Education without focus, is just like anything else without focus. It’s hap-hazardous at best and pointlessly time-wasting and counterproductive at its worst. However, this seems to be the way education goes these days. It’s all over the place where you’ve got a bit of this, a bit of that and a bit of everything. Yet if you’re trying to please everybody with everything, you invariably don’t end up pleasing anybody with anything. The fact is that the world has changed and in recognition of that, so must education.
Recently, I came across a number of different schools that are targeting specific areas for growth and development. I find this is a fascinating approach and one which has the potential to produce some amazing opportunities and educational results. However, how do you know what your child wants to focus on? Often, it’s the parents who want their kids to do something, rather than the desire coming from the children themselves. I’ve seen this horrible and damaging sort of situation so often and you know what the end result will be, but it’s like watching a train wreck in motion. There’s not much you can do about it. The fact is that if this is the case, then no matter how much a parent wants something, it's never really going to be something their son or daughter really wants to do. For example, my parents wanted me to learn the piano. I hated the piano. I didn't enjoy learning. I didn’t enjoy practicing. I didn't enjoy performing. I really didn’t enjoy anything about it. Despite loving to listen to music, I wasn’t someone who wanted to play an instrument of any kind. However, I enjoyed singing and I ended up doing some singing lessons and performances which I really enjoyed. Yet without both these experiences, I would never have known what I liked and what I should focus on. To begin with, it’s well worth encouraging kids to experience a whole range of different activities and explore interests without the parental pressure and expectations to pick one thing that they really want themselves. This process can help students work out what makes them tick and therefore what they should be focusing on in their education, especially in their high school years. I remember when I was in primary school at the end of one term, we did a week of trying out a different sort of activity. We were given a range of different options. We could choose bowling, squash, tennis or even roller skating and I don’t mean roller blading. I mean roller skating! Yes, it was still a thing back then and it was so much fun. You'd skate up to the DJ, request a song, then skate around the rink as fast as you could when your song came on! Unfortunately, the skating rink, ‘Skatehaven’ was turned into self-storage units years ago. Such a sad end to a wonderful venue, but back to the main point! The fact was you were able to choose something and concentrate on it for a week. You’d learn different skills and techniques and you’d be able to challenge yourself doing something new and different. If you didn’t like it, at the end of the week you never have to do it again, but if you liked it, this just opened up a brand-new opportunity and interest for you. That week I chose squash! This is something I really remember about primary school. Most of the time you don’t remember anything about primary school because it was so long ago and far away and but so much better than it is today. Every maths, English, geography and science lesson all blend into one with very little recollection at all of any that really happened. However, when you do something unique and different it stands out and becomes memorable. To be honest, I’ve never played squash since, but I did really enjoy that week. I did however, go on to play tennis which is sort of the same thing anyway. Yet schools don’t tend to do many experiential education weeks like this. If they did, it would have a profound impact on a child’s education and development. Think about it this way. You have schools full of dedicated teachers, whose lessons will never be remembered. That to me seems like a complete waste of time and talent. Perhaps a few more memorable weeks each year doing something different wouldn’t hurt at all. In fact, even if you did a month a year throughout high school, that’s still only six months of a student’s education, which is six months more of experiences they will actually remember, learn from and cherish for the rest of their lives. Even taking this time out, they’ll still have five and a half years of blurred generic grey days in classrooms about which to forget. With the stats suggesting that in Australia 40% of students are disengaged, why not try something different and meaningful to get at least some of those 40% back on track. In what are they interested? What do they love to do? Do you have any idea what drives them? If you don’t know that, you can’t tailor a program for them. Why not have a month every year that’s dedicated to doing different activities and I don’t mean outdoor ed activities, I mean a whole range of community, cultural, sporting and workplace activities to see what actually makes students get excited about their life and contribution to society. Some weeks they will like, some weeks they won’t like but it starts to develop a picture and it starts to give students a feeling for different activities, for different experiences and for different challenges. It lets them develop some ideas of a path that they enjoy and that they want to follow. It lets them explore what they want to explore and this can be tied back into the classroom and academic programs they need to be able to do to get into a specific field which interests them. There’s a great benefit from this because once you have students re-engaged, they’re actually going to learn and so if you have someone who is learning and someone who is keen, they’re more likely to go on to further education or seek positive employment opportunities or contribute in a meaningful way to their communities. They’re less likely to be disillusioned, disengaged with the life, the universe and everything and sitting at home doing nothing. With massive levels of youth unemployment in our country and a growing trend towards automation of many entry level and low-level repetitive jobs, it’s time to do something more useful and productive in education. At the end of the day, things like NAPLAN results and standardized tests are pointless numbers which are quickly forgotten like most classroom lessons. The emphasis that has been put on these things, would give you the impression that they’re useful indicators of long-term learning and employability, which they’re not. At the end of the day, you want young men and women who can think for themselves and be able to help solve the terrible social, environmental and economic mess they’re been left with by previous generations. Finding meaningful experiential education experiences for them to have over the course of their schooling is critical to achieving this and it shouldn’t be lumped as a ‘co-curricular’ or one off activity. Build something useful into the daily lives of students and this will have a profound impact on the way in which they learn.
