Friday, March 14, 2008

A walk in the hills

Well, the Leadership on the Edge program started proper today. We met early, 7.30, and had a presentation from our team leaders. At 8 am, Robert Swan appeared on the screen live from Antarctica and spoke for about 10 minutes to introduce the program and to talk about what he has been doing down there in the south.

Following on from that, we embarked on our first challenge. It was a 4 hour hike to see a glacier. And it was a challenge! Firstly, we were dropped off a the start point with no map, and only the sketchiest of instructions. From there we had to walk about 2 1/2 kilometers to the bottom of the glacier. The first 3 quarters of the walk were fairly straight forward, but then followed a section that was really quite challenging. It was a really steep slope, up loose stones that were wet, and therefore very slippy. The group became very strung out as everyone has different levels of fitness. But, we got there, and it was totally worth it. The views were spectacular, and it was amazing to look up at the glacier. We stayed at the foot of the glacier for around half an hour or so taking photos and chatting, before we headed back down to the hotel.

Once we'd had lunch, we continued with the Leadership on the Edge program which had us talking about teams and how they function. We then had to make an assessment of how we thought we'd worked as a team. The discussion was really illuminating and shows that different people can have significant different experiences of the same event.

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