Get Lost!

This weekend I had the priviledge of attending Abel and Karien Jordaan's wedding at Moolmanshoek in the Southern Freestate. Moolmanshoek is a beautiful private game and stud farm near Ficksburg and if you can find your way there you will have a great time...IF being the operative word in that sentence.

I left Spirit of Adventure at 14:30 after running a teambuilding day for the I.T. company Isiqina. The drive was wonderful. A few localized storms were moving through the Drakensberg as a drove through Winterton and Bergville looking across at the mountains. The Stormy yet sunny afternoon light combined with the irridescant summer colours to produce some of the best views of the berg I've ever seen from there. Cathkin peak, hiding Monk's Cowl and ships prow pass (the scene of a fifteen hour epic I must tell you about some day. Check the humblehamster blog for more details) was beautifully outlined. Cathederal peak stood proudly free of the escarpment and reminded me of the view from on top which I was enjoying just last month. The Saddle, The Rockeries, The Sentinal...it just got better and better. Then Sterkfontein Dam slid past with sun out my left window and black maelstrooms out the right. I kept on being broken by the beauty of what I was seeing all the way through Golden Gate with the fiesta dominating Lichens pass. This must be one of the best driving roads in the country by the way. I dropped a gear and shot up towards Clarens then left onto the Fouriesburg road.

I could now see through the farm lands and sandstone cliffs and Koppies to the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho, I was getting drunk on the sight of that high kingdom and might well have pulled off and gone hiking right there and then if it weren't for the knowledge that a beautiful woman was waiting for me at a reportedly enchanting farm, so I sped on singing loudly to Keane and overflowing with joy :) ... this is when the music in the movie starts to change.

The simplified map on the website showed that you needed to drive through Ficksburg towards Rosendal and start looking for a small dirt road called the S384. I would then need to follow this road until it ended at Moolmanshoek on a... hoek in the road. I was getting so keen to see Burn, my girlfriend, and to beat sunset that I missed the tiny faded board six k's BEFORE Ficksburg and drove on and on and on with no sign of the dirt road I needed. About forty k's after Ficksburg I got to Clocolan with fumes left in my petrol tank and a flat phone battery. I was lost. I found a friendly traveling rep who explained how far wrong I had gone at the petrol station and I then sped off back down the road and into the rain and the night. I was stressing about Burn and her family starting to worry about me as I should have been there already so I plunged into the darkness with far less joy that I'd had earlier. I found the Rosendal road that the confounded map had shown as a simple route through ficksburg and headed down it. The rain was heavy and it was completely dark exept for the blinding lights of on-coming trucks so I counted off the thirty k's I needed to cover before getting to the junction. And there it was. With no sign or board to confirm it.

Now here's the thing, had I not already been late and lost it would have been less important that I got this right yet it is infinitely more likely that I would have made a good decision. Having already been delayed due to carelessness it was now even more important that I make certain it was the right road but do you think I could be relied upon to make a good call in my desperation to waste not another minute? of course not. I remember thinking that another five k's up the road to check that this was not a red herring before the real S384 would have been a good plan but the idea of driving any further in the wrong direction seemed so awful that I decided to just go for it and headed down the un-named farm road into the unknown, wet blackness.

I hit a T junction after a while with a sign saying that it was the road I had been looking for to start with. I had taken an earlier road but it had brought me to where I was supposed to be! Now all I had to do was decide if I would go left or right... I started toward the left then changed my mind and went right. Later I would find that I would have been there in ten minutes if I had gone left but instead I spent at least forty minutes getting further and further away from what I thought I would be seeing around the next bend. I found a four way junction still without a sign or board of any kind so I pressed on along the bumpy tracks untill I found some lights which turned out to be a farm. I drove in and found my way arond the dairy to the farm house. I rang and rang the bell but got no answer so I headed back out the way I thought I had come in but suddenly nothing in the tunnel of light from my headlamps was familiar, I was lost in the farm! Suddenly I was on a tar road which I couldn't understand and I was cursing alloud in my car. Somehow I managed to get back onto the dirt road I had been on before so that I could re-trace my steps. It was about nine o'clock and I had been expected from just after seven so poor Burn had been going out of her mind wondering what had happened to me. She was driving around with her dad trying to find me when we stumbled accross eachother and they lead me home.