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When we don’t know what we’re doing and we’re expected to have answers or manage risk, this is a massive problem. How can we be expected to put systems in place and plan for contingencies if we don’t understand the situation or context of what we’re expected to be doing.
Many teachers find themselves in this exact situation and are expected to plan for something about which they know nothing. At this point, the major activity and operational risk comes from the person not knowing what they’re doing, rather than the potential inherent risks of the activity itself. Do we let inexperienced drivers get behind the wheel without any training or supervision? Thankfully not. Yet why are so many teachers allowed to run sports, excursions and activities with no idea, training nor experience in what they’re doing? It literally makes no sense at all to allow someone to take on a role which requires them to plan for and mitigate risks, if they have no idea themselves. The increased risk here comes from the person not knowing what they’re doing at all and they’re simply making things up as they go, which is never good in terms of risk management. A number of years ago we came across one such group on an expedition. We were in Kangaroo Valley and just starting out on an expedition when we came across a group just finishing an expedition. In talking with them, we quickly realised they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Their whole risk management plan was apparently based upon the fact that one of the teachers went for a walk and saw a snake, therefore they went canoeing instead because the risk of the snake was too great. I really want to laugh at this point as on that exact same river, I saw a 3 metre Eastern Brown Snake in the water and then it slithered up onto the place we had just had lunch, so seeing a snake in the wild and basing your decision on risk management around a single sighting of a snake seems quite idiotic to be perfectly honest. Essentially these guys had been out on a multi day canoe expedition with no canoe instructors, no maps, no communications devices and no backup plans. Everything has to run perfectly for them to be ok, which relying on luck for your management of risk, is never a good thing. One wonders how this group was even allowed to go out on this trip with such a poor basis for the management of the inherent risks, let alone the operational risks which were so obvious to this trip. Unfortunately, trips like this go out every day with no idea what their real risks are and the consequences of this can be horrendous if something goes wrong. The only way that this sort of situation can be avoided is through training and experience. If any organisation is sending staff out untrained and unprepared in terms of risk management, then they deserve everything they get if something goes wrong. Schools don’t allow untrained teachers in the classroom, so why do they allow untrained teachers in the field. Whether the teacher is running the trip or not, they need to understand what they’re doing to ensure they’re capable and effective in managing the risks involved outside of the classroom. Therefore, they need to be trained and experienced in general risk management, as well as activity or program specific risk management, so they can minimise the risks involved. The risk of not knowing what you’re doing is far too great and negligent when there’s so many opportunities to get trained and get up to speed with factors of which you should be aware and doing the right things to ensure you’re running awesome, experiential educational programs. If you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t understand the risks involved or just need a refresher, then get some training today so that you can confidently manage risk no matter what the situation or context. Thus, always run awesome, educational programs for all your students. Why are schools so challenged by risk management? This is something I’ve been noticing a lot lately and whilst risk management in schools has never been strong, because it doesn’t form part of a teacher’s training, the fact that it’s so important baffles me as to the lack of attention given to it.
