The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
ADVENTURE FOR ALL
Michael Alexander speaks to Scottish adventurers Mark Beaumont and Mollie Hughes, who are supporting a crossparty campaign to safeguard residential outdoor education centres from closure
Thinking back to when he grew up on a farm near Blairgowrie, recordbreaking round-the-world cyclist and adventurer Mark Beaumont reckons he had something of a “wild man” existence during childhood. Home schooled and “feral” until the age of 12, the former Dundee High School pupil knew how to hunt rabbits and make his own shoes out of rabbit skins.
Every morning he’d have to get up to help milk 60 goats and collect eggs from 200 hens.
While he knows now he probably took those childhood experiences for granted, he’s in no doubt the physical and mental competences he gained from getting muddy in the great outdoors and learning how to work in teams were “utterly formative” in terms of the confidence and resilience he’s dug into later in life.
“My entire childhood was education course!” he says.
But the now 38-year-old Edinburgh-based father-of-two young girls is concerned that many young people – especially those growing up in an urban environment – don’t have that connection to nature, and don’t have the chance to develop the competences that come from access to the great outdoors.
For years, he’s volunteered with the Outward Bound Trust to help give young people opportunities to develop hands-on skills in outdoor settings.
However, Mark is very concerned that due to the contraction of opportunities caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, youngsters’ mental health is being increasingly affected.
He’s concerned that “more than half ” of residential outdoor education centres that have been forced to close during lockdown could face permanent closure unless they are financially supported.
It’s for this reason he has joined politicians from across the political spectrum to launch a new vision paper ‘Thriving Through Residential Outdoor Education’.
It seeks to guarantee that all young people in Scotland have the chance to benefit from residential outdoor education experiences.
Evidence shows learning in the outdoors, particularly when including residential and an outdoor
adventurous experiences, is beneficial for mental health and wellbeing, reducing the attainment gap, and developing a connection to the natural environment.
“You talk to so many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, they talk about the residential outdoor centre experiences they had as youngsters back in the day and they are experiences that last a lifetime,” says Mark, who was a member of 2519 Blairgowrie Squadron ATC as a teenager.
“These centres – especially since the Second World War – have just been a part of the British/Scottish DNA for open access, people from all backgrounds, to be able to get into the outdoors and learn really important skill sets.
“But because outdoor education centres are not the frontline emergency that’s related to the global pandemic, I worry, and I guess everyone in this space worries, that outward bound centres and outdoor education is going to slowly and quietly die over this period and we are going to wake up in a few years’ time and wonder where all these amazing resources and spaces have gone.
“You can already see the number of centres up for sale. They are all in financial dire straits. Most of them are going to go this year and next if there is not some sort of a campaign around maintaining them.”
Written by the Outward Bound Trust, Scottish Outdoor Education Centres, Scouts Scotland, Actual Reality Trust/Ardentinny Outdoor Centre, Ardroy Outdoor Education Centre, Abernethy Trust, Ocean Youth Trust and the Field Studies Council, and supported by Children in Scotland, the Association of Head teachers and Deputies, Play Scotland, YouthLink Scotland, RYA Scotland, the Awards Network and Ramblers Scotland, Mark is pleased that so many organisations with different cultures and histories are now working together to support the vision.
While the Scottish Government’s bailout funding last year had been “welcome and helpful”, what he wants to see next is a “war chest” that outdoor centres can use as a resource when times are hard.
Young people deserve credit, he says, for often being more adaptable to unknown difficult situations than adults.
Yet a recent Lockdown Lowdown report by YouthLink showed that around two-fifths of young people surveyed were concerned about their mental health and wellbeing.
Mark says there’s no doubt these are difficult times with exams and education disrupted, and it further emphasises to him that youngsters need opportunities to build that “quiet confidence” required to deal with setbacks and build the resilience to pull through.
“Life is not a meritocracy – you don’t make success of your own life by being book smart,” says Mark, who first came to prominence in 2008 when he broke the world record for a circumnavigational bike tour of the world.
“If you are lucky enough to be clever then good on you, but the real thing that sets people apart and brings them happiness and wellbeing is a sense of choice.
“Being their own boss, making their own mind up – that independence of mind, being in the driving seat and developing their own passions. That is at the heart of mental wellbeing.
“If you grow up in the outdoors and you understand the consequences of your actions, you understand risk. You know what it’s like to get muddy and get things wrong.
