The Great Tasmanian 36 Hour Challenge
If you would like to physically and mentally test yourself come this October and you live in Tasmania, then read on.
This will outline a unique challenge that you will have to mentally prepare for, will not be easy at all to complete, but will leave you with a greater personal capacity and toughness to take with you and that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
We meet at 0800hours Saturday 10th October and the Challenge will finish at 2000 hours on Sunday 11th October.
Mark in his playground somewhere in Tasmania’s high country
This is not a 10 minute abseil or a self-nominated distance to walk/run and be a charity support vehicle to make you feel good about yourself. This is designed to be a powerful, meaningful and deeply confronting personal challenge that will safely allow you to exist for 36 hours outside of your comfort zone.
The Derwent Experience is all about positive connections and collaborating with Experts in their field. For this inaugural 36 hour challenge we are teaming up with Mark Direen from Point Assist who will lead, direct and manage both the “stretch and challenges” as well as the safety. More about Mark and his bonafides below.
We will spend in the range of 24-28 hours in the wilderness without any usual comforts. For this entire period, Male and Female, all will exist with their surrounding environment and each other, and nothing else. We will move purposefully through the wilderness and be guided externally and internally. The balance of the 36 hours will be in the initial briefing and the final de-briefing as well as transport to and from the secret wilderness location that will support our small group for a little over one day.
We hope this will be your best day of 2020 by a Tasmanian Wilderness Mile.
Our small group caters for only 14 people, with 16 - 24 years being “youth” and eligible for a cheaper price. This has the power to positively impact any person at any stage of their life, but due to its toughness…unless the Guardian will vouch for their suitability, then we deem a normal 16 year old with the capacity to have a warrior mindset to be the minimum entry requirement.
In four points, this is the challenge summarised.
Be Mentally and Physically Challenged - perhaps like never before
Gain clarity and renewed motivation to either re-commit or chart a new course
Embrace Wilderness with your Wild Heart
Redefine your Limits
What to expect:
We meet within 20 minutes from Hobart at 0800 hours on Saturday 10th October.
The location is disclosed the day before. We have a short briefing, collect our gear and then you will be driven to a Wilderness location. You will exist for the next 24 hours minimum, possibly up to 28 hours, without a roof, walls, hard floor, electricity, screens, or wifi. You will turn your phones off. We then hike, but its not about a distance covered, even though 30 km will be the low side. Along the way we will take you through some exercises that will challenge you in many different ways.
It is important to note right here as you are considering if this is right for you - or for someone you care deeply about, should a person “crack” then that person will be supported and cared for. We are of the philosphy that it is only through the crack that the light can shine in or indeed shine out. So while a large focus will be on mental toughness, we will also create a safe space for any person to freely express his or herself in a non-judemental and supportive way, and if required guide them through “the valley.”
Experience camaraderie - a mutual trust and friendship among people who spend a lot of time or a special experience together. There will be moments of magic, unscripted and profound that could happen to you, through you, becauseof you or before you.
We will hopefully have the light and warmth of fire weather permitting. Tarpaulins will be used for shelter. Expect to be standing for Sunset as well as Sunrise.
After the Wilderness experience, we will then be transported back to the initial meeting place for a de-brief and will be free to return home at 2000 hours on Sunday 11th October. You can then, and hopefully only then start thinking about your own bed.
On the weekend of the challenge, mental and physical toughness are front and centre, but the purpose is not to break you or to even push you beyond what you are comfortable with. This challenge is designed to afford a unique environment for you to challenge yourself and safely step outside your comfort zone.
Everyone has the potential for amazing and extraordinary achievements. This challenge will be raw and very real, no comforts, but no dangers either. Everything will be disclosed in the initial briefing. For some of you it may be a little stretch and for others it could be a large one - maybe even the biggest one for you to date.
The after effects of this challenge will be with you for quite some time. For this reason the final component is a social meet up in town for a beverage about 3-4 weeks afterwards where we can relive and share and motivate each other to keep moving forward fiercely and safely.
Meet your Guides.
Mark Direen.
Mark in his preferred habitat
As a former Australian Special Forces Team Leader and high-risk environment consultant, Mark has worked and led teams in some of the world’s most hostile and unforgiving environments.
His 25-year career in the military, security and adventure travel fields has given him a unique skill set and the experience to provide practical solutions to even the most complex and challenging situations.
Mark is passionate about improving people’s lives - the way they think and live. Through training and adventure Mark helps people and organisations find direction, set and reach goals, improve personal safety, build high performing teams, operate effectively in challenging environments and develop the resilience necessary to succeed.
Mark channels his formidable skills and experience through his own business called Point Assist.