Whilst many a school will scream and curse at this suggestion, claiming that they have a great paperwork system, there lies the problem. A paperwork system based purely on checking boxes and approvals masks the fact that there’s a lack of real risk management understanding and implementation. Paperwork without training and experience is just that, paperwork. It can be dragged out to accuse staff of this or that in an attempt to deflect blame, rather than being a support mechanism for decision making and good operational practices. One place I worked was obsessed by paperwork. One activity was determined unsafe because the paperwork wasn’t good enough. This was yet another ill-informed and idiotic comment from someone who knew nothing about risk management. The boss also insisted everyone sign every document, before going out on an activity, but when something within that document was materially affecting the safety of the program, nothing was done about it. Now, I admit this was an extreme case, but we learn a lot from these things and the reality is that if a teacher has not had any formal Risk Management training, the teacher shouldn’t be planning or running any sort of activity at all. Anything from a practical lesson, to a quick trip down the road to a local park, gallery, courthouse or museum, right up to sports, camps and overseas trips, requires a risk management assessment. Teachers must take the time, not just to learn how to ‘do’ paperwork, which I could probably train a team of monkeys on typewriters to do quite a lot better than some of the risk assessments I’ve read over the years, but instead, the most important thing is that they need to train for situational awareness, contingency planning and how to be adaptable and flexible to ensure whatever the activity is, it’s run well. The number of teachers who are taking groups of students out on activities who are untrained, unskilled and unprepared is worrying. You cannot contract out your duty of care nor your liability to a third party, so if you’re taking a group overseas, then you are responsible for everything that happens regardless of contract providers. These are some of the most dangerous trips to run, as far too many people see this as a holiday, rather than the significantly higher duty of care and potentially reduced resources, yet countless trips head out with a bit of paperwork and teachers who have no ideas what’s in that, nor how to really implement any of it. This disconnect widens, the more schools employ people to ‘do’ their risk assessments for them. I’ve seen an increasing number of schools put this responsibility on one person and not the people running the trips. At the end of the day, if you aren’t trained and experienced in the management of risk, then you shouldn’t be planning and running a trip at all. This isn’t to say stop doing trips, because that would be stupid and pointless. Instead, get some training so that you can be confident in what you’re doing and start to build a culture within your organisation which understands and has great risk management systems so every trip goes out with confident pro-active teachers who are prepared and situationally aware so that you are always running great experiential education programs for everyone. Before your next excursion, do a risk management training course and build your skills-set and start to address this disconnect between documentation, implementation and culture. The only way to truly run great programs, is to have that culture of risk management right throughout your organisation. OK! Before you fall asleep with the thought of two days of risk management training, hear me out!
What are the most exciting things you do in education? It probably has nothing to do with sitting in a classroom and completing worksheets. Each year, that puts countless people to sleep. Education needs to be dynamic, exciting and engaging to equip students with the skills they need for life. However, to run really cool programs like this, we usually have to step outside the school gates and engage with the real world. Only problem is that when we do this, there’s a whole stack of inherent risks with which we’re suddenly confronted. Everything from your usual stack of peanut allergies, to your bus strangely catching on fire, which to be clear was not actually my fault. The randomness and richness of the world outside the school gates is the most amazing place in which to learn, but if we’re not trained and equipped to plan for and manage risks in this environment, then we’re putting ourselves and our students at risk. At this point we have three options: Option 1. Don’t go! It’s all too hard! School’s not about the real world anyway. If you take this option, you probably should have become an accountant or a public servant, perhaps both. Complete risk aversion is pointless and damaging and should be avoided. Option 2. Just do it! Grab your bags, kids and let’s go! If you take this option, which unfortunately, I’ve seen many teachers do, then you’re setting yourself up for some major problems. Anything can and does go wrong in these situations where well-intentioned teachers don’t take the time to plan, prepare for and run their programs carefully. Option 3. Have a structured, well-planned approach for all of your programs which documents the steps you need to take to ensure your group is well managed and the focus is on great experiential education outcomes for students, with robust systems in place for contingencies to support this. For me, the only option when running any excursion, camp, sport or activity is Option 3. However, most schools are operating somewhere in between Option 1, 2 and 3 with many teachers confused about their role and responsibilities when planning and running any programs. Even experienced staff can struggle with this. You must put the time, energy and effort into building a well-formed plan no matter what the activity is. It could