“But it’s very difficult to learn these things in the traditional classroom. That’s why we need these additional experiences guaranteed to all.”
Scouts Scotland president Mollie Hughes, 30, who became the youngest woman to climb both sides of Mount Everest (2012 and 2017) and the youngest woman to ski solo to the South Pole in 2020, is also backing the campaign. The initiative is something she “totally believes in”.
She says: “Outdoor education for young people has disappeared this year with the Covid-19 pandemic. But the benefits young people get from it are second to none. You can’t get that from any other activity.
“I remember as a young person growing up in Devon, we had various opportunities to do outdoor residential stuff – Duke of Edinburgh Award etc – and spent a lot of time on Dartmoor.
“I think that kind of escape from home was great. You get to spread your wings for the first time, you get to make much better friendships, and you just kind of gained confidence doing all the sort of outdoor activities that we did. I totally ate it up as a young person.”
Mollie has taken her resilience to extremes through her amazing, successful challenges. In Antarctica, for example, she spent 58 days and 650 hours skiing alone in whiteouts, storm-force winds and temperatures hitting minus 45C.
However, resilience learned through outdoor activities is applicable to all walks of life. It’s something she regularly talks about in her role as a motivational speaker to young people.
She says: “The only way to actually create resilience is to push yourself and step out of your comfort zone. When you do that that’s the kind of space that you build resilience in. Resilience is a characteristic that we all need.
“The outdoors, especially through the outdoors and outdoor centres – because they do it in such a safe way – kids can have that outdoor challenge but also be completely safe.”
After almost a year of Covid restrictions and the impact on education, Mollie is concerned about the lasting impact on young people. It’s hard for adults, but she thinks it’s “so much harder for young people”.
She adds: “They are at that key kind of stage where they are still developing, they are still learning about the world. Indoors is really not good for them. I think this outdoor centres vision is really needed.
“If every kid in Scotland, as soon as we get out of lockdown, could go out on some amazing residential course in an outdoor centre, it would be such a great thing for them.
“At the moment, I’m not sure if every school and young person has that opportunity.
“This is about getting every single young person, no matter what background, no matter what school they come from, to get an opportunity to actually get away on a residential trip.
“It’s definitely got cross-party support. It’s about turning that support into actual commitment from government.
“They know it’s important but prioritising,” she says.
YOU CAN ALREADY SEE THE NUMBER OF CENTRES UP FOR SALE. THEY ARE ALL IN FINANCIAL DIRE STRAITS
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We all know what it feels like to struggle with a problem and not see an obvious way out – we end up stressed and anxious. But Fife life coach Alison Smith has developed a series of metaphorical tools called Landscaping Your Life to help us all with difficult situations we may encounter.
Alison, who lives in Burntisland with her 22-year-old cat, says: “I’m a speaker, coach and writer helping individuals and teams to get back on track when they can’t see the wood for the trees.”
Alison published a book last year, not surprisingly called Can’t See the Wood for the Trees? Landscaping Your Life to Get Back on Track.
“In the book, I share a number of down-toearth tools from a toolkit I’ve developed that uses nature’s landscapes to provide different perspectives to the current situation you might be struggling with – I call the toolkit Landscaping Your Life (LYL),” she explains.
“I’ve wanted to write a book since I was young and once I found my passion of helping people to get back on track, at least the topic of the book had been decided.
“The challenge was how to package supporting others in a way that was easy for them to pick up the book when they’re struggling, read a chapter, and then get back on with their life feeling more confident and resourceful.
“Once I realised that when we’re struggling, we often identify with sayings such as can’t see the wood for the trees, going round in circles, stuck in a rut, up a creek without a paddle and so on, the focus of the book became so much clearer.”
To help us cope with the negative impact of the past year, the LYL tools are now available on social media.
Alison reveals how her.
“I live on my own. Lockdown has therefore meant it’s been the lack of physical contact with others that I have missed.
“I’ve not seen my mum, who lives in England, since Christmas 2019 and missed celebrating her 80th birthday. lockdown has affected
“That said, I’ve also really missed going out into nature – there’s only so many times I can walk around Burntisland!”
Alison can often be found swimming in the sea with other Facebook Baywatch Burntislanders but says: “At one point, RNLI were even asking us not to go open-water swimming, which further restricted activities that support my physical, emotional, mental or spiritual wellbeing.”