In helping people and organisations achieve and advance, Mark’s values are embodied in being:
Adventurous – unusual and exciting;
Authentic - of undisputed origin; genuine and unscripted; and
Audacious - showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold and daring risks
“Evolution through Experience. Achievement through Adventure”
Mark is Tassie grown and a sample of some of his work and philosophy is added below so that you can better connect with your Challenge Leader.
Sam Bradley
Sam in his element
As a bucktooth freckly ginger nut, survival and resilience were skills Sam learned early in life - the school yard and parts of town where especially tough.
Sam is now the epitome of Mr Average and is motivated by his personal motto of “If I can do it then anyone can do it.” Seriously though, Sam is a Certified Coach focusing on Health and Human Behaviour and will ably support Mark with the group dynamics, and facilitating insightful, perhaps revealing and even uncomfortable personal discussions. No one is forced, everyone is invited to share and that can be as little or as much as you want. Confidentiality is assured and what happens in the Wilderness can stay in the Wilderness.
Sam owns and operates The Derwent Experience. This venture offers unique experiences for small groups often collaborating with highly experienced and professional people such as Mark.
3rd Person.
To be confirmed but they will also have to be special, hold first aid qualifications, drive one of the vehicles and double as Photographer to capture moments that will hopefully make it onto our Life Highlights slideshow.
Thank you
If you have read this far then you are no doubt seriously considering joining us for the challenge. Everything is handled by and goes through Sam at The Derwent Experience. That includes insurance as well as all questions and payments. You will of course be required to sign a Waiver to participate. This waiver will need to be signed in conjunction with payment and is effectively a personal liability and health check.
Please go to this link to reserve your place https://thederwentexperience.brushfire.com/events/472781
If you can do so by paying in full that is great. If you would like to pay in installments please contact Sam directly. We can arrange something that works for us both and also reserve one of the 14 places for you. Also if you have any questions or need a little clarification please do contact Sam by phone or email.
The following now are some writings from Mark that illuminate what will be covered in this unique and empowering challenge.
The Skills we don’t know we have. (June 2020)
Discharging from 16 years in the regular army I didn’t have to worry about getting a new job on “civi street”. I took the skills I had acquired in the Special Forces and went back to Afghanistan to work at the Australian Embassy as a security contractor with my mates. It was an easy transition from Defence and to be honest, some would say, hardly a transition at all. While there were a few major differences in my work before and after the ADF, there were a lot of similarities. Regardless, I enjoyed the challenge of private security contracting and spent the next six years after discharging from the army doing my best to keep people safe in complex and dangerous environments.
The uncertainty and real transition for me came in 2016, when I finished working in Afghanistan.
After 14 years of working on and off in the war troubled country, I returned to Australia with the goal of starting an adventure travel business in Tasmania. It was then I learned the real difficulties of being a small player in an industry where you have to compete for every client. As a veteran, I was running a few adventure hikes for former military and first responders, taking them into the wilderness to show them how good the adventure and tranquility can be for their mindset. Around this time, I was asked to speak to a group of military veterans about my experience post army. I remember answering a question about useful skills the military teach by saying; “Most of the skills the military teach us are not useful once you get out of Defence.” I was referring to skills like sniping, proficiency with a machine gun, blowing things up and techniques for destroying an enemy.
A few years on, I now believe I answered the question poorly. At the time I wasn’t too different to a lot of other veterans (and society for that matter); I thought that getting out of Defence I needed to be totally retrained in order to fit back into normal society.
How wrong I was.
“What skills can we take from our military service that will help us in life on civi street. What skills do the military give us that make us better people. What skills should we never stop using. What skills make us more competitive in the job market and able to live a life full of passion, purpose and meaning. A life where we constantly improve and evolve?”
If asked the question again today, my answer would be very different.
The huge list of soft skills of course - the important skills in life.
I believe there are two main types of skills in the life. Hard Skills and Soft Skills. The military teaches both.
The strip and assemble of a belt feed general purpose machine gun or the best place to position your fire support in order to effectively suppress an enemy while you overwhelm them are hard skills. The more hard skills a soldier has, the more useful he is. Hard skills are the abilities and proficiencies that can be taught and trained. They are easy to recognise and test for competency.
The real gold dust however lies in the soft skills we develop in the military. The behaviours, traits and non-technical abilities that relate to how we view and do things.
For most people, having the marksmanship skills to hit an enemy in the chest at 800m loses its usefulness after military service. However, work ethic, flexibility, mental toughness, tenacity, patience and problem solving are key attributes that will see you succeed at whatever you choose to pursue post service.
