All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a Canadian podcast about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My Canoe Head. It's been a couple of weeks, a well-deserved vacation, a bit of a break from the chaotic life, and we are back.
Today, I want to talk about adventurism. I want to talk about challenging your positions and your view of the world and the state of this, and then wrap that all up in how preparedness sets the conditions to allow you to rock this kind of incredible life. Listen, thank you very much to all the people who gave wonderful comments on the first part of season four. I appreciate all your continued feedback and your suggestions for episodes, ideas, and things going forward.
We are reaching 34 countries now. We have added a couple of new countries in the Middle East. I am very stoked about that. Thank you very much for joining us on Inside My Canoe Head, where we continue to talk about the wonderful world of preparedness and how to logically and theoretically tackle this chaotic world that seems to be somewhat unraveling around us, when in reality, it's just going through a normal human cycle.
Well, first and foremost, I'm thinking the need for adventure is amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, I spent a week canoeing the Churchill River with Churchill River Canoe Outfitters, a wonderful gentleman by the name of Rick, who runs that organization out of Missingipi, Saskatchewan, way up north, about an hour and a bit north of Laurent, Saskatchewan. If you want to look it up on a map, Osprey Air, a great organization who flew the group that I was with out on a float plane, which was on my bucket list. Listen, I've been canoeing and backcountry camping for some four decades now, probably a little bit more than that.
And the one thing that I've always wanted to do and never had an opportunity to do was the quintessential Canadian backcountry trip, to strap a canoe to the side of a float plane and to traverse the wilds of Canada's north and land in a lake, get dropped off on an island in the middle of nowhere, and then paddle your way out. And not only, top of, did I check that off the bucket list, I also went on a group of nine amazing human beings, myself included, eight of which I had never met before. Unfortunately, one person had to drop out on day number one because of COVID. Welcome to the world, that happens.
So the nine of us in total, one person I knew, seven I had never met before, we took off and challenged the Churchill River, about 115 kilometers, I think, in grand total. And we did that over a period of seven days and six nights. Now, it may not seem like a lot of travel. Some days we were able to knock off 28 kilometers.
Some days we knocked off seven. The weather was wonderful. A whole bunch of adventurous trips that we'll talk about later. I'm going to put out a YouTube video, a series of YouTube videos to close off the canoe tramping, tripping series.
They're going to come out in the next couple of weeks. One's going to be about lessons learned. We're going to do one about kit and how it performed. And then we're going to do one about how I would redo it all over again, that type of thing.
And then we're going to put together an actual video footage and probably a 20-minute video on the actual trip with all the wonderful participants. And so setting that aside, the human need for adventure is incredibly important. We all live chaotic lives. We all work at something.
We hopefully work at something you're passionate about, something you're trying to contribute to your community to improve the greater human condition. Whatever you may be doing, you have an internal passion for something, whatever that adventure may be. And for me, as it's quite clear inside my canoe head, it is backcountry canoe tripping. And Canada is great.
I mean, we have 14,000 lakes in this country. We have the world's largest freshwater supply. I will never in my life be able to canoe all of the lakes, even in my own province of Ontario, let alone this incredible country. So the idea behind adventure is whatever your passion may be, you need to meet new people.
And the idea of doing an adventure is not just with the same person or on your own. Solo adventuring is great, and I've talked about that on previous episodes, but meeting new human beings, meeting new people who are markedly different from you and their passions and what they do in life. And you have an opportunity to spend some quality time with them. We as humans, we learn from each other.
I had the opportunity to meet a wonderful group of people. Like I said, Josh was the only person on this trip that I knew before. We had soldiers and soldiered in Kandahar together in 07, and we did our master's together between 2013 and 2015. But I had the opportunity to meet Joe, Brian, Jody, Trevor, Danielle, Grayson, and of course, my incredible canoeing partner, Bob.
We got to do that again, bud. That was just too much fun. But I meet these incredible people that I never met before. Now, I connected with some of them in a professional sense at some point along the way through LinkedIn and my studies, but I never met them in person.
And when you meet somebody in person in a public environment or in some type of conference environment, there's a structure to it. There's a niceties to it. There's a pleasantries to it. There's maybe a few exchange of ideas.