It was the most frustrating, painfull, powerless and scary evening of my life and it must have been even worse for Burn. I recovered with good doses of meat and pap followed by marshmallows on the braai but the moral of the story is deeply ingrained. Following your gut can be over-rated and you're most likely to do it when you can least afford a mistake!

I hit my head hard today and it's late. Don't hold me to this one too closely.

Well that Northwood course was great. That bunch of boys have big dreams and a decent amount of potential to match them, I hope. It's so much fun running a course when you're an old boy of the school. That extra insight makes a huge difference. Every year we try to make incrimental steps towards a culture at that school of serving and developing the boys beneath you rather than lording it over them with your new-found power. We still had fun giving them the inside track on dealing with trouble-makers and anarchists. The role plays that followed showed that some of those prefects must have chequered pasts because their renditions of the worst kind of school boy were frighteningly believable...but hysterically funny.

It's raining outside the camp office and we've finished a long grueling day of training with some of next year's recruits. Their abseiling, kyaking and rockclimbing are starting to look pretty good and they are wrestling, pretty succesfully, with the fine art of reviewing and debriefing those activities to get real and inspirational lessons out of them. While working on the wall we were convinced we could here sounds of distress coming from the cliffs down the valley. They were pretty blood-curdling so I dashed off with one of the guys to see if any rescuing was needed. We tore down the stairs to the foot of the dam then ran through the darkened tunnel under the wall. Water was thundering down all around the exit to the tunnel on the otherside and we couldn't hear anything so we started combing the hillside. We dived into other tunnels that date back to the building of the wall (I cracked my head in one of them) and climbed the hillside but couldn't find anything.

In the end it appears it must have been a goat stuck on a ledge who either freed himself, fell to his death or got vaporised because, of him or any human, there was no trace. That wasn't the only excitement for the day, aside from all of the rope work high above lethal drops, we also ended up having an awesome and very deep conversation about God over dinner. We gave it full gas, from evolution to the end times to the infalibility of the Pope to how God will judge those who havn't heard of him. For those who aren't believers I trust I understood correctly because it felt like there were great questions asked and lovingly, accurately and well answered. Lots of exciting growth is promising to take place here next year, for everyone who was deep in theological contemplation over our chow this evening, both the Christians and those not there yet.

The final word on the matter was that God works and works and works to get hold of your heart and, if you let him, will change your life in incredible ways but, untill you've met Him, no amount of good-ness or religious effort will do you any good.

Not bad for a bunch fresh out of matric who have chosen to be here pushing through tough training instead of jolling it up with their co matriculants.

Untill next week
Cheers

How to get lazy people to do what you want, Being a style guru and December is here!

Well it is a splendid morning in Durban; the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, yah (respect to Bob Marley). Waking up to a day that has already been warm and bright for over an hour at six thirty sends me straight back to school holidays as a child. There is something indescribable about the smell, feel and colour of the world that makes me think of watching test cricket all morning or riding our bikes around the suburb; lazing a day away in the pool, or at waterworld if you can remember that wonderful place, and then finishing off with a braai. Of course all this December-ness also comes with the promise of Christmas and loads of new toys! It was the best time of year and I'm totally ready for this to be a good one too.

I'm getting ready to head up to the Spirit of Adventure camp to spend the next three days with Northwood school's new prefect group. We'll dig into some ideas about leading teams, disciplining trouble-makers and setting some good objectives for their year. We'll also make sure they bond as a group so, aside from all the climbing, walking, abseiling, padling and assault coursing they will do, we'll be sleeping out in the reserve under the stars tonight. I'll be out with them and it promises to be a beautiful evening!

I'll also begin some training for new instructors this weekend. If the prefects are looking ahead to a big 2011 the future instructors have an even more daunting yet exciting year ahead of them. They have much to learn before they are up to our standards but we have found a group with great potential so I'm looking forward to getting them started.

One final thought; Wives trying to get their husbands to be less lazy about house chores and managers trying to get employees to less useless about the finer details of their work both make the same mistakes. Both end up simply berrating, cajolling, punishing, shouting or trying to bribe the offender by with holding other nice things, wives in particular. All this does is strain the relationship and re-enforce the fact that the worker, or husband, in question is slack. Once you believe you are slack at an unpleasant task it becomes even less likely that you will have much enery for it.

