372 Holly Worton ~ How Outdoors Adventures Can Help Us Achieve Our Life Goals

Transcript

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 372. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about perseverance and outdoor adventures and how outdoors adventures can help us with our sense of perseverance and what they can teach us about perseverance.

This is a topic that is inspired by recent events, a bush craft course that I recently took that I discussed a little bit in last week’s episode with Joanna, but it is something that I have been reflecting on lately and I am just really grateful for having had that experience and just really looking forward to seeing all the things that I can learn in the future from my outdoor experiences.

So let’s get into the topic, perseverance, what is it?

It has been defined as ‘the persistence in doing something, despite difficult, or challenge, or delay in achieving success’.

And why is it important? 

Perseverance is so important because it helps you to finish your projects, achieve your goals, overcome rejection, stretch out your comfort zone…it keeps you from giving up. This is something that I talked about last week with Joanna in the episode we did together on how to achieve ‘overnight’ success and that is ‘overnight’ (in air quotes) because of course there is no such thing.

We talked a lot about perseverance and why, when we achieve goals, if we actually want to achieve them, we need to work and work and work and try and fail, try and fail, and try something different and try something new. It is all about persistence and perseverance and just keeping going. Oftentimes our goals are not easy to achieve, oftentimes we make mistakes, oftentimes we try one path and it doesn’t work so we have to try another path. And there are so many opportunities along the way to give up, and it is so easy to give up, you just say ‘I’m done’, and then you walk away from it and I am going to talk about this later in the episode but sometimes it is important to give up—and you need to know when to give up— but let’s assume that your goals are still important to you, that you want to do these things, you can’t just give up the first, or second, or third time that something doesn’t work. You have to keep trying and you have to keep trying new things; and sometimes you get tired and sometimes you get frustrated and sometimes you need to walk away from them for a little bit and take a break and come back, but these are things we can learn from our outdoor adventures. And I think that is why perseverance is one of the biggest things that I have learned from hiking, walking, doing long distance trails and things like this bushcraft course.

So let’s talk a little bit about some specific examples and, I am sure, as I tell these stories you can think of examples in your own life and hopefully this will inspire you to stretch yourself, and grow, and have new and different and more challenging outdoor adventures. I have been thinking about this a lot lately because my husband and I have been watching A LOT of YouTube documentaries and videos about people running ultramarathons, particularly trail marathons rather than urban marathons. I have just been getting really inspired by them, and thinking about how I can stretch myself, not just with running, but with outdoors adventures. I wrote a blogpost on that recently, it is called Best Outdoor Sports Documentaries and Films: Get Motivated Again. I have got a list there of some of my favourite ones, I need to add to it though, because we keep watching these documentaries and videos.

But I really got into this during this time when I was having really low energy and fatigue from Lyme disease and I wasn’t exercising and I wasn’t getting outdoors, I wasn’t doing much, and I just felt really ‘urgh’ and it really got me motivated to get back on track with my fitness, and my outdoor adventures, once my energy levels got up and running again.

So yes, that is where I am coming from with all of this. And I just find it really, really, useful to hear other people’s stories, and hear about their adventures, and see how they stretch themselves, because it gives me new ideas, it helps me see new possibilities for myself. Maybe I will never run an ultramarathon, who knows? But I can apply that mindset and those principles to my own life and to my outdoor adventures.

And perseverance is such an important quality to me because if I hadn’t persevered with all the things that I wanted to achieve, I wouldn’t be where I am today. If I don’t continue to persevere, and work towards my goals, I am not going to achieve the goals that I have set for myself and I am not going to create the life that I want to create for myself. So perseverance is so important to me, looking back on my journey over the last ten years, particularly, there were so many times when I could have given up, there are so many times when I could have said ‘you know what? I think I will stay where I am, this is okay, it is tolerable and keeping going is too hard’. So I am very grateful for my own perseverance in the past because it has gotten me to where I am today.

So let’s talk about examples, so day hikes, you go out for a day hike, you plan a route or not, or you just wander around, but particularly when you plan a route that is longer than you are used to. There have been several times on my day hikes where I have been tired, I have just not felt like I had a lot of energy, I have not really felt like I wanted to go on, maybe I had blisters, maybe my feet were hurting, and I still had to get to my destination, which was the end of the walk that I had planned.

