What does it take to work through adversity? What happens when that adversity is coming from an injury that has transformed our life? These are two of the questions that Jill Wheatley helps us to explore thanks to her extensive personal experience.

Jill shares how she handled her recovery from a traumatic brain injury she suffered from a freak accident while on a teaching assignment in Europe. Being near death, having lost 70 percent of her eyesight, she details how she coped with months of recovery, much of it in a foreign country and alone.

Jill tells us how goal setting and keeping perspective helped her to recover and go on to do ultra marathons in Nepal and climb seven of the fourteen 8000m plus peaks. While her sight is still limited, she has not stopped adventuring and pushing her limits.

In this episode of Delivering Adventure, we hear what it took for her to succeed, what the rest of us can take away to apply to our lives, and how she is handling another recent climbing accident which has badly damaged her ankle.

Key Takeaways

How can we work through adversity due to injury:

Keep perspective: Whatever situation you are in, it won’t last forever, even though in the moment it might start to feel like it. This is really important to remember when we are dealing with an injury that has negatively impacted our ability to enjoy life to the point where we start to wonder if we will ever get back to the way things were.

Set goals: Setting goals can help to give us something to work towards. In Jill’s case, she set the goal of climbing all of the 8000m peaks on the planet as a motivator. It’s fair to say that the rest of us can get away with setting more moderate goals and still reap the same benefits.

Get out in nature: Getting out in nature gets us moving, can take our focus off pain, and is fantastic for our mental health.

Don’t be a hermit: Connecting with others is really important. If you know someone who is recovering from an injury, reaching out to them to let them know that they aren’t alone can be very beneficial to their well being.

Enlist a team: Take full advantage of resources such as different health practitioners, strategies, and tools. Each health practitioner can help to address different problems and each has a different approach. Different people in the healing process can help to give you a clearer overall understanding of what is going on.

When people are recovering from injury, they can suffer from status quo bias where they tend to prefer to keep doing the same thing. This mean sticking with only physiotherapy when also going to see a chiropractor or even an acupuncturist could provide for a quicker and a more well-rounded recovery strategy.

Listening to the experiences of how others have recovered from the same situation can also be very beneficial.

Guest Bio

Following a traumatic brain injury that resulted in life threatening complications and 70% vision loss which required 26 months spent between 7 different health care facilities in 3 countries, Canadian Jill Wheatley was dropped at Denver International Airport with no direction. The only sign she could see pointed to mountains. Despite such compromised eyesight, Jill chose to spend one year alone with Mother Nature in an attempt to find light on life’s trail. Her search led through 13 different massifs and upon running in the Annapurnas in Nepal, she knew that she wanted to spend more time among Himalayan giants. Essentially she has gone from being bedridden, to a wheelchair, then on to walking, navigating hospital parking lots to hiking, trail running, mountain running and skiing before climbing 5, 6, and then seven 8000 m peaks and spending the past 5 years based in Nepal.

In a story made for movies, Jill’s trail has recently connected to another type of climb...

How should a leader communicate to people when they are under stress? One of the hardest situations that a leader can find themselves in, is managing a group that isn’t doing what the leader wants. It could be kids who forgot what their instructor told them, teenagers who are ignoring their teacher on purpose, or adults who misunderstood what their guide said. Regardless of the reason, these situations can be frustrating for leaders and can pose safety risks to everyone in dangerous situations.

In this episode, CSGA Ski Guide Erin Tierney shares a stressful situation from her guiding career where the communication style she chose to use led to conflict with the group she was leading. Using this story, Chris and Jordy then share some strategies and discuss leadership communication styles that leaders can use to avoid conflict.

Key Takeaways

Lead with a soft touch: When we lead this way, we rely on gentle persuasion and selling to start. This can involve including people in decision making, subtlety guiding them towards choices you want them to make and generally being flexible and showing some tolerance for mistakes.

Try to follow with a firm edge, instead of leading with one: If a soft touch doesn’t work, or there isn’t time to be polite, we may need to resort to a more autocratic, telling style.

Explain why we want people to do certain things: When people understand why they are doing things a certain way, there is less chance of there being a misunderstanding or conflict.

Taking ownership of the initial instructions: We need to remember that we can’t always just blame the receiver of the message if they don’t understand. We need to be aware of the fact that if people don’t understand or do what we want, we may not have communicated things as well as we could.