But trust me, when you meet somebody for the first time in an immersion experience where you are quite literally with them 24 hours a day for several days on tap, what happens is you just don't get to know their views on the world. You get to know the human being. You get to see their experiences, how they react with the world. And we all learn from each other.
And you need to go to new places. You have great new people, but you need to go to new places. Like I've been to a lot of backcountry places, but on my bucket list was always northern prairies. So this opportunity showed up.
I get on a plane from Ottawa. I fly to Edmonton, Alberta. We take a nine-hour road trip up to Missanippe. We jump on a float plane.
We fly less from Osprey Air, flies us 120 kilometers west into the Churchill River system, which is in essence just a large series of lakes or one big lake with a bazillion islands in it. And then we paddle our way back through a whole series of rapids and a whole bunch of adventure. But you have to go to new places. You have to experience new people in new places.
It's how we grow. And adventurism is very, very important for the human spirit. Now, that all seems just way too much. It's just, you know, I can't do this.
New places, it's very difficult to do. I would throw out to you that do what I do. I use canoeing as a common base, something that I'm used to, something that I'm very, very comfortable in doing. And so it's the activity itself.
I'm happy to canoe anywhere on the face of this earth because I'm quite confident in my skill level. But I go to a place with new people and experience new people, experience new places, but I do so using a common activity, one of which I'm very confident in. A lot of people do marathons, right? So there's a lot of travel, tourism, and marathons.
People run marathons. They're confident in their ability to do it. So they want to run them around the world. They meet new people.
They go to wonderful new places, but they're using marathon as a common base. You see the same thing in the sailing world. You see the same thing in the hiking world. People who like to do, you know, long distance trails of a week or two weeks will do that all around the world.
They're using a common base and a common activity that they're very confident in to give them the ability to be certain that they'll be okay and they get the opportunity to experience new people in new places. So the human need for adventure is there. And the last three weeks have taught me that, that that's something we need to feed on a regular basis. The second opportunity you get is to challenge your positions.
And what I mean by this is we all have some preconceived notions now, whether it's in politics, whether it's in social justice, or whether it's in any form of your professional ideas. Like for example, those of you who've listened to this podcast know that I am in the very final stages of finishing my PhD on emergency preparedness communications at the municipal level. Okay, so I consider myself an expert in that very, very small niche, but I am not an individual who knows everything. I am not the be all to end all in this space.
And it's very, very important to expose yourself to people, other experts in your field. So other people that spend time in your field. Now, previous episodes, I've talked about this. It's basically three groups of people.
You have your practitioners or professionals, however you want to call them, the people who execute the function. So for me, those are people who execute in the field of emergency management. They do some function. They're involved in any number of professions that make up the field of emergency management.
It's very important to have those people around. The second is other experts, other researchers. So people who actively like me spend their work time researching some aspect of the discipline, right? We're in there.
We're reading with people. We're asking questions. We're conducting research. We're trying to come up with new theories as to answer questions that exist.
Some are existential. Some are very small. Some are very important. And some are just quite interesting.
And sometimes it's a combination of all of those. And the last three, we'll call them as your experts. And your experts are people who don't actually do research, don't actually work in the emergency management profession. But what they do is they have a very, very specific knowledge level in a very confined space.
And you need to talk to those people as well. So you have to study and discuss with the practitioners and get challenged on some of your pre-positions, your conceptions, your ideas. Now, a number of people on this canoe trip that I was on were in the emergency management field, in the emergency management education field, and some people were in the search and rescue field. And so you had a myriad of individuals who had a different set of life experience.
All were well-educated in what they did, but they looked at it through their lens. And when you take a step back and listen to people, you know, it's that old saying that the nature of the good Lord gave us two ears and one mouth. And if you can hold back, which I have trouble doing, if you know me, hold back and listen to what other people are saying about an area to which you have a great deal of interest. It's really, really interesting to where you get challenged on some of your ideas.
And I'll give you a great point. One of the people out there was Grayson. And now Grayson, I'll leave last names off of this, runs a podcast. Um, and he's also works in the emergency management field within the healthcare industry.
