SHORTS | Outdoor Leadership and Learning from Adventures with Alex Brooks-Johnson

To ask about how you sort of your early career working as an outdoor activity instructor, how did that shape you as a leader and what influence did, did that have on you? It's fundamentally shaped me, and you'll know this better than me, but there's a reason why the military use the outdoors to shape their leaders, because I think there's so much you can learn from it. You know, it's directly tangible. A day out in the mountains, it will give you so many, if you're that way inclined, will give you so many analogies about life and work and, you know, your career and your leadership style. You know, it's, it's not true really. I mean, it's incredible. And I don't do so much of it now as you might be able to tell. But you know, it's being out in, in the wilderness, it teaches you lots of things. So humility, firstly the fact that actually you're insignificant no matter what you do, you know, you're not dispensable, you're not significant, and there are only so many things that you can control and most of the things you can't control. So actually there's a real kind of almost a spiritual experience of being in the outdoors, which I think is really important philosophically as a leader of an organization, to realize that, you know, no matter how hard you try, no matter how good you are, no matter how many hours you put in, there are things outside of your control that are going to happen whether you like it or not. And you've just got to deal with it. And I think the outdoors fundamentally teaches you those things. And then there's, you know, all sorts of specifics about the tenacity, that resilience, the fact that you have to be adaptive, you know, nothing ever goes to plan. But also when you're, you know, when you're actually leading a group, you know, sometimes you've got to be out the front there leading. Sometimes you can you drop back a bit. You know, if you've got a group of highly skilled climbers, then, you know, you don't need to be hovering over their shoulder and retieing their knots for them. But you know, if you've got a group that are brand new to climbing, that's exactly what you need to do, you know, and you need to be leading for them. And I think in, in business or in organizations, it's exactly the same thing. You know, if things are going really well and you've got a really high performing team around you, you know, not saying you sit back. But, you know, it's a very different approach to if you've got new people, people that are underperforming, or there's things going on in the environment that, you know are causing you a challenge. And that's where, you know, you need to be kind of front and center and. And the outdoors teaches you that like nothing else can, including experiences in leadership roles. I think everybody should have to do a mountain leader course.