Footprints on the Mountainside

As I had mentioned earlier, we are doing a Training the Trainer Programme for facilitators in the  outdoors.

Add value to your outdoor programmes with these skills and tools for facilitating active learning.

Empower Activity Camps and Wide Aware invite you to participate in a three day trainer-training programme designed especially for providers of outdoor training. Read more… »

Roger Greenaway is an outdoor facilitator and the person behind the immensely useful site on the subject - reviewing.co.uk - a man whose writings I have read on and off for the last three years, and emailed a few times with appreciation and link exchange requests, etc.

Imagine my surprise this morning to receive an email from him saying that he was planning to come to India for the first time in October to conduct an outdoor management training program at Empower Camps. Sushil Bhasin, one of the owners is someone I have known for years and we are in fact currently in a dialogue about doing some training programs together.

I promptly called up Sushil to gossip about this new coincidence. As we caught up with current stuff, I discovered that Sushil had set a goal for himself - that of being the first outdoor training organization in India to do work with international facilitators!!! How absolutely amazing.

In our busy lives, we are so fixated with creating our own images, and glorifying ourselves, it is rare to look for resources and opportunities to widen our experience, quality of work and talent sets. Not only did Sushil have this in mind, he actually pulled it through. This programme is tentatively scheduled for October. Read more… »

Children naturally enjoy the outdoors. Apart from exercise, and health, adventure education helps children develop natural resilience from experience. Learning through experience is a natural state of being for a child, and while imparting information and training is necessary, it is important that a child gets to explore the world on his or her own terms, learning to cope with consequences or celebrate them from personal experience.

A young girl on one of my camps was rapt with attention during the introductory rappelling session. She came up with this exact question “Do soldiers use these same tactical rappelling techniques?” Tactical rappelling techniques!!! I had never considered this term before.

Another child from the same session asked “Why do we call abseiling rappelling?”

The questions in themselves are not particularly significant. No particular knowledge is involved, and knowing those particular answers is not going to change anyone’s life.

What I found satisfying about them was that “my kids” had stopped simply swallowing information, and were now exploring it.

One of my more bizarre “potential clients”. I could write an entire book with the entertaining questions I get.

Got an email from a Sarita Sharma today asking for a quote for a training programme. Fabulous. I was online and sent one across immediately.

Got a response asking only for accommodation and food costs and need the outbound training complimentary!!! So now in a world of 20% extra with your toothpaste, there’s this new thing of free outbound training from a training company, while you book a hotel that is not theirs in any case.

Go figure!