Naturally crazy. Give it a go!
We took a business team up Pen y Fan, Southern UK’s highest top, two nights ago. A perfect full moon followed by a perfect sunrise. An inspiring experience in its own right.
During the ascent, friend and Fresh Air Learning Company associate, Jo Bradshaw recounted her experience of summit night on Mount Everest exactly 2 months previously.
A combination of terrain (one tenth scale of Everest, and topographic features she could link to the South Col, Hilary Step, South Summit, and summit etc.), iPad slides – brilliantly colourful in the dark, and the physical exertion of participants themselves, made the experience an Everest talk with a difference.
For our clients, the walk was primarily about achieving something out of the ordinary together. And they did. A grounding and connecting experience. A meaning-full reference point for future conversations.
The Everest story, and Jo herself, provided an interactive layer of metaphors around goals, resilience and teamwork to the whole experience.
So what?
The team was extraordinary in a number of respects.
Not all were outdoor people, only two described themselves as hillwalkers, there was a wide range of fitness levels, no-one had walked up a mountain in the dark before, and no-one had witnessed the magic of a mountain sunrise in their three or four decades.
And yet there was a willingness to give this crazy idea a go. Remember there was no expectation that the weather would be so incredible when they booked this Fresh Air Business Walk several weeks previously.
There was a sense that their personal and working relationships would be enriched by doing something different together; something connected with the outdoors and naturally inspiring; and through Jo’s Everest story, humanly inspiring.
Now what?
When you consider the needs of your team, where are you all on the spectrum of mundane to way-beyond-ordinary when it comes to creating the sorts of relationships that make great performance possible?
And you know that if you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you have always got.
Your courage. Our creativity. Your call. What might be possible?