be just going down the road to visit the local court. It could be a year level camp, or an overseas trip. Whatever the case is, you need to ensure you’ve planned for normal operations and contingencies if something doesn’t go to plan, which invariably will be the case. One trip I was on, I received a phone call to say that one of the 5th Grade students had been taken to hospital with a fish hook in his arm! I was pretty surprised by this, since there was no fishing on the program, yet here we were with fish hook in the arm, right next to a vein. Risk Management Training prepares you for weird random stuff like this and how to respond quickly and effectively no matter what the context. With a non-delegable duty of care, you also can’t outsource your risk management to another organisation, even if they suggested you can. It just doesn’t work that way. Instead, you and your school are ultimately responsible for the duty of care over your students for any trips you’re on. “But they didn’t tell us that at uni!” I hear you say! True, unis don’t actually equip teachers with most of the skills they need with which to teach, but that’s another matter. At the end of the day, if you’re running any sort of excursion, camp, sport, overseas trip or any other sort of school activity which requires you to produce a risk assessment, you need to be trained in risk management. It’s no good just to copy and paste what the last untrained person produced and put your name to it. That’s a dangerous precedence which will come back to bite you. Risk management training isn’t about putting you to sleep for two days. It’s about giving you clarity and confidence through practical experienced-based training on how to run effective and safe programs. Get in touch with us today to see how you can build this training in to your professional development schedule to ensure you’re running the best programs possible for your students. Where do you start with Risk Management? With any experiential education, you have a professional responsibility to pro-actively manage risk. This is an ever-evolving and dynamic skill-set that you develop over the years through training and experience. It’s something we can never take for granted. We take a look at some of the challenges we face in managing risk and what can happen, when things don’t go to plan.
In this episode, we talk with Paul Tame, who is a leading risk management trainer with Xcursion Risk Management Training, Lead corporate management trainer for Zen Training & Senior lecturer at Western State Uni Colorado. We take a dive into risk management for experiential education and touch on a few challenges we all face when planning and running programs. Risk Management Podcast Episode - Paul Tame & David Gregory Talk Risk Management! Often things look great on paper. However, how does that translate into the real world? With risk management for any sort of activity, it needs to be a living and breathing culture within your organisation and not just a bit of paperwork someone completed and then filed away. For more information on Paul’s work and the organisations he’s worked with over the years, check out: Zen For Business https://www.zenforbusiness.net/ Xcursion Risk Management https://training.xcursion.com.au/ Western State Uni https://www.western.edu/ And Crested Butte a fun ski resort we’ve skied together at: https://www.skicb.com/ For more information on Denali: https://www.nps.gov/dena/index.htm https://www.weather.gov/afg/denaliclimbing Working in risk management, this is one of my biggest concerns and ongoing frustrations. Why don’t people take action, manage and reduce risk until it’s too late? Far too many schools and organisations wait until they’ve had a major incident to ensure they have systems in place and the right people in place to manage risk.
Why is this? Are we all wired to think that everything is going to be ok and run exactly to plan? Is it the unconscious incompetence that comes with being new to something? Or is it not really caring? To be honest, I really don’t think it’s not caring. Generally, people are in education to help others achieve goals and consequently tend to care about what happens as a result. However, the focus of teaching and teacher training is on classroom practice and although many lessons don’t go to plan, there’s not really a need to mitigate against this risk other than to make sure you plan your lesson. Yet when planning an excursion, trip, activity or sport outside of the classroom, the same level of preparation rarely goes into it. The problem is that the management of risk and the actual risks inherent to the activity, excursion or sport is rarely understood, especially if the main focus of someone’s training and employment has been unrelated. Just because someone can teach and manage a group in the classroom, doesn’t mean he or she can facilitate and manage a group in an unstructured and unregulated environment. The result of this usually ends up with most things going to plan, but when something doesn’t, it can go pear-shaped very quickly and generally when this happens, the response is just made up as they go. This can exacerbate a problem or an incident and needlessly escalate it, which can result in further damaging consequences for staff and students. Once a teacher, administrator, school or organisation has gone through this experience, they then suddenly start to think about risk management in a meaningful way. However, this is too little, too late. The horse has already bolted and it’s not coming back. The first school I worked for unfortunately had to go through a fatality for them to realise that they had a risk management problem. I was one of the new staff employed after the fatality and the fall out from this lasted for years for some and a lifetime for many others. Whilst a fatality is thankfully a very rare occurrence, there’s many other incidents which still regularly occur that are completely