Throughout my formative years of instruction and guiding, I often had people to look up to, the ones who would take me on the river or would offer to take me on some grand adventures. I was super lucky, but I never had anyone who I would consider a mentor, a person I could keep checking in with and growing as a person and as an outdoor adventurer.

Now I have gained lots of experience and luck has paid its part along with skill to bring me to where I am. I have found myself enjoying more and more the feeling of giving back and bringing people along so I can offer my own pieces of wisdom and see them succeed.

I do it for a job because I need money and it’s mostly enjoyable though I do it in my free time as thats when I feel most connected to people, with my time always ticking I feel such a sense of pride and fulfillment in doing so for free.

I often see overseas mentorship programs, people partnering up but rarely see it here in NZ, especially not in the NZOIA scene and I have always struggled trying to piece together an argument for it or a discussion piece so we can have a conversation of why we have not done it yet.

Some reasons why I think it would be a great thing to include in the outdoor scene include overall safety and improvements to individual decision making. Not just overseas visitors find themselves in trouble from subpar decision making, I believe it would make a difference to the impact such mistakes have on SAR and other agencies.

It improves the outcomes delivery across the board to participants, we could have growth of our instructors and guides in the way they perform their physical jobs, learning new tricks and keeping them interested in it as a career rather than just a year or two fun experience. Not many bigger killers of staff than the feeling of stagnation!

It spreads a good ethos of share knowledge and not gatekeep or discourage sharing, so often people dont share either because its ‘not my responsibility’ ‘dont feel like I could have anything of value to share’ or just straight fuck you to anyone who asks. Pretty immature and pathetic in my view. If you dont want to share, so be it, but to go around actively discouraging it is a child’s mentality of a toy they enjoy and dont want to share.

I believe industries and individuals could offer some great monthly knowledge sharing events, have regular staff mentorship and change how we do the outdoors, bringing people up to a standard that will keep them alive, grow friendships and communities, as well as relieve our emergency services.

Excited to see where the thought leads me.