And I had made a statement about a business idea that I was raising for my company preparedness labs incorporated saying there is a comparison between, or we should be comparing the amount of money that a company spends on payroll or sorry, the amount they spend on it protection and business continuity versus how much individual emergency preparedness they spend. And maybe that if they spend more money on individual emergency preparedness with their employees, they're more likely to show up. And he was very quickly to challenge me right up front and bluntly, where's my evidence? What do I have to back up an assertion that training people in emergency preparedness will make them more likely to go, um, to go to stay at their job.
And the technical term, the theoretical term for it is role abandonment. People abandon their roles. Now I don't like that term, but whatever, this is what theorists have come up with. And I haven't studied that specific area enough to challenge role abandonment.
It's when people basically get up from the desk when a police officer has an emergency at home and he calls dispatch and says, you know, he's taken an hour off to go check on his family. That's called role abandonment. Or when his shift is coming up next, uh, he doesn't report for duty because his family is not safe. Uh, my theory is, is that when people are more prepared and better able and families are better able to deal with the disruption of life that, um, they're, they're going to, they're going to abandon the roles less.
But the only evidence exists in the emergency of first responders from Katrina all the way back to Hurricane Andrew and various other circumstances where there is evidence, but there isn't evidence in the greater public. And I love the idea that I was challenged on that because I had to sit back afterwards and think, you know what? He's right. I'm taking data that exists in first traditional first responders, fire police, EMS.
I'm extrapolating it onto the general working public as a theory, but I don't have any empirical evidence to make the claim that I'm making, which sometimes we do as researchers. We overextend the data to a place that we, you know, it's called generalization in research terms is that you're able to take conclusions from one group of people and superimpose them on another. And that is likely going to be the outcome. And I didn't have that.
And I love that idea of being challenged, but you need to be challenged in your positions in life. And it's not because you're wrong and it's not because other people may themselves be wrong. It's because lived experience is different across the human condition. And we need to understand how other people experience life, how they see views.
And it's how we grow. It's like, how do I know my preconceptions or my hypothesis for my dissertation about the level of relationship between municipal emergency managers and the communities they serve was a transactional nature. That was my hypothesis. How did I know that was true?
Well, it was based upon my, you know, my personal opinions, but largely based on evidence that had been gathered before. So I was testing this hypothesis on a new population in the province of Ontario. And I had a conclusion because of the people I talked to. Now, if I had just made a theoretical statement, like I did to Grayson, I didn't have any evidence to back it up.
Well, my claim doesn't go very far in my research. I made a claim. I did the research. I interviewed all the parties involved, and now I can make a logical claim as to what the nature of that relationship is based.
And I have the evidence to back up. So you need to keep challenging your position. So we ask ourselves with this adventure, with the need for human adventure, the need to challenge our position in humans, especially in today's chaotic world environments. What has this got to do with preparedness?
Well, we know that preparedness is first and foremost, an attitude, right? Preparedness is free. It is an attitude that you adopt to where you ask yourself. The most important question is who is responsible for your outcomes?
And if the answer is yourself, welcome to where you can find the rest of the answers. If you believe the government is responsible for bailing your butt out when the shizzy hits the fizzy, then I wish you the best of luck. And, you know, bad things are going to happen to you, but whatever. You're going to pay on this wonderful magical thing called the government to swoop in and rescue you.
But what does preparedness do? It allows this space to exist. It allows the space for me to get on a plane and travel to the other side of the country knowing full well that my family is prepared. Now, I'm going to tell you the honest truth.
That's what I thought the case was, but it didn't actually turn out to be that way. See, the hilarious thing in the past with me is every time I go on a long distance canoe trip, something significant happens at home. The last major trip that I took prior to this month's trip was we had a flood in the basement while I was gone, $20,000 damage. I was at a cell phone range and my wife had to deal with all of that.
Let me tell you, I heard about it when I got back and rightfully so. This time was no different. A tornado and a massive storm went through Southern Ontario and Ottawa and my family lost power for about four days and they were here to deal with it on their own while their preparedness expert was out paddling in Northern Saskatchewan. Now, funny enough, I had a short conversation with my youngest child who still lives at home about how to shut off the power, or sorry, how to shut off the water, where the Jackery emergency power supply is, and then just get out of the house if it's on fire.