preventable. There’s enough knowledge, experience and technology available to prevent so many incidents from occurring year, so why don’t people do anything about it until it’s too late? More often than not, it’s what’s referred to as unconscious incompetence. You don’t know what you don’t know. How can someone be expected to manage something, if they have no idea about what they’re managing nor why they’re supposed to be managing it. All programs and activities start with good intentions to create great educational outcomes. However, good intentions don’t always translate to good management. Therefore, specific training is essential in general risk management for school activities, sport and excursions, as well as more focussed individual activity risk management training. This sort of initial training helps move people from the unconscious incompetence, to the conscious incompetences skill level and can be quite confronting and eye-opening for most people. Suddenly, they realise the holes, gaps and risks in the programs for which they’re responsible and start to do something about it. Experience and further training at this stage then moves a person from this conscious incompetence stage into the conscious competence stage. At this point, the person understands risks, controls them and continues to actively manage and work towards risk management goals and develop a culture of risk management within their organisation. It’s at this point you actually get good risk management systems operating within schools and organisations to ensure quality practices are always in place and being used to run great educational programs with the risks minimised. The final stage persons is unconscious competence. Essentially, they understand a whole range of risks and actively manage them without thinking. If you don’t have anyone in your school or organisation like this, with this skill set, then you’re just treading water before something terrible happens. This shouldn’t be the case as again, there’s enough knowledge, experience, training and technology available to ensure risks are well managed within any organisation. It’s way too late to do this after something has failed and you can be assured that dealing with a crisis and the fall out from that is far more difficult than a bit of training and implementing good risk management systems. To avoid the inevitable train wreck of a situation in which lives, careers and reputations are damaged, get some risk management training today so you can build and leverage the right systems, processes, equipment and technology to consciously and competently manage risk within your school or organisation. Most people overlook behaviour when preparing a risk assessment for any program. To be perfectly honest, in my experience, most people struggle to understand what they need to do to assess risk for an activity, which is fair enough as there’s no training for this at uni and most teachers don’t need to know, until they really do. Whilst I won’t go through what you need to do here, even if someone is experienced in doing this, one thing often missed is the increasing problem children and teens are facing around social anxiety and how this is impacting on parents’ understating of what real risk is and why doing something different isn’t going to kill their child, but sitting on their device for almost eight hours a day could.
Due to some rubbish parenting and everyone’s individualistic desire to be the same, children have been given a lot of addictive devices from which they can suffer withdrawals. Their brains are smashed with marketing, body image messages and a filtered view of the world. Whilst in the past, our brains were attuned to be anxious about large animals which may kill us and eat us. This moved on to having your village raided by Vikings and being forced into slavery and even in fewer than the past 100 years heading off to war to fight the real threat of Nazis taking over the world. To ensure our survival, our brains are wired to help us fight or flee from threats to our safety. However, what happens when the world becomes safer, wars less frequent and the change of being eaten by wild animals almost entirely a thing of the past? Are we a happy and progressive world where we look out for each other? No, we’re in an increasingly individualistic world that has little regard for others and are becoming increasingly worried about things that don’t exist. Whilst the Salem witch trials might be an extreme example of this, it does have merit. What happened in that situation was that mass hysteria overtook people’s ability to think for themselves and countless people became worried about someone putting a curse on them, or turning them into a newt. This self-fulfilling prophecy not only in Salem, but throughout England during this period, resulted in tens of thousands of innocent people being hanged, drowned and burnt to death. “But that was in the past,” I hear you say and people don’t believe in witches anymore! Well true, but that’s not the point. The point is that people’s irrational fears took over. In the absence of any real threat or danger, people make it up in their minds. The same is true of many students and parents today when it comes to understanding risk and the activities they’ll experience outside of school. We create new ways of worrying, especially when there’s actually not that much about which to worry. The chance of being killed by a terror attack is extremely low. Wars across the globe are at the lowest point in history. Most people in developed countries have access to plenty of clean drinking water and food. People have plenty of opportunities for work and freedom of movement and association, yet people are often irrationally worried about going on camp, or abseiling. In terms of outdoor activities, abseiling is one of the safest activities you can do, yet this causes a huge amount of anxiety. The reality is that driving