People tend to remember the last thing they hear more than anything else: If we want people to focus on certain instructions, especially ones that relate to directions and safety, we need to position them last.

Investigate why people did what they did: Avoid jumping to conclusions by taking time to investigate why people made the decisions they made.

Guest Links

Whistler Heli-Skiing: https://www.whistlerblackcomb.com/explore-the-resort/activities-and-events/whistler-heli-skiing/whistler-heli-skiing.aspx

Canadian Ski Guide Association: https://canskiguide.com/

The Avalanche Hour Podcast with Erin Tierney: https://soundcloud.com/user-23585762/tah-erin-tierney-csga-10

Guest Bio

Erin is a certified CSGA ski guide and the current President of the Canadian Ski Guide Association. In addition, to guiding in the Heli-ski industry since 1999, Erin is also a guide trainer and examiner with the Canadian Ski Guide Institute. Erin currently works as the General manager of Whistler Heli-skiing.

Erin has worked extensively with teams of guests and guides in a number of roles, which makes her a perfect person to give us some insights on being a leader!

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How can we ever know when we should turn back or keep going? On paper, the safest decision to make is often to turn around or choose the route that takes on less risk. However, in reality, delivering adventure isn’t always about picking the safest choice. At the core of every adventure is an element of risk taking. Being able to decide when to go for it, and when not to, is a defining trait of professional adventure guides and instructors.

Helping us to identify when it’s okay to keep going is Mike Adolph. Mike is an ACMG / IFMGA Mountain Guide and the current technical director of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. There are a number of factors that can hold us back from continuing onwards towards an objective including self doubt, fear, and uncertainty.

We discuss some key strategies with Mike that we can use that can help us to determine if we should abort a plan or whether we are well positioned to keep going.

Key Takeaways:

How can we know when we should push forward and keep going with a plan when we may feel like doing the opposite? A few of the strategies that can help to guide our decision making include:

Set goals around experiences: Instead of hard destinations or milestones, make it about the experience. When it comes to delivering adventure, we can box ourselves in by setting our expectations around achieving certain objectives.

Identifying data points that support the decision to continue: This includes the amount of time taken to accomplish a task, competency level of skills, the interest level of group, the weather, the conditions, the amount of risk and the amount risk tolerance within the group.

Remove pressure from the leader: Talk to the group for their feedback to ensure you are not the one driving the group or holding them back.

If uncertainty is rising, ask yourself why: This uncertainty could include self doubt, the ability level of yourself or the group to handle the situation, the interest level of everyone involved, the conditions, and the actual route or path you want to take.

Don’t make a decision until you have to: This allows us the opportunity to collect as much information as possible before making a commitment.

Guest Bio

Mike Adolph is an ACMG / IFMGA Mountain Guide and the current technical director of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. In addition to guiding custom outdoor adventures for small groups, Mike also works as a guide trainer and examiner for the ACMG’s Training and Assessment Program.

Mike started in the outdoor industry in 1994 after his family, in a joint venture, opened the Sheiling Mountain Lodge and the Center for Outdoor Education in Nordegg, Alberta. He completed his final ACMG exam and received his IFMGA International Federation of Mountain Guides Association Mountain Guide designation in 2009. He always admired his instructors and examiners, even if they were a bit harsh at times, which lead to him getting involved with the instructor/examiner team in 2012. When the job posting for the interim ACMG technical director came up in 2018, he thought, why not?

The mountains have taught him to be open to all possibilities, have several options and go with the flow. I feel lucky to have this as a career and am extremely grateful to my loving and understanding wife Jennifer and our two boys Lucas and Tyler.

Guest Links

ACMG Technical Manuals: https://www.acmg.ca/03public/resources/publications.aspx

Association of Mountain Guides: www.acmg.ca

David Thomson Via Ferratas: www.viaferratacanada.com

Mike Adolph Email:

Have you ever pushed forward with something even when it became clear that you should probably change your plan or abort? If so, you may have succumbed to plan continuation bias. When this happens, we can become predisposed to continue towards completing our original plan, even when conditions change, or new information becomes known that indicates that continuing on is not advisable.

