Introducing Me

Hi, my name is Paul. Here I am doing some training. I do a lot of my training online through coaching and episodic courses, but in the above photo I'm out in the woods teaching bushcraft skills to groups of 14 year-olds. I am a leader in the Scouting movement and also a leader in the Duke of Edinburgh organisation training and leading young people on expeditions into new territory. I enjoy all forms of bushcraft, survival training, expeditions and response prepping. In the photo I had just changed my clothes and dried off after getting absolutely drenched by a student who sabotaged our waterproof shelter-building test by chucking the bucket of water into the shelter and over me instead of over the roof of the shelter to see if it leaked. I think my hair goes curly when it is wet :-)

I am Dad to my lovely young son, and partner to an amazing woman. My life revolves around them, and everything I do is with them in mind as much as it might be for me. Here they are, on one of the rare occasions that we remembered to stop and take a photo :-)

Frankie and Judy:

Copyright: Paul Williams 2016

I'm a high school teacher in the UK by day, and a writer, trainer, and educational publisher in my spare time. This is me teaching a film-making class a few years ago. Luckily one of the students decided to film me explaining the task to them, or I wouldn't have any photos of me at work.

I hope I'm more of a teacher who will stop by and help you with your specific issue, rather than a one-size-fits-all teacher who tries to fit everybody into the same mould. I'm not everybody's cup of tea and I still love my critics for caring enough to take the time to feed back to me about what they feel I can improve.

One of my biggest passions in life is literature. I love reading, and I also love writing. This is me at one of my old writing group book launches at Waterstones:

Although it might not look too thrilling looking at me here, these writing adventures are some of the most exciting and imaginative times of my life, when I am busy immersing myself in being creative.

In 2018 I'm launching a little company online, publishing educational material for students and parents. It's called Powerful Wonders (and shares my initials, P.W., woohoo!) and the whole enterprise is based on my teaching and lecturing experience these last 25 years. It'll be at powerfulwonders.com and once I get it up and live I will be posting about how I set it up and run it. I'm going to be releasing a series of resource packs for parents of younger children with specific issues in learning Maths and English. Here's the company logo:

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Copyright: Paul Williams 2012-2018 (with thanks to Andi McGinty for design).

I am also an avid gamer and love how people can explore story and narrative structures through role-playing and world-building. I have been role-playing since I was about 10 years old, and my oldest friends are from this hobby. Back then we all lived close by and met up frequently, but these days we all live in different countries and meet up very occasionally, say once every few years. So we tend to get together online using things like Discord and Roll20 to scratch the gaming itch.

Video games are something that I have always loved and these days I play a lot with my young son. We enjoy playing, recording and editing episodes of various Let's Play series that we publish, for games like Minecraft, Rimworld, Football Manager, Darkest Dungeon etc.

I love reading and thinking, and I value heartfelt dreams and exploring the landscape of imagination. I also love a good conspiracy theory, mainly for what they tell us about human dreams and aspirations, from the ways that people buy into them and want certain things to be true. I have a guilty geeky pleasure in that I love riddles, puzzles, mysteries and cryptography. I'm rubbish at them but I still love them :-)

I love animals and currently have chickens, dogs, and horses. I'll be restocking my honey bee hives in the spring as my last hive suffered queen failure. Occasionally we loan out two beautiful goats from our neighbours. I used to have sheep when I was a kid, and I dream of having them again one day plus a couple of pigs and a cow. My copy of the John Seymour book is ragged and dog-eared! Here I am with Frankie and the dogs out in the forest:

I'm interested in Steemit because the whole project is a novel approach to using blockchain technology and I'm curious to see how this can benefit people. I'm excited about how we can pass value to other Steemians with our upvotes and comments, as well as through our own posts. And I'm aware too that in many ways the monetisation of Steemit and making money through blogging are attractions for a lot of people, and can even be a goal unto themselves. I don't want that to be the case for me though.

Zig Ziglar famously said “You can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” In a world of want and scarcity, we win by taking care of others' wants and needs first. However unlikely it may seem, once we do this we create a flow that returns back to ourselves, and which takes care of our wants and needs.

A former mentor once told me the advice given to him by his mentor. The advice was: "Don't do it for the money." Both mentors understood that the money was just a side-effect of the value that they created by doing what they did and loving what they did and how it impacted positively on the lives of others. I want to be reminded of these wonderful pieces of advice, and reminded a lot. So I won't mind if I keep hearing 'Don't do it for the money' from you when I am posting and commenting here on Steemit. :-) I just want to come here and create value for others, not take it from them.

As I said at the start my day job is teaching in a high school, and that daily interaction with the students is what has kept me in the profession all these years (12 so far) in spite of the ways that the profession as a whole is suffering from political and bureaucratic interference. I actually started teaching when I became a tutor at 23 while an postgraduate at the University of London, and this soon turned into a lecturing and research job at Lancaster University the following year. I have spent most of my life now teaching in one form or another. Along the way I have had other jobs too, working as a games designer, a project manager, a ghost writer etc. I will be making some post series about those aspects of my life and the lessons they each taught me.

For now though I want to take a moment to namecheck some of my inspirations here on Steemit. I applied to join a while ago and like a lot of people I experienced a longer delay than usual as there were so many applications to process. I took the time to read a lot of posts by various Steemians and here are a mixture of those I found and those I knew from elsewhere and happily rediscovered here on Steemit.

@HopeHuggs is an inspirational Steemian who through her book 'Post2Profit' and her various emails and posts, first introduced me to Steemit and I wouldn't be here at all without her, so hat-tip to her and I strongly advise you to go and check out her amazing and informative series of posts about Steemit. I am so excited at how she has put in the effort and made a success of her blogging, because I want to achieve something very similar with mine.

@ReviseSociology is another inspirational Steemian who I first discovered through his website about Sociology. I have gained great value from reading his many posts and I have used his insights in my own lessons. I was really pleased to find him here on Steemit and I am excited at the direction he is currently taking his life - quitting his job and taking the plunge into living an altogether different life!

@drakos who helped me considerably by guiding me to speeding things up when I was waiting for my account to be activated, and who volunteers a lot of his time helping minnows and people who are trying to join Steemit.

I'm on a mission here to share and grow.

Topics I would like to post on include:

Writing and writer tips
Education / Teaching
Survival / Bushcraft
Self-Sufficiency
Animal care
Gaming (video, and pen & paper)
Publishing
Fitness, Health, Wellbeing (including running and cycling)
Conspiracy Theories :-) and just curious things about this wonderful universe

I'll return to each of these points that I made in this post, and make follow-up posts where I will explore them in more detail. I will especially focus on practical actualisation: what does it actually look like when I do these things? By doing it in this way, my wish is that anyone else can read and follow and implement whichever parts they want to see in their own lives.

I'll leave you with this picture of Frankie and I cycling over the old Severn Bridge. I remember that day so well because Frankie was a bit scared of the way that the old suspension bridge wobbled and shook when lorries thundered over it, plus it was very exposed and windy and crosses a very turbulent stretch of water (the second highest tidal range in the world). I was so proud of him that day for not turning back even though I could see that he wanted to. When we finally made it out to the middle and across to the far side, we took this photo of us below one of the towering supports for the metal cables that hold the bridge up. Whenever I see this photo it reminds me that if a little boy can conquer his fear then so can I.

Thanks, and I'll see you soon in my next posts. Until then, dream big - no, dream huge, HUGE dreams and reach like you'll grasp it and you couldn't fail.

Paul