And, a lot of times, when you are out walking in nature there are escape routes, there are ways, if you look at a map you could get a road faster and maybe call a taxi, but a lot of times you can’t so you just have to keep going. But, unless injured, I would want to keep going, to complete the route that I had planned for myself, even when it is hard. So what do I do? Stop. Evaluate where I am and evaluate how far I have to go. Think about how long it is going to take me to get there and take a break: have some tea, have some water, have a snack, have something to chew on if you have gum or candies or something to give you sugar — I am not a big eater of sugar and I am not a big fan of eating sugar and carbs when I a exercising but that is a common thing people do for energy.

So: stop, take a break, reevaluate, figure out where you are and reevaluate where you want to be, because you always can take an escape route, not always, but oftentimes you could find a road, find a way to go and get out of there, or even continue.

So evaluate what is important, is finishing the route still important to you? Is that your only option? If it is then figure out what your strategy is going to be? So maybe, a lot of times I used to really push through on my walks and I would just walk and walk and walk really fast and then I would burn myself out because I didn’t take breaks and then I learnt to take breaks. So one of the things that I talk about a lot in my book, Alone on the South Downs Way, is that I learned to take rests and take breaks early and often. So I was stopping for a rest break about once an hour sometimes and that was kind of to stretch out the day and to stay rested and to rest my feet and maybe take off my shoes and cool off my feet but more than anything it was about resting before I burnt myself out and making sure that I stayed at a good pace for myself. So even if I wasn’t pacing myself very well, having those early and often rest stops helped me to prevent burnout by not pacing myself very well. (I hope that made sense I feel like I kind of rambled on about that.)

So taking rest breaks, if you are at a point in the trail where you are like: I am exhausted, I can’t wait to get to the end, just take more rest stops, take more rest stops. Then maybe focus on things like taking photographs because that will help you slow down and give you something to distract yourself. So maybe keep an eye out for photographs you want to take. You can take pictures and share them to Instagram and other social networks because that will give you a little pause and that will distract you. Things like that are really good strategies for slowing down, pacing yourself and getting through and getting through the end of a hike that is maybe difficult.

Again, take breaks, make sure you are hydrated, make sure your electrolytes are good, and that is especially important if you practice intermittent fasting like I do, just really keep up on your hydration and your electrolytes. And just think about what you need to do to keep going, maybe it is listening to a podcast or listening to music, I really don’t like music when I am walking, or anything— partly it doesn’t make me feel safe and partly it distracts me from my surroundings and it is not why I go out into nature— but if that is going to get you through your day hike, do it. The same goes for long distance trails, plenty of people listen to music when they are out. Obviously if you are in an area where you have dangerous wildlife, I would really not listen to music or podcasts or anything, or you could just leave one ear bud out and just listen to it one side. But it is always important when you are outdoors to stay aware of your surroundings. Again, if you need some music to get yourself through, that is an aide to getting through a challenging point in your trail.

The same goes for walking long distance trails, when you are walking multiple days in a row the tiredness builds up in your body, the poor pacing, if that is a problem for you, builds up in your body and it can lead to meltdown in some cases like it did for me in my South Downs adventure which I talk about in my book! But, it can just lead to tiredness and irritability and a sense of frustration because, especially when you have a longer goal like that, whether it is a weekend walk, where you are walking two-or-three-days-in-a-row or you are walking a long walk, or something even longer, multiple weeks. It is a bigger goal and so sometimes it feels like you have more invested in it because it is harder to quit and you are going to be perhaps likely to want to quit than you would if it was just a day hike. So I think it is especially important to pace yourself, take breaks, do what you need to do to get through it, but also, re-evaluate what you need to do to enjoy it because there is no sense in walking a long distance trail if you are going to be miserable every day.

So stop and identify what is making you miserable and how to get through it and enjoy it, what would make you happier about the journey, what would make you enjoy it more and then do those things.

