The never ending learning curve…
The last three to four weeks have been a huge learning curve for me on a number of fronts, which makes life all very exciting at the moment with a whole world of new possibilities unravelling before me. Lets try and explore some of those fronts in no particular order…
My new partner (Laura) has agreed to come to the Alps with me and my group of friends, as I have already mentioned in a previous blog post here: New Journey. However having not paddled for a few years she is on her own learning trajectory, which you can read about on Laura’s blog. This learning journey is being ably guided by me… or maybe not. A couple of sessions of coaching have certainly made me question my own methods, particularly assessment of others capabilities. I’ve become very aware of pushing the training along to suit my own pace rather than accurately finding a suitable pace for the learner. This is somewhat of a wake-up call, and a fairly timely one as it happens.
As Chairman for the local canoe and kayak club we are just entering our new summer season which is traditionally the time when new members join the club and it’s all about starting with the basics. With a new committee following our AGM (including Laura) we are looking to set our priorities and training plans for the year ahead, so it’s certainly a useful reminder for me to address this from a new learners perspective rather than my experienced viewpoint looking backwards to my dim and distant past…
With me pushing Laura in her kayaking comes the quid-pro-quo (Clarice?) and she has been teaching me to ride horses. This started with a couple of hacks out into the local woods from the riding stables, now hacking basically consists of me following her and trying in someway to emulate what I’m seeing, this is pretty easy as A, the horse wants to follow the one in front anyway, and B, Laura has her back to me for most of the time and cant see how bad I really am! This lead me into somewhat of a false sense of security and feeling pretty pleased with myself at how well I was doing and how easy this horse riding malarkey is…
…This week however saw us move away from the hacking and in to the training arena. Now, Laura can fully see just how terrible I am and without a convenient horse to follow I’m having to make all the decisions and keep my steed moving in the desired direction at the desired speed. This is far easier said than done I have found out, particularly with a somewhat lazy mount who is quite happy to simply stand or plod at his own pace. However through the session and the constantly being told not to lean forward I managed to hold a fairly controlled Trot for a circuit and a few lengths of Canter. Again this has been a very useful exercise in coming down to earth with a bump, no I didn’t fall off, but it has made me realise what it is like, to some degree, learning a new skill with very little experience to fall back on.
The third facet of my learning and development has been within the blogosphere… I have been doing quite a bit of reading and researching about travel and lifestyle blogs and monetisation of websites. There are certainly possibilities out there to make a self-sustaining income from the world wide web, but when you don’t have a degree in web design or a 12 year olds natural grasp of technological advancements, it is a steep learning curve and one that has been largely self-lead. As you will see from the rest of my site I have started looking in to affiliate links, amazon marketing, ebay promoter networks, etc. These are looking a little clunky whilst I’m learning the ropes, however the methodology behind them is sound and hopefully as my skills and design acumen improve the site will start to look a little slicker.
If you are not familiar with how affiliate marketing works, it is basically about linking and driving traffic towards a business, for which they in turn pay small commissions to their partners. So if you click on the links from my site, you will be directed to the main sites for the businesses eg. Amazon, Ebay, etc., you will deal directly with them and may purchase from them as usual in full confidence, however I will potentially receive a small referral fee for directing you there. It doesn’t cost you ‘the end user’ any more and poses no additional risk to you, but it does help the ebay fee, for instance, to be shared amongst us desperately poor and struggling affiliate marketeers, so please shop in confidence and help make my dreams of a low work/high reward lifestyle a reality.
Please check back in regularly, I will be making time (note – not ‘finding’ time) to update this more regularly and with a fun summer of activities rapidly approaching, hopefully the blogs will get more interesting as we go, I will also be continually developing the site to be a little more attractive and polished so look out for photo and video content coming to a screen near you.
Keep on learning – there’s a whole new world out there! – Keith