280: Holly Worton ~ How to Let Go of Pessimism & Feel More Optimistic About Everything

Today’s Guest

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I’m back again, with another solo episode! If you listened to last week’s episode, then you know that I’ve been working on my year-end review and also planning my 2020. While looking at the list of things I want to do in the new year, I realized that a lot of the activities I’ve got planned are things that satisfy my need for adventure.

This got me thinking: is everyone else planning adventures for their new year? Adventure is something that’s important to me, so I invite you to explore how you can add more adventure to your life. Adventures take us out of our comfort zone and challenge us. They add to our personal growth by giving us a new perspective and opening our minds. The break up our routines and fill us with excitement and joy.

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

Why adventure is an important part of our lives
How you can add more adventure to your life – even on a budget
Lots of examples of little ways to spice up your routine
How you can get started TODAY planning more adventures

Take Action TODAY

Write down 50 adventures you’d like to do in the next 12 months. Really stretch yourself to fill out the list.
Pick your top 3 that you’d like to get started with.
Block off time in your calendar to get them done.

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 328. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today, I am going to talk about adventure. If you listened to last week’s episode which was all about planning your year-end review and planning the New Year, you know that I have been working on just that, reviewing my 2019 and thinking about how I want to experience 2020. So I have been making a list of all the things that I want to do in the New Year, some things I have already got booked, they are in the calendar, paid and planned; and as I am looking at other things that I want to add, I realise that a lot of the activity that I have got planned, things that I have already booked and things that I am looking at signing up for, are things that satisfy my need for adventure. This got me thinking, is everyone else planning their adventures for the new year? I suspect not. I think some people are really aware of the importance of adventure and the need for adventure in our lives, but I suspect that a lot of people haven’t actually started planning them. And to me it is really important to plan these things, get them into the calendar to make sure that I give them the importance in terms of priorities and in terms of time and in terms of booking them into my calendar – otherwise they won’t happen. So, in this episode, I invite you to explore how you can add more adventure to your life, even if you are on a budget. I think there are a lot of ways to add adventure, doing little things that don’t cost anything. Or, depending on what your budget is, you can do a big expensive adventure, it is all up to you, there is a ton of things that you can do.

What is an adventure?

So let’s start out by defining what is an adventure? To me an adventure is any kind of deviation from our normal routine, our normal life, our normal way of doing things. It is something exciting and fun; joyful and different. And that could be anything from taking a new route on the way to work, to walking down a new trail in the forest, to travelling to a new country that you have never been to before, there are all kinds of adventures and all kinds of budgets for adventures. And again, like I said, there are all kinds of budgets for adventures. So that, to me, is kind of a broad description of what an adventure is but really even the tiniest little things like exploring a new trail in the woods can bring such a sense of excitement and joy and adventure. Like I said, adventure is really, really, important to me and if you are listening to this and you are thinking: ah not really, yeah I really don’t care about adventure, I want you to stop and think about when was the last time that you felt a sense of adventure in your life? Maybe you are so disconnected from it you don’t remember what it feels like. So, I invite you, if you are not really connecting with this, pause, think about that, and also think about, when was the last time that you did something like that for the first time? I did a blog post about this year’s ago, I think it was like 2011 or so, and I will link to that in the show notes, but I love doing new things. I love trying new things, going new places, it gives me that sense of excitement and joy and adventure. So maybe pause this again and think: when was the last time that you did something for the first time?

Adventures in 2019

So, as I was getting ready for this episode, I was thinking about what adventures I had in 2019, and I am going to share them with you to give you the idea of the kind of adventures that you can have in your life. Some of these are going to resonate with you and some of these aren’t but these are things that all gave me a sense of adventure. So, for starters, you may know that I am doing a plant-spirit-healing apprenticeship which I signed up for at the end of last year. One of the first things that we did to get ready for that apprenticeship, was we had a drum-birthing workshop. Now, I am not a musical person, I had certainly never made a musical instrument before, I don’t even consider myself to be a crafty sort of person, but we spent an entire afternoon birthing these drums. These shamanic drums that we use for shamanic journeying made out of animal hides and wooden frames and we put crystals into them, and it was a really, really, lovely experience and I feel like I have such a strong relationship with my drum that I don’t think I would have if I just bought it in the store. Of course that relationship has come from journeying with the drum for the last seven or eight months or so, but that was a huge adventure for me, because again, not crafty, not musical and I made a drum! That’s exciting! Moving on from that, the journeys that I have been doing in my plant-spirit-healing apprenticeship, doing Shamanic journeys, I know that is kind of inner work, because I am not actually going anywhere, but that has been a huge adventure, stuff happens in those that I never thought I would be doing. So that’s been an adventure in itself.

