The Spirit of Adventure Challenge asks you to consider your personal definition of adventure and create your bucket-list for an adventurous life. There are six task stations on the journey to this ultimate challenge. You might visit some or all of these stations according to the instructions given to you by your teacher.
Through the station we consider: What takes you beyond your comfort zone to excitement and challenge? What do you hope to find there? What can adventure tell you about your own capabilities and capacity, and how does it lead to growth and discovery?
Some of us find our greatest adventures in the wilderness, whilst for others this is a comfortable place to be. Some find it easy to speak or perform in front of a large audience whilst for others this would be a major adventure. In this Challenge we explore the impact that our perception, attitude and context can have on our approach to adventure and what it takes to embrace adventure as a lifelong ambition.
This station discusses some of the language we use in discovering our Spirit of Adventure. We consider how adventure can build character through pushing us beyond our comfort zone, and the role that context and perspective play in defining what adventure means to us. Finally, we explore some of the skills, competencies, attitudes and virtues that shape our Spirit of Adventure.
At this station we meet Kurt Hahn and reflect on what he meant by the expression “there is more in us than we know”. In a world of increasing change, unpredictability and complexity we consider whether an ordeal can become an adventure if we change our perspective, and reflect on an example from our own lives. The session ends with a creative challenge to write a reverse poem that captures the effect that a positive or negative attitude can have.
The excitement and exhilaration of an adventure experience typically demands we overcome obstacles, face fear, take risks, and bounce back from failure: In order to experience the thrill of adventure, we must first dig-deep, and the deeper we dig the more we discover. But what are we digging for? This session considers that question through the experiences of outdoor adventurers and explorers as they discuss what it took to achieve their own personal challenge.
This station considers how adventure can broaden our outlook on the world by compelling us to experience new environments, places and cultures. Sometimes this comes through physical travel; at other times through connecting with people from different cultural backgrounds closer to home. Having explored the variety of ways in which we can expand our understanding of the world we design our dream cultural adventure experience.
Here we explore how and why we set personal goals and the steps we take to achieve them. Whether through adventure in sport or music, art or science, we consider how new ideas and inventions result from daring to express ourselves in creative endeavours, and pushing ourselves to, and beyond, our perceived physical, mental and emotional limits. The session ends with a creative challenge to invent a new approach to an established pursuit and dare to share.
At this station we consider what it means to live an adventurous life, and what that involves for each of us. What happens when we break out of comfortable routines and commit to seizing every opportunity that comes our way? Kurt Hahn said if we could see what we were capable of “for the rest of our lives we would be unwilling to settle for less”. This station considers how to make it our life’s ambition to discover our own capacity for adventure and never settle for less.
For the Spirit of Adventure Challenge we would like you to determine and describe what adventure means to you – what life beyond your comfort zone might look like – and develop and share your bucketlist goals for a life of adventure.
You are invited to choose your own format in which to do this (e.g. presenting a bucket list poster, or a personal mission, vision and goals statement, or a presentation, or a letter to “future me”, etc)
