PerfectWhelm with Eric Slivoskey: The Podcast That Helps Enhance Your Life · Eric Slivoskey, life coach

47. The Bag, The Trail, The Pilgrims, and an Encounter in Pamplona: Part 9 of My Let’s Go Around The Globe Travel Series

·41 min·1 clip

I was feeling sorry for myself over blisters on day 4 when I met a man who'd been walking for 9 months to escape war.

Eric continues his Camino series and gathers the last loose threads from the road. He says he has been back in the States for just a little over 24 hours after a trip to the UK to see his oldest daughter, Cameron. The pilgrimage still feels close. He treats it less like a travel memory and more like a turning point. For him, the Camino worked like halftime. It was the moment when things came into focus. That clarity pushed him to make changes in his own life. He goes back to the summer of 2016. At that time he had been teaching at a university in West Virginia for about four years. The job was wearing him down. He talks about leadership upheaval, controversy in the administration, and a lot of turnover around the school. He also remembers problems with student motivation, assaults on faculty, offices being broken into, and campus violence. The workload kept growing too. Committee work, classes, and other responsibilities just kept getting added. One of the most frustrating parts was the annual requirement to prove his value. He had to gather letters from community contacts, document volunteer work, track evaluations, and show, year after year, that he deserved to stay. He could see the point of periodic review. He could not make peace with having to prove it at that level every year. The whole system felt exhausting and a little demeaning. Against that backdrop, the Camino gave him a different perspective. It helped him see the cycle he was in and made it clear that something needed to shift. The lesson stays practical and personal. He tells it like someone thinking out loud about work, purpose, and what happens when you keep forcing yourself to stay stuck. Then he follows through on the promise to finish with a story from Pamplona. That early encounter on the pilgrimage gives the episode its sharpest moment. It ties the reflections to a real place and a real memory. The whole thing feels like a long, unhurried conversation after a hard walk.

As heard by us

A Camino story that turns travel into a plainspoken look at change.

Eric closes the Camino series by folding a long walk through France and Spain into a quieter look at work, purpose, and the ways people change.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a Camino reflection that lands in Pamplona and a work-life change.

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