travel, what she should discover or what she should do next.
For Louise, that distinction is fundamental. After more than 30 years working with women in coaching and business and rebuilding her own life before beginning a new career in travel at 61, she wanted to create something that used the distance from everyday routines as part of the process. We asked her why that something became a guide you can put in your suitcase rather than another app.
Created by Louise Fowller for women over 50, The Travel Guide to Your Authentic Self™ is designed to be the ideal travelling companion. Image courtesy Louise Fowller.
TGAS™ is designed to be used before a traveller leaves, while she is away and again after she returns. How does the way she uses it change across those three stages of the journey?
Before she leaves, the focus is on becoming present to what she would love this particular trip to bring into her life. It may be more fun, adventure, beauty, connection, rest or a renewed sense of possibility. The introduction is to help connect to what is calling her now and to set an intention that feels genuinely her own. With more clarity, it supports more aligned choices about the places, the pace and experiences that will shape her time away.
While travelling, TGAS™ becomes a companion and a way to nurture curiosity and self-discovery. The Compass Guides take her through carefully sequenced reflections that build on one another. Some questions are easy and enjoyable to journal. Others are designed to be felt into more deeply as the traveller wanders, meets people and experiences new surroundings. Travel gives her distance from her usual roles and routines, which can help her notice what brings her alive, what holds meaning and what she wants more of in her life.
While she is away it brings her into questions she may not have asked herself for a long time or may never have asked before. Each question creates a new awareness. Then the wonder, awe, challenges and connection she experiences while travelling give her insights room to take shape and rise naturally to the surface. Her experiences offer personal clues about who she is now and what she wants to bring into her next chapter.
When she returns, the focus moves to integration and implementation. She is coming back to the familiar routines, responsibilities and expectations of her everyday life so this stage helps her create a bridge between what she discovered while travelling and the life she is returning to. TGAS™ gives her practical tools and ideas to help her act on her insights and bring more of what mattered to her into the real world. The journey may be over, but its value continues through the choices she makes after she comes home.
You designed TGAS™ specifically for women over 50. What did you see happening at this stage of life that convinced you they needed something designed specifically for them?
I have worked with women in coaching and business for more than 30 years. One statement I have heard consistently and hear even more strongly today is, “I don’t know what I want to do next.” In our earlier years, that question can be easier to answer. Then for many women around 50, another voice begins to make itself heard. It may start as a whisper that there is something more to experience, create or contribute.
After years of caring for what matters to us, life begins calling us to include our own deeper fulfilment in that care. This stage can also feel more confusing than ever because there is no shortage of assessment tools, seminars, podcasts and people offering answers. Yet the answer to “What do I want next?” cannot be handed to us by someone else. It comes from creating enough space to hear what feels true for ourselves.
“Yet the answer to ‘What do I want next?’ cannot be handed to us by someone else. It comes from creating enough space to hear what feels true for ourselves.”
That is why I created TGAS™. I wanted to take the exploration out of the seminar room and away from the computer screen and place it within travel and nature. A new environment can become the classroom. Lived experiences can become the clues. The Compass Guides encourage a woman to move beyond analysing her future and begin noticing what brings her joy, curiosity, connection and meaning. The direction comes from within her. TGAS™ simply gives her the space, experiences and questions that help her recognise it.
“The Compass Guides encourage a woman to move beyond analysing her future and begin noticing what brings her joy, curiosity, connection and meaning.”
How did you decide what belonged in the seven Compass Guides, and how much freedom does the traveller have to find her own way through them?
At 60, I wanted to explore how travel could become a catalyst for the work I had developed from more than 30 years of coaching and mentoring women. I drew on intentionality, reflection and regeneration as design anchors along with the understanding that meaningful travel is a relationship between the traveller and the place. The destination is more than a backdrop. The people, landscape, culture and experiences can all become part of what she discovers.
There is a deliberate sequence because each Compass Guide builds upon the insights of the one before it. There is no timetable to follow. Some prompts may produce an immediate response while others may stay with her as she travels and take shape through what she sees, feels and experiences. She can pause, revisit a question or spend longer with the parts that speak most strongly to her. The traveller leads and the guide follows. That is why one of the guiding principles of TGAS™ is: Your Time. Your Space. Your Pace.
At a time when almost every travel problem seems to produce another app, why did you choose to create something physical that a traveller could put in her suitcase?
I wanted women to be able to take TGAS™ anywhere without needing Wi-Fi, a charged device or another password to remember. She might feel drawn to sit with a question while she is on a plane, beneath a palm tree on an island, on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean or in her local park. Insights do not always arrive on schedule. I wanted her to be able to capture those fleeting thoughts and ‘Aha!’ moments whenever and wherever they arise.
A phone can quickly pull us back into messages, notifications, searching and scrolling. TGAS™ creates a different kind of space. She can put her phone aside, become present to her surroundings and allow her thoughts to unfold without the constant invitation to look somewhere else.
The tactile experience was also very important to me. There is something personal about holding the guide, writing in your own hand the thoughts, observations and moments from your travels. Over time, it becomes a record of who she was, what she experienced and what began to take shape within her. It belongs to her in a way that another app never could.
How did the experience of rebuilding your life and beginning a new career in travel at 61 influence what you created without turning the guide into a prescription for how somebody else should travel or live?
It showed me how confusing this stage can feel. There is so much noise about what women should be doing at this age, how we should look, what we should say and what a meaningful next chapter is supposed to resemble. I had grown tired of all the chatter. Beneath it, I felt there had to be a simpler and more truthful way forward. My experience taught me that our direction is not always found by gathering more opinions. Our answers are already within us, but they can be difficult to hear when we are surrounded by everybody else’s expectations. Travel and nature gave me space to step outside that mental soup, become present to myself and recognise what felt true for me.
“Travel and nature gave me space to step outside that mental soup, become present to myself and recognise what felt true for me.”
I wanted to share enough of my journey for another woman to know she is not alone. By this stage of life, many of us have had quite enough of being told how we should travel, live or reinvent ourselves. We have decades of experience and a growing awareness that our own inner voice deserves to be trusted.
That understanding had a significant influence on TGAS™. It is a guide in the truest sense of the word. There is no classroom, fixed schedule or prescribed way to travel. The Compass Guides offer thoughtful questions, practical tools and space for her own insights to emerge. She chooses the destination, the experiences and the pace. The traveller remains the authority on her own life.