A couple of months ago I was fortunate to spend a week hiking and 
white water rafting in the beautiful Mitchell River National Park, in Gippsland, Victoria. The week was part of my daughter’s Exeat Week for Year 9, where the challenge is for the students to explore and embrace living out of their comfort zones. Spending a week with 13 students aged between 13 & 15, camping in tents in the middle of nowhere, having to carry our food and water, and with no access to toilets and showers, was certainly going to test the boundaries of our comfort zones!
The excitement started on Day 2 when all of us, along with large backpacks and other supplies, had to fit into 2 medium sized rafts for the 3 hour white water adventure downstream. This was the first glimpse I had of the undertones of resilience being developed by the individuals within the group, and the first signs of emerging leaders bubbling to the surface. The logistics of the adventure meant that the students had to work together to ensure that all equipment was loaded onto the rafts in the correct sequence, as well as ensuring that the correct mix of people were positioned at different points of the raft to ensure even weight distribution. The 3 hour downstream adventure resulted in a number of students breaking through their existing ‘terror barriers’, especially when they fell out of the raft amongst the rapids, and realising they were capable of achieving an outcome they originally felt they couldn’t. The looks on the students faces at the end of the rafting was priceless – I could almost see the levels of confidence of the students rise right in front of me.