Transcript

Holly: Hello adventurers! and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 379. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about why it is so important to regularly reevaluate our goals. Now this is something that I have been thinking about a lot, because again we are getting to the end of the Celtic New Year, this is the time of the year when I start getting ready to plan the new calendar year, getting ready to plan my goals, I am putting together my annual planner that I am going to releasing for sale in a couple of weeks. I am just already starting to think about wrapping up my goals for this year and planning my goals and plans and projects for the new year.

I have also been thinking about this a lot, because last weekend I ran my first race in 15 years, almost. I think the last time I ran a race was the 10k I did in Buenos Aires in I think 2006, 2007, so about 13 or 14 years ago. And my husband and I went out to Exmoor to run a race that was just absolutely fantastic, and I will link to it in the show notes, because it was such great organisation and it was such a great weekend, I really, really, enjoyed it. So I ran the 10k and he ran the 50k and I originally wasn’t planning to sign up for the 10k, he was the one that was going to be racing that day, but I had kind of stepped up my training in the weeks before the event and I said to him at one point, ‘you know if I get to the point where I can train more than 10k on my own, then I will sign up for the 10k and do that’ and so I did. A couple of weeks before I got up to running 14k and I thought, ‘okay today is the day that I know I can do it, so I will just sign up for it’. It was absolutely beautiful, it was a really, really, challenging course and I didn’t notice at the time that I signed up for it that it was rated as ‘moderate to strenuous’, it was probably a good thing that I didn’t see that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have signed up for it (which is really weird because I know I must have seen it because I read and I reread the sign up page so many times and it was right on there, but there you go, the mind sees what needs to see to do the things that it wants to do…).

So it was a really challenging 10k and people said it was one of the most challenging 10k’s in the country, fantastic, it was really hard, and I learned many things from it which I shared in a blog post I wrote called, ‘Lessons Learned from my First Race in Almost 15 Years’. Yeah, I won’t get into those so much, but I think it was really useful for me to sit down and evaluate what are some of the things that I need to do differently next time? And what are some of the things that I did well? So I will link to the blogpost in the show notes because, if you are looking to do any races you might find it useful. This was also the trail race that I had ever done, I ran a marathon years ago, and that was a city marathon in California, and then I ran the 10k in Buenos Aires and both of those were city races–I had never run a trail race. And so, it was very, very, different and both of those races were really flat, again, most cities are fairly flat, and this was very, very, hilly, much more hilly than anything that I have in my area which reminded me that I need to train on hills. I live in an area called the Surrey Hills, you would think it was hilly, but compared to the rest of the country these are lowland conditions, it is not that hilly. So I have got that up on the blog.

Then, I have also got another guest blog, done by my friend Sarah, called ‘Solo Running for Women: Staying Safe in the Outdoors’ and that is kind of a companion post to the post I wrote that I wrote about ‘Solo Hiking For Women, Staying Safe in the Outdoors’. So I will link to both of those in the show notes but I hope you fine those useful, especially the ‘Lessons Learned From my First Race’, because if you are looking to do races, I think it is worth thinking about every detail in advance just so get all the little details down so that you have less to worry about on the day. I was super-nervous so yeah; I think I will definitely improve for the next time. I have actually already signed for two more races! I have signed up for this weird timed race, I don’t know what to call it, it has got these loops, and it is here in my local area, which I am really excited about doing, because I can literally walk there from my house—which will make it so much nicer not to travel— but, you have got basically got six hours to do all the loops you want, it is roughly at 5k loops so you can do 5k, 10k, 15k or you can do as many loops as you want within the six hour time limit. I like that because you don’t have to say how much you are going to run in advance, you can just say, ‘I am going to run a bunch of loops and see what I can do’, and you can see how you do on the day.  So my goal is to do three loops – which would be 15k and we will see what happens.

