Better than a pizza
Three things lifetime wilderness guide and personal development coach Adam Evans has done to differentiate himself from a pizza. (Adam Evans part II)
Key takeaways:
Attitude. Take the business side of things as seriously as the adventure side
Pick a niche. You’ll do better than trying to please everyone
Work on your people AND your technical skills
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“What’s the difference between an adventure guide and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four.”
So the joke goes, but it doesn’t have to be this way. For many, being professional means growing your technical skills and getting more qualifications. But if you then take that approach and apply it to how you earn a living, what happens? In this article Adam Evans, an extremely accomplished and qualified caving and canoeing guide, reflects on how hard work, an enquiring mind and some luck have helped him pay the mortgage over the years.
Passion or profession?
First, let’s pick up on a distinction Adam makes. Between those with a deep passion for an activity and those who turn that into a profession. There are two mistakes he wanted to avoid. He admits that after building himself a reputation as a caving instructor he realised that his passion wasn’t really just about caving:
“..because then your passion becomes your business and you end up having to do so much of the activity that you lose your passion for it”
He also realised that you don’t do the caving or canoeing or climbing for yourself, you do it for the people you’re helping:
“you might believe you’re going to go and get paid to go climbing or caving or canoeing and have a great time and you’re not. You’re actually looking after people and making it interesting and educational for them”
It’s great that there are people who are passionate about their outdoor activities. It’s great that there are people who can earn some money while doing what they love. But the Business of Adventure is focussed on learning from those who’ve made a life out of being full-time professional guides and coaches, so we’ll focus on them.
Attitude
While we’re talking, Adam returns quite a few times to the theme of hard work and organisation.
“Apologies, I know it sounds arrogant, but I’m a very hard worker and I’m very organised and I’ve had to have this attitude otherwise I wouldn’t have got here.”
Maybe this sounds so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning. But in a lifetime of working with professionals who wear suits, not outdoor gear, this attitude predominates there as well. This level of taking things seriously seems to increase the chances of luck knocking on your door. More importantly, I think, it often seems to go hand in hand with having an enquiring mind. This is the attitude that helps you develop, find out what you are good at and become even better at it. In Adam’s case:
“I was lucky and I kind of worked it out eventually that my passion was actually people.”
Picking a niche
I think this is a hard one for many professionals: to pick a niche to specialise in. It’s pretty much in the nature of humans to be adaptable generalists. (I mean, we don’t run, climb, jump or fly very well. We don’t have sharp teeth or vicious claws. We have modest eyesight, duller hearing and a mostly ignorable sense of smell. We really don’t do niche!) But if you want to be better at feeding a family than a pizza, then a niche is what you need. In Adam’s case this was a very deliberate decision early on in his career:
“When I started out I deliberately and intentionally chose caving. I thought, well, if you throw a stone around here (the Peak District) you can hit 50 climbing instructors. So I chose caving and, I kid you not, that decision has paid my mortgage for 20 years”
For those of us who don’t like picking a niche, this story ends well. As it does for so many others known mainly for one thing. Being a specialist at one thing gives people reassurance that you’re really good so it’s no surprise they seek you out for other, related activities. So beyond coaching people in caving, Adam can be found leading people on climbing and canoeing trips, teaching on university courses and being sought out by TV companies to get their crews into difficult locations from the stunning Križna and ice caves of Slovenia to the Mayan sacred sacrificial caves of Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize.
People AND Technical skills
Back to Adam and his realisation that it was people as much as caving that motivated him.
My passion is seeing people develop, seeing people get more skilful, seeing people get more capable or doing things they never thought they could do.
Many of the people I worked with had apprehension, fear, a phobia or anxiety about something. I was working with people to do things that they were terrified of doing. I realised that the feeling of achievement for these people on my courses was absolutely incredible. Maybe I needed to become more adept at the interpersonal and soft skills so I could help people progress quicker and more easily.
That was when Adam added a new set of qualifications to his prodigious set of professional capabilities, training in hypnosis and NLP (neurolinguistic programming). It should be no surprise that one of the traits that he uses to spot a good coach or guide is their ability to communicate, to engage, to understand what will really help their clients.
In other words, to Adam, deliberately developing your people skills is as important to differentiating you from a pizza as becoming amongst the most technically qualified in your field.
Luck
Did we say three ways to differentiate yourself from a pizza? There’s a fourth Adam mentions. Luck. In his case a good friend persuaded him to get a website, back in the days when you needed someone hand-coding HTML to build a site. Adam’s friend:
“told me to take photos of people doing cave-y things and put some words on paper and then he built me a website. No one else was doing that and if you Googled ‘Adam Evans caving’ at the time I was top of the list. That gifted me five years of high-end work.”
Yes, luck does play its part. But I hope we’ve got across how Adam’s organised hard work attitude helped make this sort of luck. And would someone without an enquiring mind have said yes to this particular friend?!
So, there you have it. Three ways of differentiating yourself from a pizza:
attitude
picking a niche, and
working on your people AND your technical skills
Related links:
Adam Evans part I: Learning, learning, learning
Adam Evans part III: "Yuk, I don't want to do something like that!"