Mike Adolph joins us to discuss some of the strategies that we can use to recognize and manage plan continuation bias. Mike Adolph is an ACMG / IFMGA Mountain Guide and is the current Technical Director of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides.

Mike dips into his extensive guiding and instructing experience to share some great examples and advice.

Key Takeaways

What is plan continuation bias: It is when a person ignores the fact that conditions or the situation has changed in a way that should cause them to rethink their initial plan, but the person decides to push on towards their objective anyway.

Reasons for plan continuation bias: There are often a number of human factors at play including pressure to keep going from others, a need or desire to make money if you are getting paid to keep going, and a belief that we are more likely to experience a positive outcome. We may also end up ignoring or downplaying information that indicates that we should change course.

Set key decisions points beforehand: For example, we will decide if we continue once we reach the ridge, or after lunch, or once we have worked on this skill.

Removing pressures beforehand: Examples of this can include communicating expectations, decision points and the overall plan beforehand.

Guest Bio

Mike Adolph is an ACMG / IFMGA Mountain Guide and the current technical director of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. In addition to guiding custom outdoor adventures for small groups, Mike also works as a guide trainer and examiner for the ACMG’s Training and Assessment Program.

Mike started in the outdoor industry in 1994 after his family, in a joint venture, opened the Sheiling Mountain Lodge and the Center for Outdoor Education in Nordegg, Alberta. He completed his final ACMG exam and received his IFMGA International Federation of Mountain Guides Association Mountain Guide designation in 2009. He always admired his instructors and examiners, even if they were a bit harsh at times, which lead to him getting involved with the instructor/examiner team in 2012. When the job posting for the interim ACMG technical director came up in 2018, he thought, why not?

The mountains have taught him to be open to all possibilities, have several options and go with the flow. I feel lucky to have this as a career and am extremely grateful to my loving and understanding wife Jennifer and our two boys Lucas and Tyler.

Guest Links

ACMG Technical Manuals: https://www.acmg.ca/03public/resources/publications.aspx

Association of Mountain Guides: www.acmg.ca

David Thomson Via Ferratas: www.viaferratacanada.com

Mike Adolph Email: msadolph@gmail.com

Mike Adolph Instagram: @ mikeatcoe

Avalanche Hour with Mike Adolph: https://soundcloud.com/user-23585762/avalanche-hour-podcast-mike-adolph-acmg-10

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Managing Misadventure with Moose Mutlow

Can misadventure be turned into a positive experience? In this episode we are joined by Moose Mutlow who helps us to better understand what misadventure is, and how we can find value in it.

Moose has nearly forty years of experience as a guide, outdoor educator, and in Search and Rescue. He has worked around the world from the Kalahari Desert to the Florida Everglades, to Yosemite where he now lives. He is the author of two books and has extensive experience in family liaison and incident command.

Key Takeaways

Defining Misadventure: Misadventure is something that doesn’t go well but you can end up with a good story to tell afterwards.

Misadventure has a range: They can go from being funny stories of bad decisions to catastrophic disasters. It goes without saying that we are trying to avoid the latter as they can be very traumatic.

Story telling component: Both adventures and misadventures are defined by the stories that we can tell about them afterwards. Containable misadventures often have much more engaging stories to tell than adventures that go perfectly well.

Course correction: Being able to take a step back and look at the situation is often what stops things becoming an epic misadventure.

Taking a pause can help us to slow things down so that we can articulate the decision-making process effectively, instead of just getting caught reacting to situations. This can often lead to worse outcomes.

Reasons for misadventure: People underestimate the challenge and overestimate their ability and fail to plan and prepare ahead.

Keep people in the Challenge Zone: You have your best gains when you operate just outside your comfort zone. Taking people right the edge of the extreme is counterproductive and is rarely that beneficial. Instead, we should be trying to put people in what I call the challenge zone which is where we feel excitement, but we aren’t so overwhelmed that we develop tunnel vision and are gripped with stress.

Managing Misadventure: Realize when people are stressed, own mistakes that are made and draw attention to lessons learned along the way and try to keep it fun. Careful use of humour can be a useful tool on this last point.

