Family. Community. Work. The three areas of your life that matter most.

Mark Beaumont is best known for cycling around the world. Twice. 130 countries visited by pumping away on two pedals.

None of that matters, unless it makes a purposeful difference on the world around him.

Our family. Our community. Our work.

Those are the three things Mark believes matter most to all of us. For children, it’s maybe just the first two. Creating positive memories in these three areas, though, is what matters most. Because creating memories in those areas makes you who you are.

It also feels good. How do you create a sense of purpose in the world, arrows pointing out into the world? And how do you recognise the positive arrows that come flying back to you as a result of doing that?

When people see photographs of Mark’s adventures, flying across mountain tops, or on a 200-mile road cycle, their reaction to their own experience is “it’s nothing compared to what you do, Mark!”

But the scale of the task doesn’t really matter.

A twelve year old child might be experiencing the great outdoors for the first time in a residential centre, and will feel exactly the same thing.

It creates positive memories.

It’s building a quiet confidence.

If you define yourself by your success in the classroom, then you’re defining yourself in a way that’s very similar to everyone else around you. School is, more or less, quite a conforming space. You get picked out for your differences — the bad part. And you learn the same stuff, at the same time — fitting in is the good part.

There’s that feeling in the back of your head that what you can do might be replaceable by the next person to sit in your seat.

What matters when you’re growing up is how you hold yourself accountable, especially when you’re under pressure. How you value yourself, and how family, community and work colleagues end up trusting you, too, that makes you who you are.

That puts you in the driving seat. It gives you the quiet confidence to live life with one eye in the mirror. You can be proud of your work, while seeing yourself as others see you. And be proud of that, too.

People who’ve left their job often do it because their behaviour changed when they were under pressure. They didn’t like what they saw, and maybe didn’t like what other people thought they saw.

You don’t learn about what you’re like, in this way, in an academic setting.

You learn about it through experiences, real ones, ones you experience, not just ones you hear about.

Experiences as learning. Experiences are learning. Because the learner is then valued for who they are, not just what they know.

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Thanks to Outward Bound Trust for their hosting of Mark in today’s great webinar for Scottish educators.