There’s no doubt that lockdown has pushed us all out of our comfort zones and this can have a knock-on effect.
“Lockdown has thrown many of our habits and preferred ways of doing things up in the air,” Alison says.
“Many of these habits will, even unconsciously, have supported our ability cope effectively and efficiently day to day.
“For example, the commute to work and back might have provided a start and cutoff for work, or meeting a friend for a coffee provided connection with a like-minded person and time away from family or colleagues.
“During lockdown, not only have we not been able to fall back on well-loved habits, we’ve been forced to take on new habits – washing hands, social distancing, home schooling, being with the same people 24/7 and so on.
“For example, a walk which might previously have allowed for a bit of daydreaming and fun suddenly becomes a minefield as we’re on constant vigilance about other people getting too close to us.
“Or we get frustrated, angry, or if to even depressed because we’ve not found replacement activities to meet our needs that were being met when we could meet people and travel about.
“In other words, we’re all dealing with things we might never had experienced before, and that can increase the stress in our lives – stress that has many different ways of making itself known. The challenge then becomes about how to deal with the stress.”
So what are some of Alison’s tools, how can we utilise them and how do they work?
“When we’re struggling, logic isn’t always a great help because it’s being impact by our emotions and how we’re feeling about the situation,” she explains.
“The LYL tools use nature as a metaphor to bypass our struggling logic. We use nature to help us to find different perspectives that are currently hidden from view. Perspectives that will reduce the struggle and help us know what to do next.
“They work because we all understand how nature works – the tides, day and night, the seasons, planting seeds and allowing them to flourish and so on.
“Once we’ve got some additional insight from nature, what happens is the part of us that understands and communicates in metaphor translates these solutions back into the real-life situation, which means options and different perspectives that were out of view are now available to us.
“The key is knowing where to look in nature for the solutions. The beauty of the process is that the landscape that can help you is often in your language when you’re struggling. For example: When you need to turn a corner – go and find a corner in nature and turn it – noticing what you notice before the corner, during the cornering and after.
“When you’re stuck in a rut – yes, you’ve guessed it – find a rut to step into and then out of.
“If you can’t see the wood for the trees – ask yourself what would you do if you were in a real wood – you might follow a path out of the wood, take to higher ground, get a map, ask someone for help, or even cut down some of the trees.
“A recent addition to this list was to stop planting more trees (I’m really good at that)! Or go to a real wood and have a walk around it, noticing what you notice about what would help you see the wood.
“When life feels like an uphill struggle, draw the hill. Someone recently did this and realised they were so close to the top of the hill that the struggle was worth the effort to get to the top.
“If you’re treading water about something, perhaps it’s simply about putting your foot down, or floating instead.
“Put simply, notice the nature metaphor in the language you’re using when you’re struggling and mine the metaphor for solutions rather than try to do it logically.” Alison’s top tool is also the simplest. “It’s one that very quickly changes how you’re feeling, for when you’re going round in circles.
“If you’re feeling like you’re going round in circles, there is a part of you who does really understand what the circling means metaphorically, and it’s that part we’re going to be inviting to play along – your logical mind doesn’t have to get involved!
“Draw the circle you’re going round in, then make changes to the circling: What happens if you circle slower, faster, in a smaller circle, or bigger one, or circle in the opposite direction? Can you break free of the circle? Perhaps it shifts if you draw in squares or triangles? Or change the colour of your pen! Maybe a soundtrack would make it feel easier?
“I used this recently myself and had eight or so mini circles all going round very quickly, and it certainly explained why I was feeling very overwhelmed and a little frantic!
“The antidote drawing joined these circles together into something that looked a little like a daisy chain. Simply changing the representation in this way brought more space and ease into the situation.
“I felt calmer and more relaxed and was able to decide what one thing to do first.”
Alison has also penned some poetry about the various paths and destinations we have available to us in our lives.
“After fantastic feedback, following a recent webinar using the poem as a basis for inquiry and exploration, I’m now looking at how I can use these words to help teams and organisations to check in with each other and traverse the paths they’re facing to ensure they get to the next destination in one piece.”
Alison also sees potential in a paths and destinations nine-week programme to help people at a crossroads in their lives.
“One delegate on the recent webinar said they could see this helping greatly with their ‘mid-life crisis’,” she says.
LOCKDOWN HAS THROWN MANY OF OUR HABITS AND PREFERRED WAYS OF DOING THINGS UP IN THE AIR