Raise the Bar, Come to Life

The following article written by Lindsay Walton, Lead Facilitator of Open Door Development, was published in this month's Parallel Lines, the newsletter of the Association for Challenge Course Technology (ACCT).

We live in a society where the bar has been set pretty low. Life has itʼs challenges, hard hits and tough times, but in the sense of having something to strive for, a higher goal or standard to push for, the challenge it seems has been set to the side in favor of self-indulgence.

Many have forgotten how to fight for things, have forgotten how to persevere or be patient with themselves and others while mistakes are made and lessons learned. Many have settled for being entertained rather than being stretched, have settled for convenience rather than accomplishment, have settled for having their own way at the expense of the health and strength of their broader community.

It is a great thing to celebrate a teamʼs success and there is a sense of comfort for a facilitator in knowing that their clients are happy, enjoying their time and feeling good about themselves. A happy client is one who will hopefully return and pay for the experience again in the future. It makes for a more straightforward and stressless day as the person running the program. However, if all of your clients are happy and smiling throughout their experiences, I would like to suggest that something is not quite right. There is an Opportunity being missed. I would like to offer a life clue, one that if you grab hold of it may alter how you approach facilitation, business, and life.

Human beings at their very core desire challenge. That desire is built in to the human body. When we examine physical fitness it is a general principle that the more you sit the more you are going to want to sit. The more you sleep, the more you will want to sleep. However the more you are active, the more you will want to be in motion. The more you are challenged and see the pay-off, the more you want to push yourself. As we move forward and increase our activity we gain more ability to enjoy and engage in life. Increased range of motion, reduced pain, improved health, higher self-confidence and more. What is fascinating about this principle is that it is not confined to our physical selves.

Our inner beings, something deep in our core, responds the same way. The more we are indulged the more we demand to be handed to us. The more we focus on our wants and needs the more angry we get with others who we perceive arenʼt letting us have it. But the more we work for things, the more we push our character and see ourselves grow and strengthen, the more we want to push on and to be pushed.

Did you know that to challenge someone is to say “I care about you”? When offered out of a sincere desire to see someone grow and be healthy, independent and strong enough to face lifeʼs storms, humans perceive challenge as a sign of love. This is most obvious in young children who thrive when their parents challenge them by laying out boundaries, saying no, and disciplining them when they sink in to dishonesty, selfishness, greed, apathy or other qualities that will not serve them well in life. While making for some very hard days, weeks, months or years at times for the parents, their children display higher levels of self-confidence and ability to navigate life as a healthy and independent adult because somebody loved them enough to push them rather than indulge them. This is a gift from our parents we often donʼt learn to be grateful for until
much later in life.

What is critical to understand is that the need to be challenged doesnʼt fade away as we grow older. As adults, we are still drawn to people who call us to something higher. People who empower us, sometimes by sharing insight so that we know how to move forward and other times by making us work for it so that we figure it out ourselves. Either way, this person who we find so attractive usually accepted us as we were at the time, but didnʼt allow us to stay that way. They called us to face the challenge and empowered us in some way by pushing us, and we are attracted to that. People are attracted to Life and challenge is so very much a part of that. It is in being challenged that we truly learn how to persevere and not give up. It is in being challenged that we truly learn what it means to practice honesty, to be a person of integrity. It is in being challenged that we learn our strengths and identify our areas for growth, and develop hope that we can always move forward and always have the ability to be the change we want to see in the world around us.

I place the challenge to you as a facilitator to allow your participants to be stretched. Call them to something higher, something greater, and allow them to be frustrated while they figure it out. Examine yourself and identify when you are handing a group a clue to a challenge because they have earned it versus when you are handing out clues to relieve your sense of discomfort with their frustration. Examine yourself and identify when you are modifying challenges or letting participants get away with things not because it is better for them, but because you feel safer when everyone likes you as the facilitator who entertained them. Push yourself as a facilitator and know that there will be a payoff. You will grow as a professional, able to handle more difficult and complex team and community issues as they present themselves. Your business will grow because in the long-run people are more attracted to challenges that made them think than to entertainment which allowed their brains to turn off.

And because we know that participantsʼ experiences with us in our programs do have the ability to impact their broader lives, take inspiration and motivation from this thought. Your challenge to persevere may save a marriage. Your challenge to participate rather than sit on the sidelines may lead a parent to take a more active role in their childʼs life. Your challenge to stop taking shortcuts or looking for the easy way out may save someone from a criminal record. Your challenge to encourage others and point out their strengths may prevent a suicide.

If you are facing difficult life challenges and are being given the advice to listen to your feelings because then youʼll know what to do, ignore it. If you are giving this advice, quit it. Our feelings and emotions are clues, not an answer. It is what we know about hope, integrity, honesty, perseverance and more that will guide us through tough times and lead us to take actions that we will be proud of and that will give us peace in retrospect.

Allow yourself to be challenged. Challenge yourself. Challenge others. And Live.

Lindsay Walton is the Lead Facilitator of Open Door Development, a company that exists to build strong teams and healthy communities through team building, conflict resolution training, leadership development and more. You can contact her at info@opendoordevelopment.ca.