With the 2023/2024 NFL football season coming to a close, the talk is all about Coaches and Players seeking different teams to play for where they hope to find better success. And in the midst of this we hear the words: Fit, Environment, and Culture just to name a few. During the playoff games we hear the stories of Coaches and Players who have been on several different teams with little success and suddenly they become super stars as they are describe their success on their “new” team because the offense was a better fit, the environment was more conducive to my style, etc. In these cases, the Coach or Player are not poor performers, they just didn’t operate in the playing style that maximizes their potential. In the same way, understanding our optimal Hiking, Personal, and Work Environment can take us to heights we would have never thought possible.
What is your ideal Hiking Environment? Do you find success in 14ers, 13ers, group hikes, personal hikes, doing the same local hikes or branching out to try new trails. We can get into problems when we see other’s hiking exploits on Facebook, 14ers.com, etc., and think we need to be like them. Take some time in the next month and describe your ideal hike. What words would you use during and after the hike to describe that perfect hike and how it made you feel. Then write down words that have described your last few hikes. Do the words match or do you need make some changes to your hiking goals this year.
In your personal life, what words would you use to describe the Environment you are living in? Is it peaceful and calm with plenty of margin? Or is it hectic, stress filled, and going 100 miles an hour? It is so easy to get discouraged and feel beat down when nothing seems to be going right. We think we just need to try harder and harder; but that just makes us feel worse. I remember sitting on our back open deck when we lived in Wheaton, IL when the sky opened up and it poured down rain. The smell of the spring rain with thunder, made us want to stay on the deck, while feeling more miserable minute by minute as we got soaked. Finally, the light bulb came on and we headed to our cover front porch. There we continued our time, smelling the rain and hearing the thunder. What things do you need to change in your Environment to allow you stay “dry” and be at peace in the midst of the storms in your life.
In our work Environment, how do we get into those roles where we can be the most successful. An exercise I do one on one with others is to ask them to tell me five words that describe the strengths in their life. Then I ask them to put each strength in a sentence and use it in their current work Environment. If this becomes hard for them to do, we go down the path of describing what kinds of jobs would allow them to use their strengths in a job description.
After high school one of my son’s Alex, went through several fast-food jobs with most of them lasting less than a week. Then he started thinking about what kind of work environment he wanted to work in and thought that “Discount Tires” might be worth a try. Having no prior automotive experience, I had my own doubts about it being a fit for him, but with him now being there over a year and a half, and not missing one day, I can tell he is in an Environment where he is thriving. One of the unexpected -wonderful- outcomes of this work environment is seeing him develop a love for working on cars. About once a week, I’ll see him in the garage making some improvements and I ask him how he knows this car stuff, he replies “This is why I spend all this time on YouTube.” We have heard it countless times “Find a job you love and you will never “work” another day in your life. I think the same applies with your Hiking, Personal and Work life. Find and live in the environment you thrive in and nothing will be able to hold you back.
This and other “Trail Tips” can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredandersen and www.alandersen.co
Also, a collection of my first 101 tips have been published in a book and is available at Amazon or you can contact me to get an autographed copy of the book.
Al Andersen 