Everyday Visionary Fly Fishing Programs

We design programs using fly fishing and nature for personal and professional development. Fly fishing is fun, rejuvenating, and provides new perspectives on life and business. The fly fishing programs are designed in pristine mountain and river settings to provide an effective and lasting learning experience.

Program Objectives and Outcomes

• Become a better visionary leader which is one of the most important roles of a leader. Visionary leadership makes the best use of leader's talents and makes leadership more interesting, creative, engaging and fulfilling.
  
  
• Gain new perspectives of yourself by identifying and reconnecting to what is most important to you. Create desired futures in areas of your life or professional career. Create actions to begin moving toward those outcomes.
  
  
• Become more confident and comfortable with the journey toward your personal and professional goals.
  
  
• Become more adapt at noticing opportunities and overcoming obstacles for yourself and as a leader for higher personal and professional productivity. You and the people you lead will be busy doing what is most important instead of just being busy.
  
  
• Become better at delegating by using vision as the foundation for clear expectations about what must be accomplished to attain the vision.
  
  
• Relaxation, rejuvenation, and camaraderie with other professionals.
  
  
• An amazing fly fishing experience!
  

Fly Fishing Provides Personal and Professional Development

Visionary leadership

By helping participants to be more visionary during the fly fishing program, they will have a better understanding and have the practical knowledge to be better visionary leaders in their organizations.

Fish for opportunities on the "edge"

Fly fishers are acutely aware of edges. This is where fishing opportunities exist. Before casting in a river, fly fishers look for "edge water." They look for obstructions in the water that are causing a change in the flow of the water. Sometimes you can't see what is causing the edge because it is below the surface. For an angler, being aware of the edges in a stream is a way to find opportunity and fulfill the vision of catching a fish. Life is constantly providing us moments when we are "on the edge", and there are obstacles lurking below the surface. Learning how to use edges and obstacles is important and helpful to forward your personal and professional goals.

Matching the hatch

It is important to know the right flies for the situation. This applies to the knowledge you need about yourself, others, your organization and the world to be successful in life or business.
Fly fishing involves making choices in regard to what type of fly should be selected and exactly where and in what manner it should be fished. Such choices need to be made time and time again be reading the water, noticing what bugs are hatching and how the fish are behaving. Learning to make accurate observations in combination with one's own intuition can alter the outcome.

Line tangles and break offs

Fly fishing involves tangles, break offs and obstacles. When obstacles show up, how to be present, not stressed, and stay on track toward your goals.

Team building

Working together and sharing information leads to personal and group fly fishing success which can be related to one's personal or organizational setting.

Focus and flow

Focus and flow are components of a day on the river. In fly fishing the concept of letting the fly drift naturally in the river's flow is perhaps the single most important skill to ensure success. We will look at ways to bring the feeling of focus and flow to projects and activities in the workplace.

Creativity

Stalking trout in the flowing pools and riffles, wading the currents with a fly rod in hand, rhythmically casting handcrafted flies that imitate the river's natural food items, and waiting for a tug or a rise can be one of the most instructive moments to also consider what "tugs" at us. These are such moments when life is asking us to find the deeper places within that lead to new pathways of creativity.

Hero's Journey

The art of fly-fishing will allow us through the lens of personal reflection to gain a deeper sense of self and our place in our work and world. This will include a look at the age old hero's journey that many have gone through before us and the archetypal powers that reside deep in our minds.

Passion

William Butler Yeats wrote a poem that describes what motivated him to go out in to the woods to fish, "I went out to the hazel-wood because a fire burned inside my head." Perhaps there should be a "fire" that drives us in our work and in our lives. I am also reminded of Thoreau who said, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." And to "confront only the essential facts of life."

Perhaps to live life well and to work well requires us to find our passion. The act of fly fishing, and being in nature, and the poetry of the whole experience can stir our hearts and passions and help us ponder what is truly important, to "confront only the essential facts of life and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Failure

Fly-fishing, life and work are full of failure, but we need to realize that "failure" is often the needed path that leads to success. Every time we "fail" in fly fishing as well as our work, we are merely collecting data about what simply does not work.

Timing

The word describes individuals who can manage the circumstances which they encounter daily and have patience to wait for an undetermined period of time for something special to happen.

Everyday Visionary Fly Fishing Team

David Chorpenning, Ph.D., Program Director/Facilitator

David is the author of two books, Everyday Visionary: A practical guide to having the life you desire and the Everyday Visionary Workbook. He has been a coach, facilitator and consultant to individuals and organizations on the visioning process for 25 years. He believes that all of us are visionary. We just need to do it more often to have greater happiness, fulfillment and success in our personal and professional lives.

Over the past 20 years David has been the program director and facilitator for many adult outdoor action learning programs. These programs provided a rich, transforming and lasting educational experience for the participants.

David is married, has two grown children, and lives in Manitou Springs, Colorado at the foot of Pikes Peak. He is an avid outdoorsman and passionate about fly fishing.