The same goes for running, running is something that is harder for me to persevere with. I used to be a really good runner and then I got to this point where I was giving up on my runs and just not pushing through. I know that when I push through the pain when I am running— not pain or injury pain, the tiredness and the ‘urgh’ feeling, I know that it is temporary, I know that there is a great thing on the other side (usually!) but I have gotten into this habit of stopping and quitting or alternating runs and walks just to get through the run, and sometimes you might need to do that.

But I was getting really frustrated with my ability to persevere on my runs and I actually just had this really great session with Cara Wilde who you have heard on the podcast before where we were looking at my life values— so we did one of those values sessions that we talked about— and I will link to the episode where we talked about values and how important they are. We were doing a session on my life values and what came up was this horrible memory, this shameful memory, that I had where I gave up and quit on a marathon that I was running and that just set me up for some really bad beliefs about myself; and this happened more than 20 years ago, and it really effected my fitness and my running ever since.

So I have been able to persevere with some things in the outdoors and fitness stuff but I haven’t with other things so I am really looking forward to seeing, I have already felt, a huge shift in myself since that session but I am really looking forward to seeing, now that I am stretching myself more with my running, where that is going to take me. I have already started to persevere more with my running so there are so many different ways that you can pay attention to your mindset and stretch yourself and really persist and persevere in your outdoors adventures and in your outdoors fitness and all kinds of fitness but pay attention to your mindset. I think this is a really, really, important mindset thing is sticking to your goal and doing what you need to do to complete it in a pleasant way.

Yeah, it is not always going to be pleasant, sometimes you are going to be running long distance or hiking long distance and it is going to be miserable for times but sometimes you need to push through the miserable bit and it will be beautiful again. It is like when you are practising intermittent fasting or extended fast and your stomach starts growling, which you may sometimes hear on this podcast! {laughing} I get hungry and I start thinking of food but then I have a drink of water, I have some salt and it goes away.

        When you are fasting it is not like a little bit of hunger and then more and more and more until you are like ‘agh’, it is not like that it comes and it goes in waves. Hopefully when you are pushing yourself and you are persevering in your outdoor adventures and other things in life, that difficulty, that challenge bit should come in waves, it should be like you push through the difficult part and then you get another difficult part and then it gets easier. If it is just endless horribleness that is when you really need to reevaluate and stop and think: is it time to give up?

But before I talk about giving up, I also want to talk about my recent experience with this advanced bushcraft course that I took, which I will link to in the show notes. About half way through this course, I think, or maybe it was even earlier than that, I was working on something and I realised ‘you know what? I am not a crafty person. I am not a person who is good with crafty stuff and yet I am taking this course in bushcraft.’ Where we had to create stuff out of wood, we had to go and chop down a tree and carve a spoon from it and cut down some other wood and use it to build a bow drill set and then we had to do that horrible bow drill which was so incredibly frustrating. (If you don’t know what bow drill is it is a method of creating fire by friction.)

So the course was challenging and the assessment was even more challenging and it was really frustrating and there were so many times when I wanted to give up and there were so many times where I thought, ‘well you know what? The instructors have said I don’t have to do it this weekend, if I pass everything else I can just go home and practice this at home and do a video.’ But I didn’t want to do that, I really didn’t want to do that, I wanted to go home having done it. And so I just kept at it and I accepted help, which was important, I have not been good about that in the past, but much help was offered and people were really supportive and I kept going, I kept going, I practised during all of the breaks and eventually with much help and assistance I got it in the end and I passed. So that was so extremely satisfying and I just felt good about myself, but it would have been so easy to give up, there were so many opportunities to give up and I wanted to give up at times. The same with walking long distance trails, the first time I walked the South Downs Way I seriously thought about quitting at one point. I eventually didn’t because I went to bed, got up the next morning and felt a lot better, and just kept going, but I wanted to quit at times.

So I think now it is time to talk about: when to quit, because sometimes quitting is the right option. How to know when to give up? I think there are times in your journey when you hit that challenging point, that difficult bit, when you need to stop and reevaluate and think: is this goal still important to me? Is it important to me to complete this day hike? Is it important to me to continue this long-distance trail? Is it important to me to finish this course?

