Why I Walked the Camino, and What I Was Really Looking For

It started with a Hallmark movie.

It was a March evening, not long before my sabbatical was set to begin. I had been waiting on that first real break in my career, anxious for the reset but with no idea how I was going to use it. I didn't want to spend it sitting around doing nothing, and I knew that prepping for the spring semester I'd return to faculty for wasn't going to fill the hours. So there I was on the couch, a little restless, watching a movie about a woman who had been passed over for a promotion. Someone in the film suggested she walk the Camino de Santiago to work through what she was feeling. I had heard of the Camino once before, from a colleague who had planned to walk it. I didn't know much about it. But something about that woman, and her situation, reached out and grabbed me.

I called Phil, my best friend, that same night and told him this was what I was going to do. He immediately began making plans to join me. I told my wife, Amy, too. She said, "Well, that's nice. Have a good time." I'm not sure she thought I was serious. Little did she know.

On the surface, the woman in the movie and I had nothing in common. I hadn't been passed over. Nobody had done anything to me. For me, it was just time. I had already made my decision to step back from a twenty-two-year leadership career and return to faculty, and I was at peace with that part. What I recognized in her was not the circumstance. It was the shape of what we were both moving through.

In his book Transitions, William Bridges describes a transition in three phases: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. The woman in that movie was processing an ending and standing in the neutral zone, trying to find her footing before whatever came next. So was I. What pulled me toward the Camino was that it offered a way to stay in that neutral zone on purpose, fully and without distraction, while I walked toward a new beginning I couldn't yet see.

I have always processed my thinking by walking. There is something about the physical act of it, and the intentional, repetitive monotony of it, that loosens ideas and emotions and resolutions that nothing else can reach. There was something else, too. Seven transient years away from home, climbing the ladder of what I thought was success, had left me worn out on the responsibilities of leadership. Along the way I had also lost my sense of community. I made friends wherever I worked, very close ones. But having friends and being in community are two different things, and I had not felt part of a place in a long time. The Camino is built on community, even when it is temporary. I sensed that watching the movie. I would come to understand it far more deeply on the walk itself, but that is a story for another day.

What I have not said yet is the part I struggled with most. The return to faculty was settled. The harder question was who I was going to be if I was no longer an administrator and a leader. Underneath that sat a quieter, older feeling: a nagging sense that there was something else out there I was supposed to be doing, something altogether different, and I could not name what it was or who I was supposed to become.

That feeling has been with me a long time. I have enjoyed my career in education, and teaching has always come naturally to me. The leadership came because others saw it in me first and encouraged me toward opportunities I would not have walked into on my own. But when I went off to college, I had dreams of an entirely different life as a professional musician. Music is still how I express myself, still a real part of who I am, even if I realized early on that it was never going to be my career. Over the years I picked up other passions that might have become careers of their own, had I chased them. I started to think this transition might be a chance to reinvent myself for the second half of life, around the things I love doing, the things that felt like the real me. Drumming. Barbecuing. Hiking. Travel.

Of these, travel seemed the most plausible as a career. I had toyed with it for years, even the idea of becoming a travel agent, but it never sat right. What I love is leading groups abroad with a purpose behind the trip. Working in higher education had given me chances to lead international field studies, first with graduate students and later with faculty and staff. The teacher in me needs the purpose, the chance to build something with an educational focus. Somewhere on the Camino, walking from Porto to Santiago de Compostela in the summer of 2025, I began imagining a tour company built around thematic trips, shared readings, common interests. It would be like those field experiences, but outside the academy.

And then it landed. Ultreia.

Not a tour company. A practice for helping people who were asking the exact questions I was asking. Who am I now? Who could I become? People in their own neutral zone, processing their own ending, walking toward a beginning they couldn't yet name. It did not feel forced. Given everything I had done and everything I cared about, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I found it in the middle of the very walk I would one day guide others through.

If I could go back to that man on the couch in March, I would tell him to sit with it. The neutral zone is not a comfortable place, especially for those of us who have always taken hold of our own destiny and known what we wanted. I had been through transitions before, so I knew to wait. That never made the waiting any easier. I could not yet see how I would rediscover who I was as a twenty-two-year leadership journey came to a close. I had spent my entire adult life becoming the person I had become. I did not know what the new beginning would be. I only had faith that it would come clear.

It did.

There was one more thing I noticed, and it surprised me. My inner teacher came out before I ever set foot on the trail. Preparing for the Camino, I found myself building a curriculum for it, a structure that would let me actually use the time well rather than just drift through it. That instinct, to shape an experience so it leads somewhere, is the same one that has carried my whole career. It is also what has since become the approach I use with Ultreia to coach others.

That is the distinction I keep coming back to. The Camino changes people on its own. There is something in walking each day, in giving yourself the time to think and reflect, in carrying nearly everything you need on your back and trusting the next town to provide the rest. There is real power in the immediate community of walking beside others who are on the same path, each working through some transition of their own, but doing it in connection rather than alone. Coaching is something different. Coaching is about being more intentional in building the future you want, and then taking the steps to move forward and beyond. That is the very meaning of the word Ultreia. On the website I put it this way: the Camino changes you. Ultreia changes you in a direction you choose.

If you are standing in your own neutral zone right now, with the ending behind you and the next thing not yet in view, you don't have to name it today. Sometimes you just have to start walking. And if you want help giving that walk some structure, so it carries you toward your own new beginning rather than simply past it, that is the work I do. You can find me at www.walkwithultreia.com.