The Australian Special Air Service Regiment's (SAS) selection course, at the time I did it was the only course in the ADF not designed to teach you anything. Its goal is purely to determine if soldiers are suitable for training, to identify those with the soft skills and attributes to become Special Forces operators. Knowing that anyone, from anywhere, in the ADF can apply for the SAS is evidence to the order of priority this high performing team of professional soldiers place on these skills. Senior instructors know they can teach you to shoot later but it is a lot harder to teach you to want to learn, to have a positive mindset when situations look grim and display mental fortitude when things get hard.
Likewise, in the civilian world today; it is why any human resource manager or selection panel worth their weight values these same skills when it comes to hiring new team members. They know it’s precisely these skills that will make you most successful in the workplace.
So what are the personal traits and attributes that make up those desirable soft skills?
The list is long, and examples include:
Mental and physical toughness,
Endurance,
Teamwork as well as the ability to work and achieve results alone, unsupervised, (having both, despite popular belief, is not common)
Risk management and the ability to accept risk, (something modern society is becoming less and less able to tolerate)
Conflict resolution and tolerance for other ideas,
Identification and management of your emotions,
Clear and concise communication, as well as listening skills,
Punctuality and time management,
Motivation and purpose,
Positivity and work ethic,
Prioritisation and problem solving,
The ability to self-evaluate yourself and your performance,
Adaptability and dependability; and
Interpersonal or people skills and empathy.
The million-dollar question is how do we improve our soft skills?
While it is quite easy to listen to a talk on leadership, it won’t instantly make you a good leader. Unlike hard skills that can be taught in a 40-minute lesson and cemented with practice over time; experience is the critical factor in soft skills. It is why there are thousands of highly educated yet poor leaders but also thousands of great leaders, communicators and problem solvers that have never taken a single class in it. Maybe their parents were good communicators or maybe they had a footy coach that was a great leader. Most likely they have just learned through experience what works and what doesn’t, how to get the best out of people and express their ideas, perfecting these skills over time since they were young.
The common saying “you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with” is also very relevant when it comes to soft skills. If your five closest friends tell you it is OK to hit the beers until late on a Sunday night making Monday’s performance at work sub-optimal; you will think the same. This in turn will likely erode other peoples (including your managers) perception of your personal traits, dedication for one. But if your close friends and work colleagues promote focus and the value of not letting the team down, you are more likely to have two beers then head home for a good night’s rest.
Self-awareness is key with soft skills. Some you will undoubtably already have to a good standard – identify these so that they can go down on your resumé and help you win that next promotion. Equally as important, is recognising any areas that could do with improvement.
A simple system of improving soft skills:
Identify the soft skill you are lacking and want to improve. Be conscious of when you are using them
Research these skills and possible actions to improve them
Be aware and practice the skill
Evaluate and collect feedback
Improvement in your soft skills in life should be a steady and continuous cycle, one that never ends as they assist us in all aspects of life not just work. Good soft skills will assist us to live a purposeful life full of passion, meaning and unforgettable experiences. From the everyday moments in your family relationships, to the personal achievements and epic adventures you experience before your limited time comes to an end.
In Summary:
Soft skills are non-technical skills that are transferable through life to everything you do.
They are harder to acquire, perfect and measure than hard or technical skills.
The military and emergency services are good at teaching soft skills. Veterans and front line workers often have well developed soft skills.
Soft skills can substantially enhance both your performance in the workplace and accomplishment in life.
You can consciously train and improve your soft skills and in doing so, improve your life.
Be a Hard Target
In terms of criminal activity, did you know most criminals go through a victim selection process to assess the ease with which they could overpower a victim. This is often based on nonverbal signals which victims are usually not even aware of.
Attackers fear failure so one of the most important aspects of personal safety success is the ability to make yourself a hard target. You may not be an MMA champion but let's not tell the world that.
Some practical rules:
Move with purpose and confidence
Don't look like a tourist - avoid shorts, thongs, fanny pack, camera on display
Dress local and modest – the more flashy your attire, the more of a target you can become
Be situationally aware - put your phone and camera away while on the move
Avoid traveling alone in hazardous areas
Learn about where you are going - study up and have a plan. Know the routes to your destinations, be aware of landmarks, transport, police, medical aid and safe areas (Embassy or Consulate)
Talk to the locals - for in country advice on how to behave and move in public
Trust your gut – when something feels off it generally is
Speak with authority if a stranger approaches and never negotiate your own security in the name of politeness. Avoid soft responses like "maybe”, "sorry” and "I’m not sure”. Instead, be firm and say "No."
Don't give them an inch or let them gain more control. Turn your “No” into a complete sentence and take charge of your personal safety.
Written by Mark Direen, former Australian SAS Soldier, adventurer and personal safety consultant. Other excellent writings and thoughts from Mark can be found on his website at www.pointassist.com.au