Designed Fun for Greater Growth
Hone your C.R.A.F.T.
Five
Core
Lessons
Adventure better
Adventure More
To adventure well, focus on investigation, exploration, and discovery as your guiding principles. Investigation involves seeking knowledge, asking questions, and diving deep into unfamiliar territory with curiosity. Exploration is about venturing into new experiences, environments, or ideas, pushing past the comfort zone to uncover new perspectives. Discovery is the culmination of these efforts—finding fresh insights, solutions, or understanding that expand your worldview. This mindset is crucial for learning and growing because it encourages you to stay open-minded, embrace uncertainty, and remain adaptable. Through adventurous inquiry, you build resilience, foster creativity, and continuously evolve, unlocking new possibilities and opportunities along the way.
Flow
and
vital engagement
Flow is a state of effortless focus and total immersion, where individuals are fully engaged in the task at hand, losing track of time and distractions. In this optimal mental state, creativity, performance, and personal satisfaction soar. Flow maximizes a person’s potential by aligning their skills with the challenge before them, creating a perfect balance that encourages peak performance. It fosters intrinsic motivation, making the work feel meaningful and rewarding. By regularly experiencing Flow, individuals unlock a deeper level of productivity and fulfillment, allowing them to achieve more with greater ease and joy, while continuously evolving into their highest selves.
The Growth zone
The Growth Zone is a transformative space where individuals push past their comfort zones and tap into their full potential. It’s a mindset that thrives on embracing challenges, stepping into new opportunities, and continuously evolving. In this zone, personal and professional growth take center stage, as individuals unlock new skills, increase their resilience, and cultivate a deeper sense of self-awareness. By consistently pushing boundaries, the Growth Zone fosters confidence, adaptability, and an empowered sense of purpose, helping people become the best version of themselves.
From fear of failure
to
failing forward
Failing forward is the concept of embracing failure as a stepping stone to success rather than a setback. It’s about using mistakes and challenges as valuable learning experiences that propel you toward growth. Each failure is an opportunity to reflect, adapt, and improve, rather than an endpoint. By shifting your mindset to see setbacks as part of the journey, you develop resilience, problem-solving skills, and a deeper understanding of yourself and your goals. Failing forward is crucial because it encourages perseverance, innovation, and the confidence to keep trying, knowing that every failure brings you one step closer to success.
Encouraging for courage
Courage is not about being fearless but taking action despite fear. Encouraging someone to increase their courage while respecting their choices requires a balance of empathy, support, and gentle guidance. This lesson will teach you how to offer words of encouragement in a non-judgmental way, leaving the decision up to them.
We advocate for the merits of prudent risk taking as a key element to substantive adventure experiences.
Our AdventureCRAFT Curriculum is always intentionally crafted to the needs of each unique client. Key components of a program include: Embracing Adventure: focusing on creating explorers intent on self-discovery. This phase includes introductory activities, building trust in the "Forming Stage", and creating a container of safety. Exploration includes within oneself: Who am I? What do I hold important? How do I contribute to my own well being and the well being of my community? Emotional and Social Intelligence - Cooperating with others in respect, compassion, and kindness. Group Formation Stages: Forming, Storming, Norming... : Conflict Resolution, Achieving a goal Group Initiatives: Cooperation to achieve a goal, failing forward, problem solving, Task vs Process Interactions with risk: pros/cons, risk management techniques, Risk vs Reward. The safe use of equipment through safety demonstrations, instruction, and practice. Taking on challenges and offering support: The Challenge of Choice, Decision making skills, Self-limiting beliefs, Imposed vs Implied goals Building grit and character development, choosing endurance and resilience, fostering confidence.
AdventureCRAFT is an active and engaging experiential learning curriculum designed to cultivate character and challenge participants to self-reflect in powerful and meaningful ways. Investigation, exploration, and discovery are core concepts, as is responsible risk-taking, problem solving, effective cooperation, and finding meaning in failure. Adventure participants are invited to explore their growth zone in a variety of contexts, investigate their learning edge with curiosity, and develop a deeper sense of self-reflection and self-awareness.
Adventure provides unique and invaluable opportunities to learn what truly brings happiness, meaning, and satisfaction to one's life. There is no better way to foster growth than through facilitating responsible adventures in a variety of contexts. Whether it's in the classroom, a backpacking trip through Utah, or multiple week excursions in a foreign land, learning and growth must be prioritized and intentional. When we intentionally lean into risk while managing and minimizing undesirable outcomes, we increase the odds of a positive growth experience.
Join us in creating a new generation of intrepid explorers!
To better understand both the nature of healthy adventure and the ways it can benefit the world, Chris has spent countless hours researching the topic. The AdventureCRAFT curriculum is the sum of a great deal of human behavioral research, literature, and empirical knowledge combined with two decades of Chris's experience, observation, wisdom, and reflection.
Now, he hopes you will enjoy the same material as much as he has, and let it transform your adventures. Enjoy these fascinating books that have inspired and instructed Chris in so many powerful ways!