Earlier this year I did my second NNAS Gold Training, the National Navigation Awards Scheme, did that up in Yorkshire, that was fantastic as always terrible weather, not that Yorkshire always has terrible weather but they specifically seek out poor weather conditions for this particular navigation training, because it is an advanced training where you are focussing on low light, evening navigation, nighttime navigations and also just poor weather conditions. So, it was a big stretch out of my comfort zone, I had never been to that part of Yorkshire before, we walked to placed that I had never seen before, it was really a big adventure, I really loved it; and these are always really small classes, it is a weekend, two days, and I really, really, love them, I really love these classes. I linked to this guy Mark Reid, of team walking, in the last episode, but I will link to him again in the show notes for this episode, so, navigation course.

Earlier this year, I think it was the end of April, beginning of May, I did a plant identification for wild food and foraging course. That was fantastic, we camped in the woods and we identified plants and we foraged and made dinner out of it and we learned how to use these plants for medicine and it was just, it was such an adventure because it was the first time that I had ever taken a course where Iw as camping every night and it was really, really, lovely to share the experience with other people and to lean all kinds of new plant stuff, that was great.

Also, my appearance on ITV to talk about my new book, that was an adventure, that was the first time I appeared on live TV, that was a big step outside of my comfort zone it was really exciting, and I really enjoyed it.

Later in the year I went to the Victorious Festival, my publicist had a stand for authors and I went and gave a talk and I talked to a tree in front of people, that was a huge step out of my comfort zone because I have never done that on demand in front of people before, in real life, so that was an adventure.

Lavender, I went to a Lavender farm in my area, that is a really low cost thing, I think it was £2 to get in, one of the last plants, or the last plant that I am going to be working with on my plant-healing-spirit apprenticeship was lavender, so I wanted to go to this lavender farm and really connect with large quantities of lavender, 15 acres of lavender and connect with the plant-spirit there and that was a lovely experience. I had been to that farm before, but it was a big adventure to me to connect with the lavender in a different way at that farm.

The South Downs Wey, to me, walking a long-distance trail is always an adventure and I think that is one of the things that I love so much about it, because even though I know walking from point A to point B I have these different stages set up, I know where I am staying every night, it is still an adventure, because the trail, you don’t know what is going to happen along the way and you don’t know who you are going to meet. You don’t know what the weather is going to be like, it is such a deep adventure for me, and I think that is one of the reasons why I enjoy walking a long distance trail so much, it is so exciting and adventurous, and I love it.

And then I think my most recent adventure was going to Atlanta to speak at She Podcasts Live, I had never been to Atlanta before, I haven’t been to a conference in ages, this is the first She Podcasts conference, Amanda and I were speaking on the main stage, it was really exciting, it was a little step outside my comfort zone because I do love public speaking, but it was a big adventure, I met tons of people I had never met before, it was really exciting to go to a conference where I knew only a handful of people and when I say a handful, I think I could count them on one hand, I don’t think I knew more than a handful of people there so that was super-exciting, I got to meet new people.

Next Year

So those were the highlights of my adventures for the year, the adventures that I have got planned for the next year, you won’t be surprised are very nature-y things.

If you know me, you might know that ever since ages ago, ever since 1996, I have been wanting to walk the Camino De Santiago and that’s not happened. I have been pretty obsessed with it in recent years, I have read, I don’t know, ten or fifteen books on the Camino, other people’s stories, I have got a guidebook. I have a friend, Adam Wells, who runs a walking group here in the UK where he talks about the Camino and he helps people get prepared for the Camino. I have been really into this, but I just haven’t had the time, the space, the money, to take a month, or five weeks, off of my life and go to Spain and walk 500 miles, it just hasn’t happened.

