The EARTH 1 Program is a one-week personal, team, and organisational development program in the wilderness.  You will focus on your specific issues and objectives that you bring with you.  This is based around an established and effective process known in some circles as Wilderness Vision Quest.

The objective is to come through the EARTH 1 process with clarity, firm new intentions, objectives and immediate actions, formulated by you, for when you return to your life or work context.  For those with personal anxieties and fears, impacting personal wellbeing, one of the things we can do on an individual level to pull ourselves out of this darkness is to take positive action – Do something.  Take control.

• On an individual level, your intentions and actions may be around what you can do on a personal level, or within your family, or at a larger agency / project level in your community, or joining the activities of an already established and working organisation. The point is to push down your fear, take control, and understand that you can and are making a difference, whatever level you are working at.  On a personal level, this is a four-stage process:
  1. What am I actually afraid of? What are my convictions?  Understand the root of your precise anxieties, fears and issues – CLARITY informing your personal beliefs and convictions for what matters most to you.
  2. What is my life context? Everyone can do something.  What are the boundaries and limitations on your life, lifestyle and time?  What level can I be involved at?
  3. What part can I play? What do I believe I should be involved in?  Tailoring firm intentions and plans around your life context, and around your convictions and beliefs of what matters most to you.  Live out your beliefs, whether at a personal level or at a group / organisation level.
  4. What am I going to do?   Not just thinking.  Empowerment.  Wellbeing.  Formulating firm actions to take when you return to your normal life context
• Organisations and Teams: These actions might target larger specific organisational issues including mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, team issues, lack of creativity, or short-circuiting a blinkered way of homogenous, cloned group-thinking.
• All: 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.

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 the EARTH 1 program.  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.

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

No tech to new tech! 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 FPH program.  For many, this may be the first time they have approached their objectives or issues cleanly, and completely outside of other expectations 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 FPH 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.

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 REAL 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 and Basic 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 your choosing your personal solo area

 

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

Our eQeOUTDOORS’ team includes:

• MBA-Qualified Consultants
• Ex-Industry Environmental Scientists and Biologists
• 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.  He is a trained Wilderness Vision Quest Guide, and Director of Wilderness Therapy and Training for eQe.