Guest Bio

Moose Mutlow has nearly 4 decades of traditional and alternative education experience around the globe. He has course directed 58-day Outward Bound instructor trainings in Appalachia, been a deputy headmaster in the Kalahari Desert, managed a beach concession on the Mediterranean, slogged through Australian rain forests with middle school students, has more than 2000 days of field instruction in a wilderness setting, spent four months as the Interim Head for an elite ski academy, and returned to Outward Bound to instruct a canoe program for Veterans on the Gulf of Mexico.

Since 2002 Moose has been a member and senior trainer of Yosemite Search and Rescue, working as a technician and within Incident Command, at one of the busiest SAR operations in the world.

Moose currently works for NatureBridge in Yosemite National Park as the Senior Projects Director for planning, design and construction of the National Environmental Science Center.

Moose has written two books, Searching: Finding Purpose, Laughter & Distraction Through Search & Rescue and When Accidents Happen: Managing Crisis Communication as a Family Liaison Officer.

Guest Links

Moose Mutlow: www.moosemutlow.com

Searching: Finding Purpose, Laughter & Distraction Through Search & Rescue:

In this episode, Ken Bélanger shares a funny Heli skiing story that highlights the challenges of trying to talk people out of doing something that will probably not meet their needs in the long run. We look at some of the lessons learned from Ken’s story and offer some strategies to manage these types of situations.

Ken Bélanger is an ACMG Ski and Hiking Guide and the owner of Elevation Guides. Ken’s story highlights the difficulties that leaders can face when they are trying to balance giving people what they want versus what they really need but may not realize it.

Key takeaways

How can we sell someone into do something they need, when they don’t think they want it? Here are four options:

Try Persuasion: Strategies include reasoning with them, offering to do something better, tell them that what they won’t enjoy whatever it is they want to do. Avoid telling people they can’t do it, this can just sound like a challenge to some people.

Use Force: When the level of risk is high, you may have to force them to do something they may not think they want to do. Strategies include a hard no, cresting and sighting rules, and having to attain a skills-based objective or proficiency level before doing something harder.

Let them Suffer: If there is a low risk of serious consequences, it is possible to give people a taste of how hard of uncomfortable a situation will be if they don’t do what you are suggesting. This only works if it is safe and there is an escape route.

Hope that it works out: When there is a low risk, they refuse to change course or listen to you, the damage can be contained or there are no other options, you may have to just hope things work out!

Guest Links

Elevation Guides: www.elevationguides.ca

Ken Bélanger on Instagram: @elevationguides

Guest Bio

Ken Bélanger is an ACMG Ski, Hiking, and Via Ferrata Guide, CAA Professional Member, CANSI Level 1 Nordic Ski & Telemark instructor, CSIA level 1, and Advanced Wilderness Adventure Medic.

Although Ken grew up in Calgary not far from the mountains with his single father and two brothers, they didn’t have the financial means to explore them. It wasn’t until his late teens when he could self-fund trips that he finally discovered skiing and hiking.

He was immediately hooked. It was a steep learning curve to overcome his fear of heights and water, but within a few years he was instructing and guiding water-sports, climbing, cycling, and nordic and telemark skiing.

Ken considers himself extremely fortunate to have learned under some fantastic guides and instructors along the way.

Now operating Elevation Guides with nearly 30 years of guiding experience in 23 countries, he couldn’t imagine a better career. Ken resides in Canmore, Alberta at the doorstep of beautiful Banff National.

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At the heart of every adventure, is a degree of risk taking. Being able to communicate the level of risk that people can expect to be exposed to is an important component of delivering adventure to others recreationally and professionally.

There is nothing worse than exposing someone to a situation that has an elevated level of risk or challenge and having them turn around and tell us that this is not what they expected. When this happens, the blame almost always lands on the leader.

Helping us to examine how we can communicate risk more effectively, is friend of the show, Will Gadd. Will is a world class climbing, paragliding and white-water kayaking athlete. In addition to undertaking many adventures around the world as a professional athlete, Will also guides others professionally and is a certified ACMG Alpine Guide.

In this episode we explore why it’s important to communicate risk and discuss some of the strategies that allow us to do it more effectively.

Guest Bio:

Will Gadd is a world class climbing, paragliding and white-water kayaking athlete. In addition to undertaking many adventures around the world as a professional athlete, Will also guides others professionally and is a certified ACMG Alpine Guide.

