Randa Quraan | Socially Loud Media I booked the flight before I let myself think too long about it. Because I knew if I thought too long about it, I would find a reason not to go. A client deadline. A school thing. A voice in my head reminding me that mothers do not just disappear to Europe for their birthdays. I went anyway. I landed in Lisbon alone, with no agenda, no itinerary made by committee, no one to coordinate with. Just me, a city I had never been to, and my birthday. It was one of the best decisions I have made in years. What I found in Lisbon was not adventure, though there was that too. What I found was myself outside of my roles. No one in Lisbon knew I was a founder, a mother, a strategist, a coach, a Palestinian, a brand. I was just a woman walking down cobblestone streets eating pastéis de nata and watching the light change on the water. I was nobody's point of contact. Nobody needed anything from me. And in that silence, things became very clear. Who I was underneath all the doing. What I actually wanted. What I had been putting off thinking about because thinking requires stillness and stillness is hard to find when you are always on. There is something that happens when you are alone in a foreign city with no one to coordinate with and no one waiting on you. You figure things out. You realize you are more capable than you let yourself believe when you are always surrounded by people who need something from you. You sit at a table for one and eat a beautiful meal and you do not apologize for it. As women, especially as mothers, we spend so much of our lives oriented around other people. Solo travel breaks that pattern. Not selfishly. Necessarily. Every founder needs this. Not Lisbon specifically. But the thing Lisbon represents. Time alone that is not working. Space that is not your home or your office. A context where nobody has a claim on your attention. The business will not collapse. I know it feels like it might, but it will not. And if you set it up properly before you leave, the exercise of preparing for your absence is itself valuable: it forces you to delegate, document, and trust your team in ways you probably should have been doing already. I came home from Lisbon with something I had not expected: clarity about the next chapter. Not because I had a strategy retreat or a planning session. Because I rested. Because I walked. Because I let my mind wander without immediately making it productive. Some of the best business thinking I have ever done has happened when I was not trying to think about business at all. Give yourself the trip. You are not just a founder. You are a full human being. And that human being deserves to be celebrated on her birthday, with pastry, with good light, with her own company, in a city that does not know her name. --- Randa Quraan is the founder of Socially Loud, Socially Loved, and Socially Legit. Speaker. Strategist. Coach. Palestinian American. Mom. Faith-driven. Building loud on purpose. sociallyloud.com