I could, you know, insurance will buy everything else. What I realized was is a large part of the family preparedness is me and I had not done a sufficient effort in educating and training everybody within the family to take over my position. And this is a key lesson that come out of this experience for my family and I is that I had this whole system set up inside the house to where we would be able to execute pretty much all of our normal tasks simply by utilizing the tools and the skills that were within the house. However, I failed to tell everybody about all of that.
I failed to show everybody everything in my plan. So when I was on the other side of the country, I had nothing but a little text machine to try to give advice. So if you have a wonderful preparedness plan at home, which you should, make sure that your family knows how to execute that without you there. Now, my wife and son did a fabulous job.
job. I mean, they just, they made it through a couple of days and said, screw it and went to a hotel on the other side of town. I don't blame them at all. Everything came out the other line.
It wasn't, you know, significantly serious for everybody. But the point being is, is that when you wrap yourself in a blanket of preparedness, it gives you the confidence and the ability to challenge yourself and do things outside of the norm. Now, whether it's take on another line of business and whether it's take on a new educational task or whether it's start a YouTube channel or whether it's any of these other things that as David Goggins says, life begins at the end of your comfort zone. How do you feel comfortable or at least confident in taking that leap of faith and trying something new and a bit of adventurism and meeting a bunch of new people and challenging your positions and all these things that make us grow as human being.
That's all based in a sense of preparedness and that you have that regular normal life of yours is in a safe fallback position. So should the shizzy hit the fizzy or should this not work out as you had thought it might, you are perfectly fine to return to normal household operations and carry on because you've built this blanket of preparedness. And that's what we do here at Inside Mike and New Head through all of our social channels is try to remind people that preparedness is a blanket that you wrap yourself in, that it facilitates you executing an incredible life. It is not a barrier.
It is not a way down. It is not something you think about 24 seven. It actually is a tool that you use to allow you to be confident in your ability to navigate the world. And just it's based in the stoic principles of events will happen, right?
We have the dichotomy of choice as the stoic philosophers will say. Everything is what it is. Events happen. They are not good.
They are not bad. It is you as an individual who assigns goodness or badness to an event. Most of the vast majority of events that happen in the world are beyond your control. They are absolutely outside your influence.
So how you decide to react to those is completely up to you. There are things within your control. That is where your time and effort should be spent. And there are things outside your control.
There are events that happen that you decide are very sad events and they'll cause you a bit of grief and you'll go through a period of grief. But that's your choice. That's coming out. Then you come out the other side and you carry on with life.
The whole point is that preparedness does this for you. So as we relaunch here, season four, this is episode 12. We're going to start talking more and more about life, adventurism, and we're going to start putting more of the world around us into Inside My Canoehead. We're going to continue to talk about preparedness, of course, but we're going to reach out and start investigating some pretty cool avenues.
I've got a couple of wonderful people lined up as guests in the coming month or two. We're going to get back to some live guests. I know that's done very well in the past and people very much like that. But if you take anything away from today's episode of Inside My Canoehead, it's that there's an incredible world out there full of wonderful new people you know nothing about to have great adventures in places you've never been.
Even right now, in the middle of the socioeconomic and political warfare-driven chaos that this world exists, the opportunity is there for you to still grow as an incredible human being to get out there to meet wonderful people. And while there'll be much more on my YouTube channel, I, again, want to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who were on that expedition with me. I am a better person for having met each and every one of you. I have grown as a person.
I have been challenged as a theorist. And all this, you know, it's great. It just makes my life better. And for that, I thank each and every one of you.
So thanks again for joining us this week on Inside My Canoehead. We're relaunching all of our daily preparedness tips. Sometime this week, we're going to kick off the TikTok and YouTube reels. This week's YouTube channel will be back up with another video probably on Thursday night or Friday.
We are starting the big push next week is where we're going to go full bore and many hours a day of work are going to be put in. I have to take a bit of a break every once in a while as I continue to write the final iterations of my PhD dissertation. So thank you very much for joining us. Stay safe.
Again, all those ideas that you're sending me about things that you would love to see in a podcast, I love it. I'll put a YouTube video. Any ideas you have. And remember, drop over at InsideMyCanoehead.ca.
It's where a link to all the socials might buy me a coffee. And if you want to hire me, I'm there. So have a great week. Take care of yourselves.
And we'll talk to you later this week.