“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

― Mary Oliver

Welcome to the Katuka Leadership & Coaching Programme! Through this workbook we are going to give you the opportunity to change your life by identifying what makes life worth living for you.

This is no ordinary coaching programme, focusing on only one area of your life, like flatter abs or the latest diet. Rather, this programme can affect all areas of your life and what matters most. The big question that confronts us all was expressed in the words of poet Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The purpose of this programme is to help you answer this question for yourself in the best way possible!

Our ancestors were able to survive because they paid enough attention to physical threats like spiders, snakes, and predators. However, we have inherited their tendency to focus on negative things that no longer threaten us and we continue to have such strong physical reactions to the daily hassles of life that it harms our mental and physical health. This bias toward the negative has kept us from seeing and fully appreciating some of the best things in our lives – things that bring us joy, meaning, and fulfillment and that can actually help us better cope with stress!

The purpose of this programme is to enable you to rediscover and build on these things so that you can jump start your life in moving toward the happiness and success that you seek.

In fact, we can think of how this programme can help you in the context of a “hero’s journey” that involves facing our fears and learning from even some of the worst that happens as we seek to move towards a better life. The author and teacher Joseph Campbell studied stories around the world, across many centuries, and found the same stages in many of them, that these stages often reflect what happens in our lives, and that they can be used to inspire and guide us on our own journey.

Basically, there is a call to adventure into an unfamiliar place or unknown circumstances. The early part of the journey involves undergoing a series of smaller trials and tests while meeting people who can guide and mentor us, and learning the skills we need in order to face bigger challenges. Eventually, there comes a big test that involves confronting something particularly challenging or scary. Campbell says that “The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure you seek.” If the hero succeeds in learning, growing, and facing the greatest challenge, then they emerge transformed with rewards they could not have imagined and gifts that become just the kind of things that the rest of the world needs.

How is this kind of hero’s journey related to our programme? This challenge is a call to the adventure toward whatever you might want most and be best for you. In our favourite stories there is often a mentor or guide like Obi-Wan and Yoda in Star Wars or Dumbledore in Harry Potter and there is often a power that the hero needs to master, like the Force in Star Wars or magic in Harry Potter.

Katuka can help you in the same way by serving as a guide to show you the way and as a “force” that enables you to put what you learn into practice until you can fully embody it in the life you want. This is a call to the adventure of becoming your best and making the most of your live – despite whatever stress, traumas, or bad things that you may experience along the way.

For each of part of this programme, you will have a lesson, videos to illustrate it, activities and exercises to make it come alive, and the opportunity to reflect on and write about what you are learning. The lessons are grounded in positive psychology and related areas of science including neuroscience and other branches of psychology and the social sciences. Most important, research has shown that the activities and exercises you will be doing are effective in enabling people to increase their happiness and well-being and change their lives for the better.

In addition, each part builds upon the previous part, with the first being basic training and identifying what may make you most happy, the second enabling you to identify and better use your strengths, the third empowering you to build better relationships and making a difference in the world around you, and the fourth in helping you plan for a better future beyond this programme.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

Now that you have answered this call to adventure and are ready to begin, let me tell you about the workbook tasks listed below for this chapter:

• First, in order to help you better understand how you can benefit and increase your motivation for completing this section, there is a reflection question about why you are doing this programme and what you hope to gain from it.
• Second, at the end of this chapter there is a link for a special video about Joseph Campbell’s idea of a “hero’s journey” for you to watch. This was included to help you understand how your life and this programme might be like the kind of “hero’s journey” that can motivate and inspire what you do in this programme. You will be asked to write about the ways that your life has been like this kind of a hero’s journey, how this programme can be like it, and what kind of an adventure this programme might be calling you to.
• Third, there is an activity that involves writing down three good things that happen in the next days. You will be doing a variation of this activity several times this during this first part of the programme. I included this because it has been shown to be so effective in helping you reduce your bias towards the negative and see more of what is good around you. It also takes practice so it can be a good exercise to continue every day until it becomes a routine and natural part of your life. Fourth, there is a well-being survey for you to complete and score. In the next chapter, I will help you understand the elements of well-being that the questions ask about on the survey. I include this survey at the end of the first and last part of the programme so you can compare your scores and see what may have changed.