Now the nagging wife or manager may reply; "Well that so-and-so is slack in that area, don't make it my fault. I'm going to keep on making their life difficult untill they get themselves sorted out." I have sympathy for this point of view and it may well not be your fault that person X is dropping the ball but it is your problem and by being on their case about it you're only making it worse. "So if I can't remind him that he's left his socks on the floor again and point out that he promised he would start doing a load of washing each day but, just like everything else in this house, he hasn't done it; what can I do? must I just leave it and do all the work myself?" askes the wife. That's a good question. Let me answer it like this.

 I moved to a new city for university and I went to a new church. I had a blank slate there and people were getting to know me for the first time. I had never been particularly stylish in dress untill that point but early on in my time there I managed, somehow, to get a reputation as a relatively well dressed guy. Once you believe people expect you to look good you naturally put some effort into it. This reputation grew as I started to think about what I was going to wear for more than the time it took to reach into my cupboard. As innevitably happens when you start thinking about your 'look' I very quickly started to wear slightly unusual
(occasionaly ridiculous) things. When most were happy with trainers, jeans and a t-shirt, I would have white leather shoes beneath my jeans and an old tweed jacket over my t-shirt. Somehow this was ok for me because I had stumled into a reputation as a trend-setter of sorts, "Paul can pull it off", people would say.

All of this is interesting because I witnessed a very marked change in behaviour over a six month period that is a very clear line in the sand seperating my whole adolescance from my life forever after, yes I'm still over-dressing to this day. This thing of our reputation, or other's expectation of us, defining what they actually get from us is very real and managers, wives and everybody else trying to change the behaviour of your people should pay attention to it. As long as the worker knows that failure is expected they will feel very bad, berate themselves and appologise but very few will be able to pick themselves up and prove you wrong. They will do it when they remember, or if you've threatened particularly well thet day or if they feel sorry for you. What doesn't change is the fact that they will do as little as possible, in that area, to get by. If you can give them belief that they are actually good at it and that you're expecting them to succeed every time, you watch the difference it makes.

If the wife were to stop nagging about washing and house work and ask the husband to come and help with dishes, then compliment him on how good and thorough he is on the greasey pans, then thank him for the fact that he actually does the dishes pretty often and (and this is important) he is actually much better than the average hausband at pulling his weight in the house he will start to see himself differently because he realises that you see him differently. It is then very easy to say, 'employee/husband I know job x has slipped your mind recently but can we discuss a way to make the system better so that you can be powerful in that area like you are in this area here?'

It may seem like nagging is easier but I'm certain that helping people to see themselves as above average at something and letting them believe we're expecting that from them is much more effective that reminding them how weak thay are. Be cunning like all good leaders and get creative!

What do you think?

A begining

Greetings!

At long last this blog is up and running. Praise the Lord! My work, at Spirit of Adventure, takes me to incredible places, allows me to meet wonderful and insightful people and constantly puts me in positions which are challenging and force me to have an enquiring mind. The idea behind this blog is to reflect on the adventures we're having and allow you to experience them too. It will be loads of fun I'm sure.

Teaching leadership is a particularly complicated idea, especially because many would say that leadership can't be taught and some even suggest it can't be learnt. One should be very suspicious of anyone claiming that they can teach you everything you need to know about leadership, it isn't an exact science. Despite that, we have been dedicating ourselves to the study of leadership since 1994. What we aim to do is give people real experiences of working in groups and leading them through adventure activities in breath-taking parts of the world. We then debrief or 'review' what happened, bringing in the best theories and most useful handles we can find. I trust this process allows folks to leave or courses feeling a little better prepared for when the moment comes for them to step up and respond to the call of leadership which we will all hear at least once in our lives.

Jump on for the ride if you feel like thrashing out some of the most important questions about life, relationships and the art of working with other human beings, we'll throw in a good dose of humour and open mindedness with dollops of controversy and perhaps the odd spot of wisdom.

I'm heading off to Shongweni Game reserve now to join a group of students who are on a course with us at the moment.

Speak to you soon.

Paul