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Welcome to the Travel Transformation Podcast, the podcast where we talk all things travel and all things transformation. I'm your podcast host, Jessica Grace Coleman, and today we'll be talking about backing up your life.

Now, I'm trying to sound a lot louder and more enthusiastic in these podcasts because I was listening back to some of my earlier podcasts – and I've only done a few – and some of them are just like, “Hi.” I sound like Ross from Friends when he's depressed, and he's like, “Hi.”

So I'm really trying to be more animated. It's hard when you're sort of just talking to yourself because you just talk as if you normally would. But I need to get into the habit of talking as if there are people listening to me, which I hope you are.

So, yeah, hopefully this sounds better and I'm more animated and everything! Hey, you live and you learn. And most people will admit that the first episodes they do of anything – or the first book or the first blog post or anything – is always a bit rubbish. So I'm hoping the podcast will continue to get better as I learn more about podcasting and editing and sound levels and all that kind of thing. 

Talking of sound, I apologise if you hear any rain or wind. The weather is terrible today, and I do not have a fancy podcast studio – because I roam around a lot and there's no point in having just one place where I can record things, because that is not how I do things. So, if you hear the weather in the background, a pitter pattering of rain – I actually stopped recording earlier because there was just a deluge of rain, and I was just like, “Come on, give me a break!” – but yeah, apologies if you can hear that. I also have a dog here in the room, and if you hear any weird noises, like licking or anything, it's not me, I promise; it's the dog. I'll try and edit those bits out, but let's see what happens. 

So, today I want to talk about backing up your life and your mind, just like you backup your computer or your photos in the cloud. This is your mind, your past experiences, your memories, everything that kind of tends to fizzle away over the years – if you're anything like me, because my memory is terrible.

I want to start with an African proverb that says: When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. And, of course, you can get rid of the old or add woman or any gender you want. Basically, when a person dies, a library – your library of memories, thoughts, lessons learned, past experiences, everything that made you you – burns to the ground. Which is terrifying, I know, but that's why I'm doing this podcast episode even though it's not particularly about travel. 

I wrote a blog post about this and I did a presentation about this in one of the colivings I was at, and that was before I got into all the travel transformation stuff. But I think it really applies, especially if you're travelling around and having all these amazing experiences and all these memories that you want to keep – both for you and for anyone who comes after you, whether that be kids, friends, family, or strangers on the internet.

So, basically, our memories, our stories, our anecdotes, our lessons learned, all the wisdom we've accumulated throughout the years… if we don't put these out into the world somehow and pass them on to the next generation, then when we die, our own personal libraries will burn to the ground. There'll be no trace of them. It will be like we never even existed. 

Again, terrifying. If we don't leave any kind of positive mark on the world, was there really any point in us being here? If we live and learn but then don't pass on what we've learned or what we've built to anyone else, then we're not really adding any value to the world or to the people in it.

And I think that is one of the main purposes of us being here, to pass on what we've learned and to hopefully make it easier and better for the next generation, to make it possible for the next generation to live better lives. And I realise that with climate change and all that kind of thing, we're not necessarily going to be able to do that, sadly, if it just keeps getting worse. But we can try it on a personal level to make things better for the people who come after us by passing on the lessons we learn and our knowledge and our wisdom, instead of it just vanishing when we go.

So, I like to think of backing up our lives the same way we back up our work or photos on our computers and phones. If we don't back them up, if you're anything like me, you'll feel a bit nervous that something might happen to your computer or your phone and you'll lose everything. So we back them up to the cloud or to an external hard drive or however you do it. I often email myself work as I go along, so I know it's on my Gmail if anything happens to my computer and my hard drive.

And we're so obsessed with doing this with the technology in our lives. We get so paranoid about something happening to our devices and losing all our hard work, all the things we've written, the presentations we've made, the photos and memories we've stored… but not many people are concerned about what happens to all our experience, knowledge and wisdom, our own personal stories, and memories if something were to happen to us. And I find that bizarre – that we're so worried about all our stuff vanishing technology-wise, but we don't apply the same thing to our own lives and our own memories and the things we learn. 

I've started thinking about this a lot more in the past few years because I'm an editor and I've written and edited a lot of autobiographies and personal memoirs, which is probably the most obvious way to back up your life. I get a lot of clients in their eighties and even nineties who have suddenly started worrying about what will happen to their lifetime of knowledge, wisdom, and stories when they're gone. 

Will their children remember their stories they've told them? Have they taken on board the lessons they've tried to teach them? Will they pass them on to other people? My clients feel a sudden urge to get everything down on paper in their own words, so they have something tangible to pass on to friends, family, and strangers. They might publish this, or they might literally just do a print run of 20 or 30 books and hand them out to friends and family members.

Basically, they want to save their own personal library. They want proof that they were here, that they lived, and that they did something good with their lives. But how do you go about doing something like this? Well, fortunately, there are several options that I've come up with, and I'm sure you can come up with way more.

And, like I just said, the first one is to write a book. I know that might sound like an impossible thing for some people, but these days there are so many ways of doing it. You can get someone else to write the book for you, from information you've given them. 

The way I do it is I either interview the person, get their answers and write things up from there, or they literally just send any notes they've made over the years. Diaries, journal entries, blog posts even, if they've done that kind of thing online. And I can delve into this wealth of knowledge and pick things out and then ask them questions when I want something clarified, or if I think, ‘Oh, that's a good story, I bet that will be good to expand.’ So I ask them about that. And it doesn't have to be a full autobiography either. It can be a memoir, which is usually a lot shorter, or it could be a novel, like a fictionalised version of your life.