your kids to and from school each day is one of the most dangerous things you can do. More people die in road accidents every week than they do in a year or two or more in outdoor education. With such a disconnect, how do we start having this conversation about risk with parents? Firstly, explain a bit about the current state of the world and back it with some stats. People are always quite surprised by this. Then explain a situation where you went up to a stranger and started chatting with them. What was the fear? How did that make you feel? What happened when they started chatting back to you and you discovered they were a really interesting person. If you haven’t done this, do this and then you’ll know what I mean and you’ll have a story to tell. Talk about the growth associated with taking risks. Turn it over to the parents. What was something you did as a child that was fun but your parents didn’t know or what was the last time you took a risk with something new? How did it feel? What did you learn? The reality is that most people’s fears are now grounded well and truly in the fantasy world with social media making it easier for parents and students to reinforce their own beliefs about a topic, no matter how stupid that topic may be. For example, a parent searching for bush walking fatalities, will end up down a rabbit hole which is solely focussed on how people have died in the bush. By doing this, they discount everything about the fact that bush walking is incredible for students to get out and about and learn about themselves and others. Social media and google searches will filter everything out and now the parents’ world is just a clouded mind of bush walking fatalities and just like witches, nothing else is right with the world until we ban it or get rid of it, which will then lead them to support groups for angry parents to want to ban bush walking and on it goes. Unfortunately, it’s our job to bring them back to reality, because this is the exact same thing that’s dragging their kids down into other rabbit holes of pain, despair and other people who are always far happier, more successful and wealthier than they are. At the end of the day, most of this is total rubbish and yet it’s what children and parents are believing. Let’s bring them back to reality. Talk with them about social risks, social anxiety and maybe facing this fear is far harder than facing down a bear charging at you looking for a tasty meal (although this would have to be in North America, as our Koalas are way too stoned on gin leaves to care). Often what I’ve seen is a huge amount of social anxiety prior to camps as both parents and students fear disconnecting from the world. The fact is that most of it’s a complete load of crap, but trying to get the socially anxious to understand this, is a much harder task than simply stating the obvious. At your next pre-camp briefing, call this out. Show them some stats and get them grounded in some level of reality. I know it’s been a year longer than we had hoped, but now, despite the current global issues, which reminds me of the Billy Joel song, ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, we’re back for season 2 of the Xperiential Education podcast!
This season, we cover all sorts of great programs from art, to science, to risk management, to outdoor ed, to a really wonderful student-led medical program and a few things in between. The depth and breadth of the podcast and our guests, highlights how important it is for students today to learn to be adaptable problem solvers. Season 2 is brought to you by Xcursion Risk Management, for all of your risk management training and software needs for running great experiential education programs. https://training.xcursion.com.au/ https://www.xcursion.com.au For more info, guest suggestions and other feedback visit: https://xperiential.education/ Everyone loves a good drama. At work, the gossip around who’s dating who is far more interesting than doing your job. Newspapers and media outlets rely on bad news to sell papers or in digital terms create ‘click bait’ so you click on the article. Often, in both cases, the headlines don’t match the actual story because if they did, people wouldn’t read them. It’s far easier to get someone to pay for a paper with the headline “Virus Outbreak! 95 Year old Dead and Infections on the Rise.” Rather than, “55,000 people have already recovered from the Virus many only experienced mild illness.” This is not to understate the issue at hand. Yes it is concerning and yes we need to do something about this to slow and/or stop the spread. However, the impact this has had on outdoor education alone is massive, with countless school cutting all programs, no matter how remote or disconnected they are from the fact that children are not really being affected. The level of perceived risk is through the roof, the level of actual risk for most people remains relatively low. I saw this again on the news last night. ¾ of the whole news was about the ‘massive’ jump in cases. The ‘sick and elderly dying,’ the panic buying, the dark days ahead and all of this negative crap which gives the average person the impression that the zombie apocalypse is here. For most people, given the popularity of the show, the Walking Dead, they’re reacting as if a zombie virus or Ebola has gotten loose and is wiping out 80-90% of the healthy population. The fact is, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that fear and panic are driving this and hyped up by the media, is driving the world economy into recession. Ironically, like a fine print disclaimer at the bottom of some ludicrous advert, one of the later stories in the news was basically, ‘Oh by the way… if you wash your hands, don’t touch your face and mouth after contacts and don’t have prolonged close contact with an infected person, the risk of catching this is really low. The number of cases of this in the country and around