The Adventurer's Companion: A Practical Guide to Life Change

By Patrick Geever

Jump-Start YOUR journey to a better life today!

Deep down, you want to change, to experience, to create, to give, to make more of your talents, dreams, and relationships.
So why don’t you?

The Adventurer’s Companion will answer this question for you AND be your practical daily life guide for setting your true goals, taking action, and effecting personal change to fulfill YOUR dreams.

The Companion is lavishly illustrated - with OVER 400 PAGES packed full of unique insights, exercises, examples, and practical advice.

The book is your essential companion on the road to improving yourself and your life, UNIQUELY combining insight AND practical techniques:

- Understand yourself and what makes you tick.
- Find your true path and purpose in life.
- Improve your career and relationships.
- Become more creative and fulfilled.
- Remove your blocks to action - such as low self-confidence or fear of change.
- Keep your attention focused every day on what truly matters to YOU.

The book is distilled from years of practical experience by the Oxford-educated author as a Life Coach, Personal Effectiveness Coach, and Behavioural Therapist.

Sherlock Holmes had his Watson, Don Quixote had Sancho Panza, and now finally... the rest of us have the Adventurer’s Companion to help us achieve, grow, experience, and change!

Get the book now and let the Companion guide you every step of the way to a better you and a better life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Geever
• Release date: May 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476472805

Patrick Geever

1. Biography Patrick was born and raised in the UK, where he graduated from Oxford University. He is active as a Life Coach and Personal Effectiveness Coach, Therapist, Writer, and Independent Consultant – and has achieved advanced certification in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Patrick has worked and travelled all over the globe, including spells living in New Zealand and the deserts of Arabia. Patrick currently lives in The Netherlands, is married, and has two teenage daughters. He is clearly an all-round upstanding person. 2. Alternative Biography Patrick frequently engages in self-defeating and ineffective behaviour, and is often challenged to find a really good reason for getting out of bed. Until recently, he had no idea what made him tick and was drifting aimlessly – allergic to anything that might upset this comfortable state of affairs. Since Patrick began to pay more attention to himself and his life, things have definitely changed a little for the better, but there is still plenty of headroom for improvement, and quite possibly some room for head improvement. Yes, dear reader, Patrick is just like you... fallible, flawed, and flapping around in the dark – looking for clues and remedies, trying to make a little sense of it all. However, you may learn something useful from his experiences and insights that will help you on your own journey through life.

Book preview

The Adventurer’s Companion

A Practical Guide to Life Change

Patrick Geever

The Adventurer’s Companion: A Practical Guide to Life Change

Published by Patrick Geever at Smashwords

www.pgcoaching.nl

Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Geever

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Biography

The author was born and raised in the UK, where he graduated from Oxford University.

The author is active as a life coach, therapist, writer, and independent consultant.

He has completed advanced certification in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy, a process involving assessment and training from some of the leading authorities in the Cognitive-Behavioural field – including Windy Dryden (Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmith College, London), and Wouter Backx (Director of the Rational-Emotive Training Institute in the Netherlands).

The author has worked and travelled all over the globe, including spells living in New Zealand and the deserts of Arabia. The author currently lives in The Netherlands, and is happily married with two teenage daughters.

The author is clearly an all-round upstanding person.

Alternative Biography

The author frequently engages in self-defeating and ineffective behaviour, and is often challenged to find a really good reason for getting out of bed.

Until recently, the author had no idea what made him tick and was drifting aimlessly - allergic to anything that might upset this comfortable state of affairs.

Since the author began to pay more attention to himself and his life, things have definitely changed a little for the better, but there is still plenty of headroom for improvement, and quite possibly some room for head improvement.

Yes, dear reader, the author is just like you… fallible, flawed, and flapping around in the dark - looking for clues and remedies, trying to make a little sense of it all.

Under no circumstances should we put this author on a pedestal. He is neither a better person, nor a more successful person than you.

However, you may learn something useful from his experiences and insights that will help you on your own journey through life.

Dedications

To Lilian – for what came before.

To Robin and Josephine – for the future.

Many thanks to Harold Bierens for the great artwork.

Contents

Foreword

Structure of the Book

Part 1 – Introduction

What is the Companion?

What the Companion is not

Wherefore art thou Companion?

