De Avontuurlijk Leven-podcast: Why we need more adventure in our modern lives
Belinda Kirk is one of Britain's most influential adventurers, founder of Explorers Connect and author of the book ‘Adventure Revolution. The Life changing power of Choosing Challenge’. For Brigitte Ars, owner of the 'Avontuurlijk Leven-podcast, this book was an important inspiration for her own book ‘Waar is het avontuur?’.
We met a few times at the Adventure Mind conference, a conference on the amazing power of adventure on our mental health and wellbeing, organized by Belinda herself. Both of us strongly believe adventure brings us back our natural, human state of being. 'Adventure is such a great antidote against modern life, because modern life has become so unadventurous', Belinda says.
The power of adventure
She advocates more adventure in society, in all sorts of ways. 'What I’ve seen time to time again is that adventure has a transformational, positive effect on people. It helped me, it has changed my life, it’s been my therapy, but then I saw over my whole career, it has helped all kinds of people in all sorts of ways. That’s why I spend so much time on it, spread the word, and why I believe we should rebrand it.'
The power of being uncomfortable
Adventure to Belinda is about choosing challenge, choosing to push yourself out of your comfort zone with an element that has a certain uncertainty, and therefore an element of adversity. 'You need to feel uncomfortable. The uncomfortable is not what we are going for with adventure. That’s just an element that you need to put up with, it’s the grit in the oyster that makes the adventure so good.'
The danger of routines
Belinda talks about the importance of having adventures. 'Once you go on adventures, you'll learn that the difficulties you put up with are worth it, because there is something greater at the end of it. There is some greater feeling of accomplishment, or some goal.' Self-confidence building, relationship building, learning, and magic. 'By following the same routines and the same rules all the time, we do not get engaged. It can put us to sleep a bit.'
Belinda also talks about finding meaning through adventure, life changing stories and about the importance of resilience, of adventure in our modern life and the importance to integrate adventure as an antidote for modern life, in our cities, schools, health system, wherever we can in our society.
A truly inspiring story.
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