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Week 24: The Thai Cave Rescue
So what do you do when you find out that 12 young boys and their football coach are stuck nearly two kilometres in a complex cave system in Thailand and the monsoon rains have just begun? You call John Volanthan. I remember watching this rescue unfold on the news back in 2018, and like many…
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Week 23: The First Ascent of the North Face of the Eiger
This week, I would like to take an extreme example of adventure and focus on my next word in the A-Z of personal development – ‘belay‘. You might wonder why I have chosen such an obscure word. Please bear with me! What does the word mean in my Collins dictionary? ”to fix a rope around…
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Week 22: The Kon-Tiki Expedition
As mentioned in my previous blog, I am going to take a deep dive into a case study for adventurous career paths each week until week 52. Each one will be accompanied by a personal development ‘keyword’, in A-Z order, from the dictionary. This is because I think achieving goals is a very complicated process…
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Week 21: Goal, aim or target – what’s the difference and why does it even matter?
I’ve been giving career guidance sessions now for ten years. During that time, one thing that has been consistent is the lack of agreed definition with regards to the words we use about career progression. Some people say goals, others use aims, some even use targets. Because they’re all the same anyway right, and really,…
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Week 20: ”I think therefore I could be”: all goals start in the mind.
Ten years ago, I was teaching philosophy to 17 year olds. One group in particular had been kind of written off as low achieving, and were only in my class to fill their timetable. There were four of them (students, not classes.) And me? I have no degree in philosophy, and knew nothing about it…
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Week 19: Why Plan B is the key to success.
This post introduces a slight, but very important, change in trajectory for this weekly series. I am going to take you through the theory and advice on creating, setting, and achieving your goals. Whatever they might be. I’m going to take ten years of guidance and reflecting on my job, on what has worked and…
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Week 18: Back to Work
This week, I have been back in work, at two local schools. Just two weeks previously I would have been unable to do this, but I’m now recovered enough that I’m increasingly not even thinking about my back anymore. That’s a good thing, clearly. But there are a few things to bear in mind before…
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Week 17: The idea of ‘The Journey’
What is a journey? Why are they important? What do they teach us? I’ll let a recent journey give insight into some potential answers. The dictionary claims a ‘journey’ to be ‘an act of travelling from one place to another’ while intriguingly the entry for ‘journeyman’ (let’s also include ‘journeywoman’) is ‘a skilled worker who…
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Week 16: The ‘Plateau of Progress’ and how to handle it.
I’m not too sure why I put that phrase in some kind of quote marks. It’s not a quote that I know of but it sums up how I feel regarding my ongoing recovery. So let’s say that you’re aiming for something. An end point. An achievement of some kind. Big, small, short term long…
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Week 15: Having a problem reaching your goal? Why refocusing is the key.
What happens when we see danger ahead on the path towards our goal? Generally, we don’t like to feel like we have failed. Or perhaps worse still, feel like others see us as a failure. Goal setting is often used as a way of making us feel we are becoming better, more improved in some…
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