How the Companion will help you

Part 2 – Key Concepts for Life Adventurers

Anatomy of adventure

Lifeposts

Lifeline and life logo

Life code

Framing

Heavy attention

Adventure Time

The Autonomy Vacuum

Adventurer imperfect – the quest for vitality

The perfect Adventurer

Comfort addiction

The Comfort Zone

Comfort and adventure

Soft wiring

Gaining control – the ABC of behaviour

Life in the adventure zone

Part 3 – Introducing the Adventure Game – Saddle-Up!

Creating your Adventure Game

Adventure territories

Lifeposts and lifeline

Life code

Treasure framing – the SMART way

Populating your territories

Territorial Balance and Flows

Vitality

Personal Weight Belt

Bears

Summary of getting started

Part 4 – Playing the Adventure Game: Life on the Trail

Sunrise Check

Vitality index

Adventure Time

Pow-wow

Part 5 – The Adventurer’s Toolkit – Increasing Vitality

Introduction

Adventurecraft

Finding the ‘X’

Eyes on the ‘X’

Navigating to the ‘X’

Emotional rescue

Emotional Hygiene

Wake-Up Call

Introducing the ‘effective detective’

Investigating Outcomes

Finding and disputing our beliefs

Distorted thinking – an overview

Bangs for your buck – the focal point for change

Anxiety and Adventure

Awfulizing

Threats to comfort – inertia and flight

Threat to Identity

Beliefs fit for Adventurers!

Techniques for increased effectiveness – a summary

Habit and leverage

Limits to personal change

Emotional rescue as lifestyle

Life skills

Time Management

Effective communication

Assertiveness

Physical Health

Problem-solving

Beating procrastination

The billboard blur – Adventure reprise

Selected References and recommended reading

Foreword

Deep down, most of us want to change, to experience, to create, to give, to make more of our talents, dreams, and relationships. So why don’t we? The Adventurer’s Companion will answer this question for you and, at the same time, provide a practical life guide for navigation, action and personal change.

This book is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without the insights, tools, and techniques I collected and developed ‘on the road’, the book would still be a work in progress.

The person that commenced on the task of writing the book had to act, learn and change in order to complete the task – to overcome internal as well as external obstacles.

I expended a lot of effort to ensure that the themes, ideas and practical help you will need to reach your life goals are as clear, concise and as structured as possible. In particular, the Adventurer’s Companion provides an integrated framework to help you make sense of life navigation and change – and allows you to place your own particular issues and challenges into context so that you can resolve them more easily.

The Adventurer’s Companion necessarily focuses on certain areas of life’s adventure to highlight what is important for getting ‘on the road’ towards your goals and staying there. It is heavily illustrated for the same reason; as a form of shorthand to ensure that the concepts are clear.

So what is really important for ‘doing life’? Read on.

Structure of the Book

The book is logically sequenced, moving from key concepts we need to understand through to the practicalities of creating and managing our own life ‘Adventure Game’. Creating and playing the game is the process whereby we determine our life’s direction and effectively navigate towards our goals.

Navigation represents our ‘Adventurecraft’ skills in action; the game provides a visual framework for the basic skills and techniques we need to get on the road and keep going.

Finally, when the wheels start to fall off on the journey, the ‘Toolkit’ section of the book will help us understand and conquer the inevitable challenges we will face as we pursue our goals. Many of these challenges represent internal emotional issues rather than external obstacles. Why do we avoid change even when it is in our best interest? Why are we so addicted to comfort and security? How can we change the way we feel and act to become more effective in getting what we want?

– Part one – Introduction

Here we provide an introduction to the nature of ‘life adventure’, and an overview of the journey made by the author which led to the creation of this book.

– Part two – Key concepts for Adventurers

Key concepts and insights to help Life Adventurers understand themselves better and to become more effective on their journey. These key concepts form the bedrock for the Adventure Game and for increasing our vitality for adventure covered later in the book

– Part three – Introducing the Adventure Game

Introduces the ‘Adventure Game’ – the set of tools and techniques we will use to pursue our life adventures. Here, we will set up our game, including the creation of our Adventure Map which will act as a high-level guide on the road, and the definition of the goals (treasure) we seek.

– Part four – Playing the Adventure Game

Now that we have set up our game, we learn how to use it in practice, on a daily and monthly basis. Playing the game keeps us focused on the goals we seek and the challenges we may need to overcome along the way. We may be challenged to change ourselves as well as deal with external obstacles on the road.

