Pat’s Story
Aged nearly 21
(roughly 7500 days), Pat has
big plans to get the most out of
the 25500 or so days ahead.
Most of Pat’s life has been spent living in a small town in Scotland. Pat has set a key goal to travel and to see more of the world. In particular, Pat both wants to meet and to get to know new people, to try to build a global network of friends and contacts, and to invite them to visit Pat’s hometown, in Scotland.
Pat is a personal fitness coach at a local gym, and has only a limited budget to spend on this goal. Knowing that travel costs are rising, and that saving money opportunities are limited, Pat realises that any long term travel plans will have to be funded partly by finding some work locally whilst travelling. Pat starts to put together a 33thou Roadmap to achieve this goal.
Pat has put both Spain and France on the list of places to visit first as these seem easier to get to. Pat’s Goal Gap Review identifies that some conversational language skills will be needed as the locals may not be able to understand Pat’s strong Scottish accent!
Pat starts to research how to bridge this gap.
Pat now sets about acquiring these key Enabling Assets. Having made enquiries with the local adult advice centre, Pat learns that there is an evening French class at college in a nearby town, but no Spanish. The town is about half an hour away by bus, which means that each lesson will involve about an hours’ travel. The course is about two hours long.
This will use up a full evening of Pat’s available time, but only part of it will be spent learning French! The cost of the bus fare combined with fees for the course will be about thirty pounds per trip. This seems a bit expensive. Also, there is only one lesson per week, but it is the only option available at the moment.
Alas, there is no good news about learning Spanish to be found anywhere,
so Pat has to put this action on hold, for the time being.
Whilst discussing these plans with a friend, Pat learns that the friend’s uncle has an old collection of French language audio CDs from the 1990s. He sells these to Pat for the cost of one evening lesson – twenty pounds. There are twenty CDs in the set. Unfortunately, Pat does not have any equipment that can read CDs, and the company which made them has gone out of business. So, Pat calls on another friend who helps by converting the CD data into cell-phone files which Pat can access using headphones during the bus journey to and from the French lessons. This doubles Pat’s learning time.
With more research, Pat discovers a free, on-line French course in the archives of a national radio channel. This is not interactive, but Pat believes the combination of the college course, the digitised CDs, and the on-line language course will together be sufficient to achieve the target of learning basic conversational French. As far as French is concerned, Pat has now reached the 33thou “I Can” stage. Delighted with this success, Pat meets with a few friends to celebrate!
It is now the start of September. and Pat is planning to travel early next summer. This period equates to about 275 of Pat’s stockpile of 33thou days. Pat was hoping to invest 50 days to learn each language. For learning French Pat believes this to be a realistic timescale, but Spanish is still up in the air. Pat’s updates the Roadmap, which is now also starting to fill with the actions needed to address all the other identified Goal Gaps.
Attending the evening classes at the college, Pat sees an information board on which students post adverts and notices of all sorts. Pat posts an advert asking for help in learning conversational Spanish. Fortunately, a fellow student. who also happens to be Spanish, answers Pat’s request. Even better, the person is ready to exchange Spanish lessons for some personal fitness training. In addition, in the archives of the national broadcaster, Pat has also discovered free on-line Spanish lessons. Pat can take up the on-line Spanish course and exchange fitness training for Spanish lessons once the French course has ended. Pat commits 50 days for learning Spanish to follow on from the 50 days to learn French.
Pat has now reached the 33thou “I Can” stage for both learning Spanish and French. This has all been done at a cost of thirty pounds per week, plus twenty pounds for the CDs and, of course, some free personal training for the Spanish lessons instructor – making it all affordable and very worthwhile! With time now committed, Pat does complete these actions, and learns to speak French and Spanish! He has acquired two Enabling Assets that will be useful for the rest of his life. With both the new language skills and a new Spanish friend, Pat really feels Great!
And that calls for a big celebration!
Well done, Pat!
-000-
