The objective is to come through the CLEAR BLUE SKY process with clarity, firm new intentions, objectives and immediate actions, formulated by you, for when you return to your workplace context.

• These actions might target specific work-based issues including mental health and wellbeing, a work problem, a required solution, a decision that needs to be made, team issues, lack of creativity, or short-circuiting a blinkered way of homogenous, cloned group-thinking.
• Or these intentions and actions may be around generating a new purpose for you as an individual, or a whole new vision, mission and purpose for your team or organisation, or even an individual.

Clear Blue Sky is about Rebel Thinking.

The Program facilitates you to focus on what you or your organisation are really all about, in the most unconstrained and uninterrupted way possible, in a mind-set altering environment and wilderness context you would never normally approach these issues from.  This is what frees your thinking and also your emotions, in order to clear away the clutter and blockers, expose your blind-spots, allowing you to get to the heart of what is truly important and urgent in your objectives for attending.  In the light of this new and different context, participants are frequently surprised to discover other different objectives – that the things actually needing to be dealt with are not what they thought.  Clarity.

Our eQeOUTDOORS’ team includes:

• MBA-Qualified Consultants
• Ex-Industry Scientists
• Senior Managers to Managing Director level
• Business Coach
• Advanced Bushcraft Practitioner and other Outdoor Leaders
• Therapists and Counsellors
• Wilderness Vision Quest Guides

Since 1983, eQeOUTDOORS’ Director Robin Sheehan was a climatologist, oceanographer and environmental scientist; a developer in environmental and space systems; and Managing Director in the GIS sector for Europe, Middle East and Africa.  We’ve worked hard to develop the application of this powerful, established personal development process, creating the accessible 1 week CLEAR BLUE SKY programme.

 

You want to move from ingrained 2-dimensional “work” to fulfilling a new 4-dimensional vision and purpose.

You will work on these 5 principles as part of the overall CLEAR BLUE SKY program:

Irrespective of whatever theme or issue you have brought with you, these 5 principles scale to relate to everything, from a whole organisation focus, all the way down to an individual and their role within it, and everything else in between –

Envisioning: Building Vision and Scope – far beyond what everyone else is currently doing or thinking; moving far beyond a simple competitive or reactive “keep up with the rest” approach.  Refusing to blindly follow or fall in line.

Radical and Rebellious Thinking – Who says you can’t? Removing the blinkers of cloned “Group-Think” peppered with blind spots. Dare to lift your head, see and say something different.  There are radically different ways of approaching things or perceiving things than how everyone has been blindly pursuing them for years.  And just because “everyone says it is like this” doesn’t mean it’s true or that it’s not time for a new idea.  Dare to throw away the invented-rule book we all propagate and unleash your radical rebellious mind to re-imagine new avenues of exploration, solutions, and timescales.

Decluttering: Single mindedness and focus – New clarity of direction and target objective.  Clear out the distractions, diversions, red-herrings, and blind spots.

One Tribe: Your Tribe in the Workplace – Belonging – Belief – Ownership – People

Intention: Formulate and execute immediate next actions, based on the above

The CLEAR BLUE SKY program allows you the space within the process to address questions and issues typically relating to your role, your project, your business, or your thinking, unconstrained:

Removing the walls and ceiling in our minds and imaginations – Releasing Unblinkered Thinking and Creativity in Role

Working with Intention – Direction, Momentum, Target and Resolve in Work

Envisioning and Passion – Purpose, Mission, and Vision as an Individual, an Organisation or Team

Staff / Personal Development and Motivation

Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace

Clarity and De-Cluttering in Teams and Individuals

Dealing with Change and Making Changes

 

You are here because you choose to be.  Because you want to radically change your thinking or your approach to something in your work, team, business or organisation.

No distractions to new directions! Stripping away technology – laptops, phones, and even a roof over our heads – we are freed from all external influences and diversions to focus in a unique and powerful way on our own strengths, objectives, and reasons for being here on this CBS program.  For many, this may be the first time they have approached their objectives or issues cleanly, and completely outside of other expectations, influences and limitations, and completely outside of their current lifestyle and constraints – In the wilderness.  Unless it’s raining, this is the original blue-sky thinking.

• Severance: Freeing ourselves from outside influences and making a mental shift to focus only on the objectives at hand that we have brought with us to the CBS program
• Preparation and Exploration: Exploring our own creativity and imagination in problem solving and new idea formulation, using our Mesolithic ancestors’ problem solving and multiple-solutions-focused thinking as a creative metaphor for developing our own solutions and intentions around our own objectives. Strip away current thinking, current technology, industry expectations – This is the time to learn how to approach your problem or objective at hand …when all you have to start from is a blank sheet.
• Threshold: Intense and productive solo time in the wilderness, to gain crystal clarity in our own specific objectives, away from all other influences, stripping away all vestiges of self-imposed constrained thinking, and stepping away from constraints or influences put upon our thinking by other people, situations, and also the limiting culture and expectation from our industry or workplace. This is the phase where clarity takes hold, and the real issues emerge, demanding our firm intentions and actions to move forward.
• Incorporation: Final honing of firm intentions for actioning on your return to your workplace situation.