I learned a lot of things in this course, I didn’t need to get the certificate at the end, I could have just taken what I learned and been like: great, that’s good, I learned a bunch of good stuff. But I really wanted that sense of completion from getting the certificate and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. So stop and reevaluate: is it really important to you to achieve this goal? And reevaluate regularly because especially in life goals there are times where our goals change, our priorities change, and some stuff is no longer important to us— so you need to stop and reevaluate.

I am doing that now with my business mindset book series, one of the things that was really important to me about rewriting that series was because the books sold pretty well in their first edition but I wanted to make them available in different editions, because they were just eBooks, so I wanted to make them available as paperbacks, workbooks and audio and I wanted to improve them, because I thought they could be improved upon, and that was really important to me and I wanted to re-release them. I have done that with two out of four of them. The third book is ready to be published, I am going to publish that once I get back from the Ridgeway. But the first two aren’t selling, they really aren’t selling. I have had great feedback from the new editions, I have had great reviews of them but they are just not selling them.

So I have had to stop and reevaluate, am I going to finish this or am I not? And what I have decided at this point, and I may reevaluate this again before the year is out, is I need to change my name. I think I am messing up the Amazon algorithm by using the same name for my nature books as I am for my business mindset books. So I am just adding my middle initial and I am going to be relaunching those books with that and I am going to see if that helps. So when I get back from the Ridgeway I am going to publish for the first time the second edition of Business Visibility, I am going to relaunch the first two with that new name, hopefully that will help. Once I have done that I a going to reevaluate whether it is worth my time and effort to update the fourth book in the series, which is Business Intuition. I am pretty sure that I am going to do it, I just might not put as much effort into to it as I did with the first two books. We shall see.

So again, stop and reevaluate: is the goal still important to you? It is important to me because I want to have that sense of completion of updating them but I might change the project. So I am probably not going to do audio books for the last two books, like I did for the first two. I know a lot of people really like audio books but again, they are really not selling that well, so I need to reevaluate whether it is worth my time. Also, doing audio books is a lot of effort and it is just really difficult, so if it’s not selling I don’t want to put that effort into it.

So again, those are the kinds of questions that you want to ask yourself when you are reevaluating your goals. Always check-in, see if it is still important to you and kind of imagine what it would be like. So when I was walking the South Downs Way, and I was thinking about giving up, I thought about what it would be like if I gave up and I called my husband and said ‘pick me up tomorrow, I need a ride home, I am going to quit’, and I didn’t feel good, I really didn’t like the feeling of that. I really liked the feeling of completing my walk, which is what I ended up doing.

Same with the bushcraft, I stopped and daydreamed and visualised what it would be like to go home without having completed the bow drill flame and how I would feel about myself and what that would be like and would I really put the effort into achieving that on my own without all the support from the other people? Probably not. How would it feel to have completed that course but not have gotten that certificate? So that was another thing that pushed me on. So also daydream or visualise what it would be like for you to give up. What does that path look like to you? Where does that path lead? Do you like that path? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but there are times when your priorities have changed, your goals have changed, your interests have changed and your original goal is no longer important to you. So you need to either give up or reevaluate or change the project or change the goal so it is more suited to your needs now, or your interests or your wants.

As I have said, some of the things that really helped me get through that bushcraft assessment was accepting help and taking a break, I took a lot of breaks and also I didn’t practice intermittent fasting for those two days. I just ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and I ate comfort foods. I usually try to stay high fat, low carb, mostly keto, even when I am camping and going on these courses and I do practice intermittent fasting, but I didn’t because I knew my stress levels for completing that bow drill assessment were going to be really high and I thought: you know what I just want to eat the foods I want to eat, when I want to eat, and not add that extra stress and worry to my week or the two days of assessment.

So also think about things you can do to reduce other stresses on yourself. So maybe if you are really working hard towards a goal and you are getting really frustrated and it is getting really difficult, maybe there are other goals you can either drop, or postpone them, change the completion date, let go of other projects, or just let go of things that aren’t important to you. Maybe you have decided that the main goal, or this particular goal, is super-important to you but you let go of other things or your postpone them to give yourself more time and energy and to put the effort in to achieve the primary goal.