– Part five –The Adventurer’s Toolkit – increasing vitality

We are fallible, imperfect Adventurers. The Toolkit will help us with challenges we face at all levels – how to locate and navigate to our goals, how to identify and deal with resistance and other problems of our own making, and important life skills that will make our journey easier.

The Toolkit comprises the largest part of the book and this is logical. Our most common problem as Adventurers is that even when we have a clear view of our goals, we still fail to achieve many of them. The Toolkit will help us to understand ourselves, to get on the road, and to persevere to reach our chosen treasure.

How to use this book

The aspiring Adventurer will get optimum benefit by reading the book in sequence from beginning to end. However, if you are really impatient to begin your life adventure, then you can dive immediately into parts three and four to create an Adventure Map of your own goals and start to navigate towards them. You can always refer back later to key concepts in part two to help you understand more of the bedrock thinking underlying personal growth and change.

The Toolkit in part five is designed as a permanent reference to help you identify and overcome your own personal blocks to change, which could be either due to ineffective thinking or lack of specific life skills. You will need to read and understand the Toolkit as you commence on your own life adventure.

Remember: you will not get far on your adventure without good navigation skills – or without becoming an ‘effective detective’ and learning to sleuth yourself!

Part 1 – Introduction

What is the Companion?

This book is about personal life adventure. In the Companion we define life adventure as follows:

‘The conscious definition and pursuit of goals which are truly important to us, including taking positive steps to address the obstacles on our path’.

Unfortunately, none of us are perfect and we can all use some help. Every true Adventurer can use a metaphorical travelling companion. Don Quixote had his Sancho Panza and, when the ‘game was afoot’, Sherlock Holmes had his Dr Watson.

So what is the Adventurer’s Companion? For most of us, personal life adventure is analogous to being given a chess set and just told to get on with it. We don’t get advice or the tools we need to play. What is the goal of the game? What do the pieces mean, why do they behave the way they do, and how do we move them around the board? Later, as the simple questions are answered, we need to get a deeper understanding of strategy and the impact of our choices as we gain experience, learn and grow.

Life, like chess, can be deceptively simple – but also as complex and enriching an experience as we choose to make it. The Companion was born directly out of my own experiences.

The aim of the Companion is simple: to help you to clarify the things in life that matter most to you and help you spend more time doing, experiencing and achieving.

The Companion will help you get on the road quickly and help you stay there, wherever your adventures take you. The Companion will be there with you every day to help provide the framework within which you can decide your direction and move. And movement is very important in the Companion – participation is the key. As Woody Allen once observed, 80% of success is showing up.

At first glance this looks like a poor recipe for an adventurous life, but think about it. Turning up and continuing to turn up implies that you have overcome your inertia to start on your chosen adventures, you are persevering and you have learnt to live with your fears and anxieties related to acting, changing and new experiences… now that sounds pretty adventurous!

The aim of the Companion is to bring clarity to a complex subject; action, life change and our search for meaning. The Companion will provide you with the concepts, vocabulary and tools to help you act and change as required to attain your goals.

What the Companion is not

The adventure of life is very personal; the Companion is not prescriptive or judgemental. It will not try to make you, for example, a ‘better’ person or a more ‘successful’ person. In fact, the Companion will help you to stop attaching such unhelpful labels to your whole ‘self’, or to others. The Companion will help you to determine which kinds of goals are likely to bring you the most enjoyment and fulfilment, and help you move towards them in a practical and effective way.

Wherefore art thou Companion?

Beginnings

I was feeling a little seedy, listless, becalmed. I couldn’t put my finger on it – a certain expectancy – like when I upped sticks and headed out to Arabia for three years. When the call came out of the blue to head for the desert I was ready, even though I didn’t know it. I was in the doldrums. I had been waiting for that call.

And five years later, in the Netherlands, I was ready again – only this time the call was internal – a ‘wake-up’ call. The voice whispering softly … you’re drifting…flotsam.

In the summer of 2004 I went on holiday with family and friends to Quiberon on the French West coast. The weather was fantastic, and like you do when you step out of the mainstream of life for a couple of weeks, you get to thinking about life and what you really want to do – what really matters…

I was slowly realising there was a gap in my life. Nothing was going wrong specifically, but I was missing something. A lot of the things I wanted to do in life that I considered important just weren’t getting done; like writing a book and changing career. So I made a big resolution (been there too?) that things were going to change when I got back. And they did… for about three days – then I got carried away in the current of everyday life again and that was the end of that.