Some of Will’s career highlights include:

• Establishing the hardest mixed ice climbing lines in the world.
• Setting the world distance record for paragliding. Twice. 423 km (263 miles) the second time.
• Kayaking down dozens of first ascents across North America.
• Winning the Canadian National Sport-Climbing Championships. Four times.
• Winning three gold medals at the X Games.

Will has also been recognized as a mountain hero by the United Nations for his efforts to raise awareness for environmental issues including how climate change is affecting the mountain environment.

Guest Links:

Contact Will to be your Guide, Instructor or Speaker: https://willgadd.com/

Instagram: @realwillgadd

The Last Ascent, Kilimanjaro: https://www.redbull.com/ca-en/films/the-last-ascent-will-gadds-return-to-kilimanjaro

A Fun Ted Talk: Three Simple Tools to Manage Risk, Fear and Children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTdFkPTTnsA

Key Takeaways:

The role of risk communication is to: Inform everyone of what to expect, so that people know what can happen, how likely it is and how risks will be managed, can provide the leader with informed consent.

Getting informed consent: Getting informed consent involves communicating the risks that will be faced in a way that people can understand and process accurately. Only when people have an understanding of what can happen to them, can they give informed consent to undertake that activity.

The challenge with getting informed consent is that in some circumstances it can be difficult and even impossible to inform people effectively.

When it comes to communicating risk: Do it at the start, end and during an event. You should be informing people any time you are going to be taking on an increased level of risk or you are about to do something that is completely new to them.

Involving people in the decision-making process: Anytime there is going to be an elevated level of risk, or there is a new situation that people have not encountered, leader should probably consider involving their group in the decision-making process.

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How can we improve our performance in a crisis? We spend a lot of time talking on Delivering Adventure about how we can avoid finding ourselves in crisis. However, despite our best efforts, we can all end up finding ourselves in situations where either ourselves or the people we are with end up in a crisis. In this episode, André-Jean Maheu helps us to explore how we can improve our performance when stressful situations cause us or others to lose control.

AJ has worked as an adventure guide, ski patroller, avalanche forecaster, first aid instructor, and paramedic. He is also active in Search and Rescue and operates the North Shore Snowpack YouTube channel.

Guest Bio

AJ Maheu began his career in the outdoor industry over 30 years ago. After spending a decade instructing, guiding river trips in Québec, and hikes from Alaska to the Andes he shifted his focus to emergency response in remote settings. He worked as a paramedic on worksites on Baffin Island and began a 20-year-career teaching wilderness first aid. He has taught emergency preparedness and first aid in multiple adventure travel guide programs in 6 different colleges and universities across the country.

AJ Maheu is an avalanche professional and member of the Canadian Ski Guides Association. He has also worked as a professional ski patroller for the past 20 years. He is active in many spheres of the avalanche industry including forecasting for industrial operations, search and rescue, and ski resorts as well as instructing and guiding.

AJ runs the North Shore Snowpack YouTube channel, providing weekly snowpack information to backcountry users and is a brand ambassador for Nano Traino, manufacturer of high quality, packable emergency evacuation toboggans. When not working, he is busy delivering adventures for his 2 boys, taking them on family adventures.

Guest Links

North Shore Snowpack YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@northshoresnowpack?si=eZClzV6KePi3hYwb

Nano Traino: https://nanotraino.com/en/

Key Takeaways:

Managing performance effectively in a crisis: Best strategy is to keep yourself out of the crisis zone. When we are gripped with a crisis, it becomes very hard to counter our instincts of fight or flight. Our ability to think straight also becomes quite compromised. This means the best strategy to manage a crisis is to avoid losing control to begin with.

To prepare for a crisis: You need to practice. Preparation can pull you through stressful situations.

When you practice, make sure it’s meaningful. This means it has to have specific objectives.

Make it realistic, go through all the steps with no short cuts. Practicing should outline what is difficult. It should have an element of stress.

Reduce your vulnerability: Vulnerability is your inability to withstand a hostile environment or consequences. It is important to realize how vulnerable you are.

Spending a lot of time looking at the foreseeable can help to recognize when you are going to be more vulnerable. This can help us to identify the things that can cause us to lose control to begin.

Stay focused on building momentum: Adopt a proactive mindset where you focus on the things that you can do.

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