Combined approaches in this process assist in freeing us from constrained thinking:

• Coaching and personal development approaches
• An exploration of ancient tribal and wilderness living skills, and multiple-solutions-focused thinking
• Rebellious Thinking and Diversity of People and Ideas
• Smash our mindsets and mental cages – Traditional Wilderness Vision Quest and Rites of Passage techniques, to generate subsequent intentions and actions beyond all normal expectations. VQ is how our ancestors sometimes approached decision making, change making, seeking answers to issues and problems, or even to discover what the REALLY IMPORTANT questions actually are in the first place.
• Established and recognised therapeutic approaches to facilitate personal development

These are uniquely integrated tightly with an exploration of how our ancestors approached technological problems with multi-faceted solutions-focused thinking, imagination and creativity, for example:

• Advanced Bushcraft, and Mesolithic long-term living skills, tackling objectives and technology for:
  • Fire mastery
  • Shelter mastery
  • Basic Tool mastery
  • Making tools and items we may need as a tribe from forest materials
  • Water / hydration mastery
  • Safety systems and keeping yourself and others safe – the Buddy System
  • Orientation and natural navigation in the landscape
  • Familiarisation with the local terrain and choosing your personal solo area to support your personal characteristics and free your mind

More background details here, on our FAQ pages >>> https://www.Life-Engineering.co.uk/vision-quest-faqs/

New research by Deloitte for the UK alone show that organisations are losing way more than £40 Billion every year by not addressing Mental Health and Wellbeing of workers.  Deloitte research reported £43 Billion was lost in 2018 – an increase of 16% on 2016 figures.

On average, an organisation has been losing 9 operating days per year due to Mental Health and Wellbeing issues unresolved in their workplace.  17.5 Million working days were lost in the UK in 2018, and it’s getting worse.

The study follows up on a government-commissioned review that found about 15% of people at work have symptoms of a mental health condition.

 

The wages people are paid when they’re on sick leave is one way to estimate the cost.  But people often don’t disclose that sick leave is for mental health problems.  So, the true costs are probably much higher.

 

eQeOUTDOORS’ WILDERNESS PROGRAMS AND MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING

eQe people have been:

• Delivering targeted Wilderness Therapeutic programmes since 2011
• Delivering professional therapeutic provision and interventions since 2002
• Teaching and training people since 1998
• Working professionally with the natural environment since 1983

Our Wilderness-based programs incorporate a number of recognised therapeutic approaches, and frequently individuals are attending for reasons of Mental Health and Wellbeing.  There is no stigma attached to this.  This is often related to quite normal human conditions to do with basic work and life stuff, like: stress and pressure, confidence, assertiveness, anxiety, self-esteem, relationships, self-awareness, self-motivation, work-behaviours, empathy, and required social skills for any working or leadership role.

For example, our therapists have played a major role in designing our wilderness-based programs, and we frequently integrate:

1. Solution Focused Therapy – Aiding in making decisions, choices and changes, in order to achieve a solution and attain clarity of vision
2. Rites of Passage and Intention Setting
3. Therapeutic Nature of Relationship with Natural World
4. Transactional Analysis
5. Specific Wilderness Vision Quest and Rites of Passage Techniques, including:

• • Personal Mirroring and Reflection
  • Intention Setting and Solution Focused Therapy
  • The Council
  • Transactional Analysis

Be prepared to identify and burn away the impurities and contaminants that divert you, block you, blind you, lie to you, and slow you down.  The impact can be profound.

Become a spear again, as an organisation, or team, or individual in your workplace or business, or indeed your own personal career path – Your professional and work passions and visions are there to be rediscovered, rekindled, re-envisioned, re-forged, and firm “next actions” formulated for when participants return to their daily lives or workplace.

Target    Actions    Spear    Momentum

It’s disturbingly easy to lose sight of the target, and become blocked from progress as an organisation, a team, or an individual.  Or to become lost in the fog and clutter and distractions of “real life” business and organisational issues, email, admin and legislation.  Group-Think and homogenous “just like me” teams can also blinker an organisation and steer it endlessly down a wrong path, fuelled by unquestioning “everyone here accepts this is the way and keeps going” mentality.  It feeds our own comfort and affirms our opinions to be with like-minded people, who know the things we know, and have the same experience or background to us.  Individuals are intelligent, experienced, maybe the best in their field, and they have correct ideas.  But collectively, the group is homogenous, with no-one bringing to the table anything different to anyone else.  Because they are all the same.  The group is “clones”, with limited boundaries on thinking and no experience beyond the sphere they all work together in – experts or not.

Evidence from Joseph Henrich (“The Secret of our Success”) shows that:

• From a group of geniuses – all leaders and experts in a specified field who all know as much as each other – only 18% will achieve or invent a required innovation to solve a given new problem
• From a group of lower-achieving and more diverse individuals – but who can communicate well – 99.9% will achieve or invent the required innovation

You act like Vikings, but the truth is you’re all just rowing together in the wrong direction, because you all agree with each other, think the same way, with no diversity, with no reality-check compass, no wind in your sail, and you can’t see anything for the fog.  And no-one lifts their head to see a different truth beyond the comfort-blanket of the fog, and say “stop – go that way”.

Clear away the clutter and be rewarded with crystal clarity of what you must now be, do, and achieve.  A new Vision.  To rediscover the feeling and excitement of potential and passion and purpose – a Vision and a Mission.  To get back on track – Or find a new track.

Start again.

Target.  Direction.  Aim.  Action with Firm Intention.  Momentum.

Launch your spear, into the CLEAR BLUE SKY.

Are you ready?  Is your team or organisation – your tribe – ready?

It’s about getting out of your normal context, into the wild, to address issues, mission, vision, and clarity, outside of your normal work and life environment, and away from the people and influences that funnel us down a predictable path to a predictable answer.

 

It can generate movement in “stuck” situations and provides a reality check for the issues and situations we bring with us, often even resulting in the questions we are asking to be changed to the questions we should be asking.

 

This is based on an established, powerful, personal and life development process, and eQeOUTDOORS uses the power of being out in the Scottish wilderness, alongside a strong focus on learning practical bushcraft and wilderness living skills needed there, to reconnect with our natural world, integrated with modern coaching and therapeutic approaches in order to propel ourselves forward in life and as a person.  Magic does happen, and you make it happen.