So, the following year, in the summer of 2005 I went on holiday with family and friends to Quiberon on the French West coast. The weather was fantastic, and like you do when you step out of the mainstream of life for a couple of weeks, you get to thinking about life and what you really want to do (anyone for déjà vu?). Only this time sitting on the beach, I realised that just making a resolution was not going to get the job done. I realised I needed help to change (and to get going on all the things I wanted to do), and I was going to have to manufacture that help myself because nothing else had worked.

When I was younger I dreamt of being an explorer in faraway places, I was constantly poring over maps of far-flung mysterious places such as Indonesia and Australia. I also dreamt of being a detective and solving complex mysteries.

So I decided to employ all of these talents to help myself.

I would explore and find a way of clearly defining all the great things I wanted to do. I would look for clues in books and in discussions with others. I would employ detective skills on myself to find out what was preventing me from achieving my goals, and devise ways of getting past the problems in my path.

So, on that holiday, I started to develop the basic concepts and practical techniques you will find in this book. And when I got home I continued on the journey using myself as the guinea pig – observing, learning, experimenting and growing – with the necessary setbacks and frustrations along the way.

The Companion is the result of that journey… a journey that continues, but with some of my goals achieved.

What drove me to write the book?

I love to write. I love to share ideas and connect, but most of all I wrote the Adventurer’s Companion to fill the gap – because the book did not exist – and I needed it.

But what did I need? I needed a practical guide covering ALL aspects of life adventure from navigation techniques to effective emotional management and important life skills, logically structured, combined with the necessary theoretical foundation and insight.

In particular, I needed a book that would really help me when things were going badly on the road…. Not a coffee-table book of life change with a few concepts and lists but no follow-up… but a book that would clearly cover all aspects involved in change and help me keep moving when the going gets tough.

The long hard stare…

When I donned my deerstalker hat and became my own Sherlock Holmes, I found a number of areas impeding my ability to change direction in life and be doing what I really wanted to do.

Here is a selection of some of the main areas I found when I finally managed to understand myself a little and be honest with myself. I think these apply to most of us in some measure. There are others and we will review them later.

Up creek – no paddle

When I started looking at myself I realised I had a problem with life travel. Firstly, I was lost. I had no way of visualizing the direction in which I wanted to travel in life, what was important to me and what I wanted to achieve. Secondly, I had no tools to help me on the journey, to help me navigate and keep going.

Particularly where our goals are leisure rather than work-related, we all make the mistake of thinking that we do not need to invest time and effort into getting what we want. Nothing could be less true. We need to invest as much time and effort into structuring our free time as our work time. This can be painful initially, as we often associate this kind of structure with work – but there is no way round it if we wish to make the most of the precious time available to us on our journey.

So, one of my first tasks was to develop the techniques to help me understand where I wanted to go, and to provide navigational support on the road.

Alien

I discovered that I was an alien to myself, unexplored territory. I had never taken a close look at my emotions and behaviour. I didn’t have the tools to understand myself. Eventually I began to see what made me tick and how I was often behaving in self-defeating ways, against my own best interests. Armed with this knowledge, I was able to start addressing these issues.

Emotional and behavioural support is a critical component of this book, because we are often unaware of how we act against our best interest, often subconsciously, and even when we become aware, we do not have the tools to change ourselves as required to reach our goals. The Companion will give you both the insight and the tools to achieve this.

Junky

Here is one of the main behavioural issues I stumbled across once I started paying attention. I’m just like you. No really – here’s a small example:

One day, sitting around the table, my friend Duff gave me a piece of advice.

Stop putting sugar in your tea, he said. You don’t need sugar, it’s just poison – and anyway the tea tastes better without it. And I immediately just knew he was right.

So, on Bastille Day in France, 14 July 2005, I took his advice and quit. Big deal, I hear you say. Well, the thing is… Duff gave me that good piece of advice around 1980. So it had taken me 25 years to quit putting sugar in my tea, even though I knew it was a good idea.

So what am I? A comfort junky. Like I said… just like you. I need my comfort, as much as I can get. Mainline if possible – straight into the vein.