Frustration is also a big part of it. I found it really frustrating to just try and fail and try and fail and try and fail and again sometimes you need to take a break, have a snack, have some comfort food and whatever and then try again or get help and try again. Frustration, I think, sometimes is a part of the journey when we are doing these difficult and challenging things whether it is in life or in outdoor adventures and I think perseverance is something that can help us with frustration. When we have persevered and when we have achieved things it gives us the confidence to do it again and again and again and to try for bigger things and to try for different things.

And that is one of the reasons why I keep doing these outdoor adventures, that is one of the reasons why I keep doing these long distance trails and these courses that totally take me outside of my comfort zone, because I learn perseverance, because I learn how to work through frustration, because I learned so many things about myself and I stretch outside of my comfort zone, and I learn to not give up. And I learn how to do things so I can achieve my goals, not just in these outdoor adventures but in life because I think every time I achieve one of my goals or my projects or my journeys in the outdoors, it helps me with my life, it helps me to persevere in my life, it helps me to achieve my projects and achieve my goals and stretch outside of my comfort zone and keep from giving up in my day-to-day life. It helps me to create the life that I want to live because I know that I can do it because I have done it before, in my outdoors adventures, in my walking, and my courses.

And it just really helps me to grow as a person and it makes other aspects of my life easier because as I have said a thousand times talking about comfort zone (and I did a podcast episode about this recently so if you want to learn about your comfort zone on episode 369 I talk about ‘Getting Outside of Your Comfort Zone With Outdoor Adventures’) and when you stretch your comfort zone in a particular area you will stretch it in other areas of your life.

I feel that in the last ten years I have been stretching and stretching my comfort zone and I have grown in so many ways, so I would like to invite you today to think about how you can reflect on perseverance and how you can improve your perseverance and your persistence in your outdoor adventures and also in life, something to be aware of because when I became aware of that during my bushcraft course it really helped me to keep going, it just really motivate me and I have signed up for some ultra walks next year that I am not sure that I am ready to share about on social media, but you are hearing about it first.

There is one in April, I think it is, and one in September, long-distance walks but in one go and that is going to be a massive stretch for me and it is going to be a massive stretch out of my comfort zone. For the last five years I have been walking slowly, I have been taking breaks, I have been resting early and often, and the challenges that I have set forth for myself next year, they are going to totally be outside of my comfort zone, I am going to have to train for them and it is a very different kind of walking. My normal slow-paced ‘let’s-enjoy-the-journey-walking’, is not going to be replaced but this is going to be a new thing and I think we shall see in addition to my normal slow-paced-walking, we will see how it goes. You will find out more next year once I do it. And hopefully I will be sharing some of the journey with you as I train for these here on the podcast and on the blog.

So that is it for now. I hope you found this interesting and useful and I hope it gives you something to reflect on.

Another related episode, which if you haven’t listen to it I think you might enjoy is 364, where I talk about personal growth through outdoor adventures and that is just personal growth in general. Both of those episodes that I mentioned, 369 and 364 now have downloadable transcripts as always about a week or two after an episode goes live the transcripts are available on my website, you can just read them straight up on my website or you can download the transcripts in a PDF and that is with no opt-in required. I don’t ask you to give me your email address you can just click the link and download it for free. That is just because, sometimes when I am listening to other podcasts I find it really challenging to take in the information, I am not good at receiving information through my ears, so sometimes when I am learning something I want to go back and read what I just listened so I can really take on the information, so that is why.

I hope you found it interesting and useful, I would really like to challenge you to reflect on this and think about how you persevere in your outdoor adventures and in life and how you can stretch yourself even more. Maybe come up with one stretch goal for your outdoors adventures that you would like to plan either for the next week, month or year and share it with me. Email me at: [email protected] and let me know what your goal is, I would love to hear from you.

And thank you so much for listening, if you enjoyed this episode please leave a quick review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, it would mean the world to me. And I just got an email from someone the other day asking me how to review on Apple podcasts so I have done a couple of videos which I will link to in the show notes on how to review the podcast on Apple podcasts on desktop or on the mobile app.

So that is all for now and remember to visit: http://HollyWorton.com/369 for the show notes on this episode and in a couple of weeks the transcript. Thank you so much for listening.