Full Transcript

• Introduce yourself.
• My name is Alison Young. I'm known as the solo, female, middle-aged, titanium-reinforced cancer thriver, neurological movement disorder manager and long-distance backpacker, Blissful Hiker. I've blissfully walked 12,000 miles on six continents. Blissful Hiker is my trail name – it was given to me by other hikers because I tend to show up to camp at the end of a long, hard, challenging hiking day, still smiling.
• Tell us what you do.
• As Blissful Hiker, I am a reinvention expert. The name Blissful Hiker represents something deeper. It's the result of managing some really tough times, not just on trail, but in my life. Blissful Hiker represents my success at reinventing myself during those times of loss and transition. And what I do now is help others reinvent themselves.
• Tell us about your signature talk.
• We have a saying in the backpacking community: hike your own hike. My signature talk uses that phrase as its title. When life demands that you change, I act as a guide to help you "hike your own hike" by using difficulty and uncertainty to energize reinvention. Whether we like it or not, failures, setbacks, cosmic rip-offs happen. And when they do, they can leave us feeling ungrounded, like we missed a waypoint, like we're walking the wrong trail. But oftentimes these transitions are opportunities disguised as loss, opening us up to alternative paths on our life journey. And the good news is that harnessing difficulty and powerful emotions for positive action is a teachable, learnable skill that can be successfully developed in both individuals and teams, as well as organizations.