Comfort is a life game we all play. There are plenty of others, but maintaining our comfort is the most addictive game of them all and potentially the most detrimental to our life dreams. Look at the soaring obesity levels in relatively wealthy parts of world. We all know the solution is to eat less, eat more healthily, and take more exercise… but the obesity levels keep on climbing with the associated impact on physical and emotional well-being.

The Companion will help you understand and counteract comfort addiction to help you move forward on your journey.

Outcomes

So what did I learn on the road? I learnt how to pay attention, to plan and navigate, to understand myself better, to address the (often invisible) blocks to action and change, to learn from my mistakes, but above all how to get on the road and keep moving.

Getting on the road led me to hitherto unexplored and fulfilling new areas of my life such as training to become a cognitive-behavioural therapist, starting up as a life coach, and writing – rather than just thinking about writing. It helped me to be more accepting of myself, to become more relaxed and generally less stressed, to understand and communicate better with others, but above all it helped me to reduce my internal resistance to action and change in pursuit of my personal life adventure.

One of the main conceptual threads running through the Companion is encapsulated in the following quote by Viktor Emil Frankl, a holocaust survivor whose views and theories on psychology were shaped by his experiences:

"Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

We have much more control over ourselves and our destiny than we think. Bear this quote in mind as you read the Adventurer’s Companion – it is a recurring theme at many levels.

How the Companion will help you

Many of us will have already tried a variety of books, ideas and techniques to change our lives or achieve certain goals. We keep on searching for that perfect book containing ‘the secret’… and often we do find some gem of wisdom and useful techniques, but usually after a short burst of enthusiasm we stop and settle back into our old comfortable ways again.

Below are the most important ingredients I have distilled from my own experiences on the road to action, change and meaning – and which I have incorporated into the Companion. These ingredients and associated insights will assist you to really achieve your goals using the Companion as your guide:

• The techniques in the Companion help us formulate our desires and dreams in a simple but effective visual format – a map of our adventures. The map also clearly shows the issues and challenges we face on the journey, together with the positive steps we take to overcome them;

• The approach is holistic, addressing all of the skills required by the Adventurer (for example, not only how to set our goals and navigate, but also how to address common behavioural issues such as procrastination when trying to achieve our goals);

• Clear conceptual placeholders for all the skills we need, and for the issues we may face on our journey;

• The techniques are practical – they will help you to get started quickly and help you to keep going. (And perseverance is a large component of success);

• Mechanisms for keeping what is really important to us high in our consciousness – ensuring we maintain attention and focus on our chosen direction and goals and avoid drifting;

• The time horizons for action are deliberately short; this enables us to get a continuous sense of achievement – important for motivation of Adventurers;

• The focus is on the journey as much as the destination; again this helps our motivation and is realistic. As we shall see, much of the enjoyment and fulfilment we find is in doing and being, as well as in achieving;

• Incorporates learning from our mistakes on the journey;

• Addresses resistance to action and change within ourselves as a key enabler for life adventure.

Part 2 – Key Concepts for Life Adventurers

There are a number of key concepts which underpin the rest of the Companion both in playing the Adventure Game to navigate successfully to our goals and also in dealing with the internal and external obstacles we meet on our path.

Anatomy of adventure

We defined adventure as ‘The conscious definition and pursuit of goals which are truly important to us, including positive steps to address the obstacles on our path’.

There are a number of ways we can view our life adventure:

Adventure as a game

In parts three and four of the Adventurer’s Companion we will set up and play the Adventure Game – a set of insights, ideas and practical techniques to help you get more out of life.

Viewing adventure as a game helps us to tap into our imagination, to see the world anew again with the eyes of a child, and to question the habits and beliefs that have brought us to our current circumstances. For a child, everything is open to question, and the possibilities of life are limitless – bounded only by the limits of imagination. This is the attitude of the Adventurer.

Seeing life as a game also prevents us from taking it too seriously. There is a paradox here – as Adventurers we will ‘play the game for all it’s worth’ and then gently laugh at ourselves for doing so. We cannot ‘win’ the game of life – but we can certainly create the right conditions to extract pleasure, fulfilment and meaning from the experience of playing!

Adventure as a treasure hunt

In the Adventurer’s Companion, we refer to our goals as ‘treasure’. Some of this treasure will involve long-term goals. For example, write a novel, learn a language, build a business, volunteer to help others, or get physically fit.

Other treasure will be short-term; taking part in sporting activity, visiting a new country, or spending time with our children, for example.