And, if you want to know how to do this, you can actually read my book, Write Your Life: The Ultimate Life Hack for Achieving Your Dreams, for more info on how to even start thinking about this. It's a book about goal setting and going after your dreams and doing all this by using creative writing exercises. But you don't have to be a writer to use it.

Sorry if you just heard that – that was the dog sighing because life is hard. She's just lying there asleep.

If you don't want to do a book, that's fine. You can start a blog, writing regular articles on things you've done in the past and the lessons you've learned from them. You could create a website. You could do a vlog, you could go on YouTube, get a YouTube channel, you could start a podcast like me – and, weirdly, I wrote these years ago and podcast is not on there, but that's a great way of doing it. Just record your life in a fun way. It could be through stories or reels on Instagram and Facebook, a Facebook page or Instagram profile. You can share it that way.

If you don't want to be as public as that, obviously, you can keep a diary or a journal with the aim of passing it down to the next generation of your family or anyone else, you know, if you don't have kids. You might not want to pass on everything in your diaries; you could go through any diaries you've kept and write out bits in a new book that you could pass on. 

You can obviously tell other people your stories, have face-to-face conversations with friends or family members, or write them out in letters or emails. You can encourage them to tell their friends and family members too, both now and in the future, to make sure your stories get passed down over years to come.

You could keep a box full of life souvenirs – again, which you could pass down to family and friends. Personally, I have a huge chest full of travelling souvenirs, postcards, tourist brochures, gig tickets, theatre programmes, photos, and anything else I've kept from my travels, holidays, and days out, and it's in this really beautiful chest. If anyone found that chest – like if I was gone and they found this chest – they would instantly be able to understand a lot about me and my life and they would be able to see pretty much everything of importance that I've ever done.

Besides, it's nice to have that kind of thing and, every year or every few years, go through it – because I inevitably forget what's in there because my memory is terrible – and it can bring back all these great memories of your trips. I've got my diaries and journals from my trips in there as well, if I've kept them, and little things I've bought here and there. And yeah, I highly recommend doing that.

If you have any ideas of how you can back up your life, I'd love to hear them. Email me at info@traveltransformationcoach.com or DM me on Instagram @traveltransformationcoach if you have any ideas, if you have anything to say on this topic, because I feel really passionate about this. 

Interestingly. I did this talk in the coliving villa in the Basque Country, and it was really interesting to see what people had to say. Like a lot of people thought, ‘Oh yeah, I do need to do something because when I'm gone, everything will be gone and I do want to be remembered.’ And one of the guys actually said, “I don't want to be remembered.” And that was a really interesting thought for me.

But yes, we might not want to be famous or anything like that, we might not want to write a book and have it out there if you're particularly introverted or you don't want your personal life splashed around, which is fair enough, but it's not about you as a person being remembered, I don't think. I think it's about the things you've learnt and everything that you can help people with being passed on. And I think it's a pretty cool notion that you can teach people things and help people out with issues in their life even after you're gone.

That is the kind of legacy I want to leave behind. And I talk about legacy a lot in my – sorry, the dog just sighed again! I talk about legacy a lot in my Travel Transformation Academy – which you can find at traveltransformationcoach.com/academy – because I think it's such an important thing to be aware of the legacy we're leaving behind and to intentionally create that legacy while we're still alive, rather than just leaving it up to fate or leaving it up to whatever people may or may not remember about us once we're gone. I think we can engineer it so that we can leave behind really useful thoughts, memories, experiences, and lessons that can actually help people even after we're gone. And I think that is a really, really cool thing. 

I like the quote from Hamilton, which is, “What is legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” And I like the idea of planting things now that will grow in the future even when you're gone and you might not be around to see it.

So, yeah, I really hope this has made you think a bit about backing up your life, especially if you're travelling around and having amazing experiences and meeting all these great people, because you don't want to lose those things. Like, think of 20, 30, 40 years in the future. As much as you want to remember every single thing you did, you're probably not going to.

You're probably only going to be remembering five or 10% of things. So I think it's really important to figure out how you want to back up your life now and keep doing it throughout the years so that you don't forget everything and so that other people can benefit from it, too, in the future. 

Thank you for listening today. If you haven't heard about the competition I'm doing, basically, every month I'm going to be picking someone who has written a review on Apple Podcasts and I'm going to be sending them one of my books in ebook form of any of my non-fiction titles – that will be Write Your Life, Write Your Year, Intentional Travel Transformation, and any other future books. 

I'll be picking one a month, so please, please write a review – hopefully a nice one – on Apple Podcasts and either copy and paste it and send it to me or send me a message saying what your name is on Apple Podcasts so I can see it. Or just send me a screenshot to info@traveltransformationcoach.com or on Instagram @traveltransformationcoach. I will be picking one every month and I will be reading out the reviews on the podcast as well. 

So thank you for listening and, until next time, I hope you come up with an idea to back up your life, and I will catch you on the flip side, bye! Bye. I had to do that because I thought it sounded like Ross again. Anyway, I'll see you next week, bye! 

Do you want to learn how you can use travel – and travel-related principles – to completely change your life?

Written by Travel Transformation Coach Jessica Grace Coleman, this guide walks you through 10 ways you can transform yourself – and your life – through travel... even when you can't travel!

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