Tag: adventure education

Learning from failure in adventure sports.

You’ve probably heard a million slogans and catch phases about failure and the importance of embracing it.

I quite like ‘Fail Fast’ and ‘Fail Forward’.

I get it. But I struggle with the abstract and vagueness of failure when trying to make use of this notion. Most failures are small. I’d like to avoid big ones.

What did I last fail at? Am failing enough? What counts as a failure?

With adventure sports I find this much easier.

If your learning to paddle board and your hair is dry — you’re not trying hard enough. If you learning kayaking and your not falling in, your not trying hard enough.

You know that feeling when your out on the water on a cold day, keeping your hair dry, not getting water down the back of your wetsuit. Then BOOM. You stack it. Hair wet. Freeze. Failure. NOW the session starts. Now you start trying new moves, having a laugh, learning, progressing and realising it’s not that cold if you keep moving.

This is where I am trying to get to my mentality of failure in other areas of life. Not sure how.

NB The element of risk in adventures sports left out of this article.

Schools are specialist learning organisations for young people.

Despite pressures for exams results, schools (generally) find the time for ‘learning outside of the classroom’ initiatives- Forest School, Outdoor Pursuits, PE, Games, Walks etc.

They inherently understand it aids learning and development.

So why is it forgotten about when we get to the workplace?

Are companies not thought of as learning orgnisations?

Do companies simply not know how to use the outdoors to their advantage?

I don’t believe we grow out of the benefits derived from adventure and the outdoors.