Adventure as growth and change

Adventure is also a personal journey through life of growth and change. As Adventurers, we may decide to change and grow as a goal, or may simply be changed by our experiences on the adventure trail, by what we learn and experience.

Change is hard for us to do. We frequently have a lot of built-in resistance, inertia and unhelpful behaviour to overcome in order to achieve this. The Companion will help you understand and overcome this resistance.

Some of our treasure will be aimed at overcoming emotional and behavioural blocks to our adventure, such as procrastination or personal growth purely to improve our general enjoyment of life – such as addressing feelings of low self-worth or improving our communication skills.

At a higher level we may aim to become more complex, fulfilled individuals – living lives with clear purpose and meaning, living according to clear principles, and striving towards long-term goals. The paradox of ‘be’ and ‘become’ requires an element of planning and direction. The Companion will help you determine and easily visualize the direction in which you want to travel.

Adventure as a challenge

As Adventurers, we face challenges in overcoming the inertia of comfort to get started and continue on our journey. Whilst on our journey, we will encounter adversity in many forms; some challenges will be internal, others will be external.

We must be strong enough to overcome these obstacles and persevere to reach our treasure. Insight and knowledge is also a form of strength. Understanding yourself and in particular what drives your anxiety will empower you to change yourself where necessary. The Companion has a Toolkit to help you with all the obstacles you are likely to face on the journey.

Lifeposts

Lifepost is a hybrid word constructed from the words ‘signpost’ and ‘life value’.

Lifeposts represent the underlying preference values that guide and drive us through life. They form the often unseen markers and beacons illuminating the treasure we choose. They represent treasure that we want to possess, or that we hold dear.

Lifeposts represent what we want to have rather than how we choose to live.

Lifeposts include values such as family, creativity and independence.

Understanding our values is therefore important for a number of reasons. Firstly, our values can help us pick meaningful treasure for ourselves to strive for. Secondly, we can see if our current values and direction conflict. If this is the case, then we can do something about it. Values also impact the way in which we travel – as well as the destination. For example, personal integrity as a value could prevent us from pursuing a particular treasure.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, values help us make choices.

Look at this picture.

As life ‘artists’, we paint in the structure and detailed direction of our lives, with our lifeposts helping us to make clear, conscious choices consistent with the values that are important to us.

Defining our lifeposts ensures that we are able to steer rather than drift at each crossroads – the point where we make decisions about the treasure we will pursue and our reasons for doing so. Our lifeposts ensure we do not make haphazard or unclear choices that we cannot explain to ourselves or anyone else. And remember… not making a choice is also a choice… to drift.

These values help us make decisions about situations and actions. They act as shorthand, as signposts to help us clarify our priorities and direction as Adventurers.

We may turn down a promotion at work because of the negative impact on our family life, or downshift our career and endure financial hardship to fulfil our creative ambition as an artist. Such choices become much easier to make when we are clear about what we value most in life.

We need to make a critical distinction between life preference values within our control and those that are possible outcomes of actions we take. Life preference values within our control include family and creativity. These are things we can work on. Life preference values such as happiness, health and wealth are outcomes. Notice the difference.

We cannot simply ‘don the mantle’ of outcome values. These values happen as a result of living life in a certain way – and their achievement cannot be guaranteed.

For example, we cannot ‘decide’ to be happy today – we cannot turn it on and off at will like a tap. Happiness as a state originates and grows through feedback from action, attitude and experience. Outcome values are a possible by-product of our adventures, something to strive for indirectly – with no guarantee of success.

We can avoid a lot of frustration by understanding this concept and not demanding outcome values to materialize. The ‘name of the game’ – the name of the Adventure Game – is to create and cultivate the conditions within which happiness and fulfilment can occur. So if we wish to be wealthy and identify wealth as a lifepost then we must identify the steps we need to take in order to achieve our goal. Working on the steps towards wealth is within our control, the outcome is not. So we need to discover and apply our life preference values as lifeposts to help determine our treasure as we move, strive, experience, learn and grow.

Do we value creativity more than financial rewards or independence more than status? Will we sometimes put creative expression above the needs of our family?

Whenever we reach a crossroads or a crisis, our lifeposts help provide us with clarity on the best road to take. Sometimes we compromise our own personal interests for the sake of others, but again, our lifeposts will help us to make such choices.

Our lifeposts therefore represent navigation on our route – but what is the general direction we wish to take in life within which we will use our