But, about 10 days ago, I was on Reddit, on the Subreddit for the Camino Santiago and someone posted a blog post, and I will link to this in the show notes, about the Camino Portugués. So if you don’t know about the Camino, there are several that go to De Santiago, Spain. The most famous one is the Camino Frances which starts in France and goes all the way across the top of Spain, that is the most popular one. But there is another one that goes through Portugal and there is also one called the Camino Ingles, which where people travelling from England to Santiago would walk and again it is a shorter one that goes just through Galicia and there are other versions of it. The Camino Portugués is about two weeks, the Camino Ingles is probably less than a week. The Camino Portugués is the one that I have been obsessed with for the last 10 days or so ever since I read this blog post, I have since read three books about the Camino Portugués. I have planned I am going to walk it probably March of next year and I am super-excited about this. So excited, because I feel like I can finally do a version of the Camino without taking a big chunk off my life. I do still want to do the Camino Frances, the long one, but not for a couple of years and I feel like this is going to satisfy my need for that type of adventure soon. I am also thinking about doing the Camino Ingles later next year and I am super-excited about that. I want to write books about both of those because those because these are lesser known Caminos and people don’t know about those as much and people don’t write books about them as much.

I also want to do another outdoors course up in Yorkshire, I am doing an ethnobotanist course which is I think eight or nine months over the course of next year. I am doing a wildlife identification and tracking course and another thing that I have been wanting to do, and this is a different kind of thing, you may know that I do Workcations for writing my books, one thing that I have always wanted to do is to hop on a train, a really long train journey, and just use that time to write. That is something that I have wanted to do for a couple of years now, had it on my list of things to do this year and didn’t do it, I am going to do it next year, so I am super-excited about that. All of these adventures I have mentioned have been kind of big things that I have got planned for next year and they are things that require significant investment. So those are things that are my big adventures that I have got next year.

Smaller Adventures

But, in terms of smaller adventures, there are so many things that you could do. You could alter your routine in some way, take a different route to work, have something different for breakfast, have something different for lunch, for dinner, something that you have never cooked before. Try something new for the first time. Travel somewhere new and again travel can be expensive but just researching a trip can give you that sense of adventure, so for the last ten days that I have been researching the Camino Portugués and planning my trip has been so exciting and fulfilling. So just reaching a trip even if you are not going to do it for a while, that can give you that sense of adventure. Reading travel books, in the winter when I don’t do as much walking, I read a ton of travel books about people walking a long distance trail and it is so satisfying for me and it fulfils that need for adventure. Walking out in nature, walking out in the woods, take a new trail. When I first moved to the area that I live in, I loved just turning down a trail that I had never been down before and just exploring and seeing where it went. Learn something new, you can learn stuff online for free or you can take a class. Or you can explore your local area, I have lived here, where I have lived for the last eight years, and there is still a lot of stuff that I haven’t seen. And that could be exploring in terms of walking, trying a new restaurant, walking through the neighbourhoods, I really like just walking through different neighbourhoods in my town sometimes in the evening. Walking down new streets, exploring new places.

You could try a new meetup group, meetup groups are often free, often low costs, so just go online, go on meetup.com, put in your area and find something new, find something new to do and meet new people. Try a new hobby, now that might have a cost involved with it, but often low cost, especially if you go through meetup. AirBNB also has experiences, which aren’t super cheap, they are not like Meetups, but they can be new things to do. Try a new means of transport, if you are used to taking public transport to work, ride your bike or walk, or walk for a stretch of it or take public transport instead of driving. I don’t know try something new.

I think these are all ways to break up routine and add adventure to our lives. Wear a new colour, try a new style. Try a new type of exercise, listen to a new kind of music, listen to a new podcast. Declutter your space, your home, your workspace, that makes space for something new. Decluttering is a weird thing, even though you are getting rid of physical objects, it somehow magically shifts things in your mind and energetically in your life and I really do believe it makes space for new stuff. That could be new adventures, especially if you declutter with the intention of making space for new adventures, that could also be decluttering your calendar so that you have time for new adventures.

Hang out with someone new, so maybe get in touch with a friend you haven’t seen for ages, or call a friend you haven’t seen for ages, or meet new people through meetup, try a new haircut, try a new hairstyle. Like I said earlier, try a new food, try a new restaurant, try a new recipe, something wildly different from what you normally eat. Volunteer, there are tons of things that you can do volunteering, that can be an adventure and you will meet new people. Try something that scares you, try something that is outside of your comfort zone, I think a lot of this sense of adventure comes from doing things that are a little bit scary and that are often outside of our comfort zone but they are really satisfying because they do stretch us in new ways, they help us grow in new ways and I think adventures are an important part of our personal growth, of our personal development, because they take us outside of our comfort zone and they give us a new perspective on life, they open our mind, they are challenging, they break up our routine, they fill us with that sense of excitement and joy.