the world are testament to this. Added to this, most people are not dying. They’re experiencing mild ‘flu-like’ conditions and recovering. What’s the problem? The problem is that everyone loves the drama and focuses on the negative side of the drama, rather than looking at the whole problem in context. The world is not going to be completely overrun and shut-down by this virus. It’s not wiping out the next generation of young people and healthy people, but mild viruses which don’t kill lots of people, don’t make good news stories. On 30th Oct 1938, the radio show ‘War of the Worlds’, by Orson Welles first aired. This sparked wide-spread panic, with people thinking they were being attacked by aliens. Now we might laugh at this now, as we know it’s a story, but at the time, that felt so real as it was coming through their airwaves. The media has a lot to answer for in this. They’re far from reporting the facts and this has been so over-editorialised and hyped up that the fear and panic they’ve put into the community could have a really long-term negative effect. This will all blow over given time. However, how many businesses are going to be wiped out? How many fights are going to break out over nothing? How much panic is ok before the media is taken to task over this, which, to be honest, they won’t be. If you look back in history, the world has survived many things. However, fear and panic is so contagious that the impact it has on a mild crisis can and does turn everything into a major catastrophe. We’re experiencing runs on banks, stampedes in stadiums, riots over food and supplies, when the supplies aren’t at risk. The timeless words of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ echo loudly through this current world crisis and we should always remember: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; …. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! The full poem can be found here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if--- It is time for us to take stock and see this for what it is. It is not the world ending pandemic that will turn everyone inside out. It is a virus, which spreads quickly through close contact and poor hygiene and the effects of which are generally mild with most people recovering. Let’s not lose our heads. The world has gone through worse and there will be worse to come, but standing firm when everyone else is losing it, is so important for the world right now. We need more people to have level heads and respond to this current issue accordingly. For some stats on the current virus check out: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ For some crucial tips on surviving a zombie apocalypse check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyUbQTEFuss In life, we can always come up with ten reasons for not doing something. The negative talk of most people determines why something shouldn’t be done more often than why it should be done. In general, people don’t like to take risks and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, taking risks is how we grow and develop. If we’re so risk averse that we’re not willing to try anything new, then this really doesn’t allow us to reach our potential on any level. Yet when most people encounter something new or different, they will run through in their minds all the reasons why it won’t work, rather than all the reasons why it will. This is common at work and in people’s social lives. The comfort of knowing the outcome is a wonderful thing to be able to hold onto as it gives us certainty, which is always comfortable to have. However, this certainty can often hold us back from interesting and exciting experiences. One really good example of this is abseiling. Over the years, despite this being a really safe activity to do, abseilling has been the most challenging activity I’ve seen for many students and teachers alike. You can see them talking themselves down, even before you get started. Some people won’t even put on a harness because they’re afraid of heights, rock falls, ropes breaking, slipping back, falling off the cliff, being dropped off the cliff, the rope being cut, the anchor giving way, the double anchor giving way, looking stupid or afraid whilst on the rope. Despite this huge bunch of negative talk, what’s the one reason you should forget all of this and just go for it? Now I can’t answer this for anyone, but what’s important is that we encourage people we’re working with to find the one reason for doing something. This might not be easy, as the easiest thing to often do is nothing, but where does that get us? It disempowers people and means they will never be able to live up to their potential. The irony of all this is that often by not doing anything, or taking any risks, people end up with a false sense of what real risks are and often the risk of doing nothing is far greater than the risk of giving something a go. When you’re setting up an activity which might have a high-level of perceived risk and a high-level of resistance from participants, why not chat with them about the benefits of taking a risk on something. Use a tangible example of that as well, to ensure they can see how and why finding the one reason to do something, versus the ten reasons not to. This is massively beneficial to their own personal development and growth. There will always be plenty of reasons not to do something in life, but if nobody took any sort of risk, then we’d still be living in caves. Even if something doesn’t work out the way we thought it would, taking that risk can mean we end up having a wonderful and unexpected experience and learn and grow from this. This is followed by other experiences we have as a result of finding that one reason why, versus the ten reasons why not. Take a risk today! Try something new and different and surprise yourself as to how wonderful that new experience can be. |
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