So I invite you, what are the things that came to mind as I was listing possible adventures? What are the things that came to mind as things that you would like to try? You could learn a new instrument? And I invite you to sit down and make a list of 50 things that you could do in the next 12 months as adventures and to bring more adventure into your life. Again, they can be something as simple as going walking near you house and turn down a trail that you have never been down before. They don’t have to cost money, they don’t have to take a ton of time, whatever comes to mind. Go camping, if you have been camping before, go camping somewhere new. They don’t have to be outdoors stuff, but a lot of my examples are because I like the outdoors, I mentioned when I was, a couple of episodes ago maybe, speaking up and using your voice, I mentioned that one of the things that really changed my life in terms of speaking up and expressing myself was doing Toastmasters, go to Toastmasters, I think it is free for the first couple of visits and then after that they will ask you to pay their annual membership fee which is really reasonable. Go to toastmasters that will take you outside of your comfort zone if you are not an expert in public speaking. So look up things that you can do, and I really, really, encourage you to do a list of 50 adventures that you can have in your life in the next 12 months, and I am saying 50 because that will stretch you, if that sounds like a big number it is probably not but it is enough to make you think beyond the basic stuff of new breakfast, new route to work.

So I would like to offer you that challenge, and I would like for you to let me know if you took me up on that challenge and email me and let me know what were some of the things on your list , your top three things, or the first three things you are going to try. And the next thing is, once you have made this list of 50 adventures, block out time in the calendar to do them. Again, some of them are going to be really easy, like if I it is something like cooking something new for dinner, that is part of normal dinner routine, but it might just take you a while longer if it is a new recipe, but other things like going for a walk in the woods, down a new trail, that might take longer.

So block out the time in your calendar for these first three mini adventures and maybe journal about it, journal about your experiences and how they make you feel and ask yourself: do I want to do this again? Do I want to do something similar? Do I want to do something different? How do they make me feel? Do I want to experience more of this feeling? I really think that adding more adventure to our lives is really important for our personal growth and also for our personal satisfaction in life. I love routines, one of the things that really threw me off in the last-month-and-a-half-or-so that I was really busy was that I didn’t have my routines and I thought I was getting back to my routine last week and then I just crashed, I mean I didn’t burnout, but I needed some time off. So I had a kind of half-work-week last week, because I was getting into I don’t know normal life again and this week I am finally back on track with my routines. I do like routines but I also think it is important to break them up and shake them up because it is shaking up our routines that gives us that sense of adventure, even if it is just a little thing like having something different for breakfast, I think it is important, I think it makes us think differently and have that new perspective and again the breakfast example I know that sounds silly but try it and. Try something new for dinner.

So 50 things to do, 50 adventures and good luck! And please let me know how it goes, I really, really, want to hear from you about this and see what you think, what you enjoyed, what you are looking forward to and also maybe write down what had been your adventures for this year, because I think it is important to acknowledge the little adventures that we are already having, that we are already creating for ourselves, in addition to planning new ones for the year.

So that’s all for now I hope you found this interesting and useful, I have put up for the last episode, which was about how to do your year-end review and plan your new year, I have put up in the Patreon a list of journal prompts, so I put up the questions that kind of included during the episode but I have also included my extended list of journalling prompts for wrapping up your year-end review and also planning your year. So if you are in Patron, you could get that in Patreon. If you are not yet in Patreon, I would love to have you support me there, membership starts at $1 a month and you get access to all kinds of things including those journal prompts which I think are super-useful. So, if you head over to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there.

Thank you so much for listening if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe on whatever app you are listening to this on and remember to visit: http://HollyWorton.com/328 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.

I hope you find this interesting and useful, if you have any questions please get in touch, my email is [email protected] or you can find me online and get in touch there.

Remember to visit: https://www.hollyworton.com/328for the show notes on this episode.

328 Holly Worton ~ How to Add More Adventure to Your Life