I have also signed up for a half-marathon at the end of December and I am really excited about this one. I decided to apply one of the things that I learned from Exmoor – and run a very flat run! – because I feel like if I am going to stretch my goal, I want easier terrain, so I am running a half-marathon. And that leads me into the topic of today which is why it is so important to regularly reevaluate our goals because running a half-marathon was one of my goals for next year and, as I said, I haven’t formally written out my goals yet and I do have a page in my journal for this year where I wrote out my fitness goals for the next couple of years: what is my goal for kickboxing? what is my goal for backpacking and hiking? what is my goal for walking and running? I was just laughing at myself because I realised I had written down, ‘half marathon for next year and a marathon for 2022’, and somehow in my head I had forgotten that I had written that and in my head I decided I was going to do a half marathon and a marathon next year, which is totally do-able, but I decided to bump up the half marathon to December, because I looked at my training and I realised that I have time to do the training to get to that point, so I am super excited about that, which means, once I do that, I need to find a lovely marathon to do next year. And that is going to be a big deal for me! When I planned my marathon, back in, I don’t even know when it was, 2003 maybe, thereabouts, I am trying to think, it was 2002/2003, whatever a long time ago, about 18 years ago and I did not finish, I DNF’d that thing. And that is something that has really bothered me ever since and it was an event where I took on a lot of limiting beliefs about my fitness levels and my ability to be an athletic kind of person. I developed a whole bunch of limiting beliefs as a result of that DNF.

So I kind of feel like I have unfinished business in terms of marathon running but I have done, I actually did a huge tapping session with my friend Cara Wilde, we did a whole thing where I did my values around my body and fitness, and the whole limiting belief around my marathon came up and we just tapped through that and transformed a lot of beliefs and now I am super-excited. Running a marathon totally seems like something I can do next year, it doesn’t seem like an impossible dream, it really, really, helps. I am going to link to Cara in the show notes–if you are have been listening to this podcast, I know you know who she is because she has been a guest several times, but she does great work in terms of, she does this great NLP values elicitation – that is what is is. And then, based on that, she clears up your limiting beliefs around that using tapping, or EFT, and then she does the values elicitation again, to get your new values, once you are in a better place – it is such a powerful, powerful, process and I am totally in a different place with my training thanks to that.

I am also seeing another NLP person to help me with my beliefs around training. So I am working a lot on my sports mindset because I know that is probably the weakest part of my mindset, I have been working on business mindset for years, I think I have a great business mindset, I have really come a long way in that area but my sports mindset, not so good but it has been getting better and I think doing that mindset work is what has helping me to completely rethink my fitness goals for the next couple of years, because I am already bumping things up, which I didn’t think I could do, because I didn’t think I was capable of doing it and now I can see that with the training it is possible – so that is a huge mindset shift for me. And if you feel like you still have limiting beliefs around your fitness ability, or your sportiness, that is something to look into, I would see someone about that, either see someone who does NLP, or tapping, or PK, or something that helps you to reprogram your beliefs at the subconscious level and I did a blog post a couple of weeks ago, about sports mindset, because I was trying to get clear on what my own limiting beliefs are around that, so I will link to that in the show notes, I give different questions in that blog post to help you get clear on what your current sports mindset is.

Reevaluating your goals

So enough about me, let’s talk about you. When was the last time that you looked at your goals? Whether it is your goals, your plans, your projects for your personal life, your hobbies, your outdoor adventures, your professional life or business life, when was the last time you looked at that? Do you even have your goals written down or are they just in your head? If they are in your head, write them down now, as soon as possible, today if possible, this week. If they are written down but you haven’t looked at them in a while look at them. The only way that I managed to get stuff done is because I am constantly looking at that list, I have got it printed, I have got it stuck into my journal and I have got another one that is printed and it is stuck on a clipboard, where I cam see it on my desk. That’s how I get stuff done. And, flipping through my journal today and looking at my fitness goals for the future, which I hadn’t yet incorporated into my formal list of goals, but looking through that list made me realise I am already doing the things that I planned to do next year, and I could bump up stuff sooner.

So when you are looking at your goals, they are not set in stone. Sometimes we need to reevaluate especially when we have such a weird year as we have this year. Sometimes we can do things sooner than planned: I am doing that half-marathon at the end of the year, rather than doing it next year. I am doing the marathon next year rather than the following year. I really want to do an ultra, I want to do a 50k, that is going to be my first ultra. I think I originally planned to do that in 2022, I have got it written down for 2021, or 2022, I think I might be able to do it at the end of next year, I don’t know, but I think I might be able to do that sooner than I thought. I have even bigger goals for running that I am too scared to say, but some people have heard them, so I will just say it. You know how I walked the South Downs Way in 2015 and it was so damned hard, and I wrote a book about it, I want to run the South Downs Way, that is 100 miles. So I don’t plan to do that until 2023, it is in the list, but I want to run the whole thing – I am so excited about that, it is crazy! Right now it is crazy because I haven’t trained for it, I am nowhere near to it, but that is my big scary goal that I just made public! So there we are.

So sometimes we can do things sooner than planned and sometimes we can add new goals. So when my plans got messed up by Covid this year, I was supposed to walk the Camino Ingles and Portuguese, because I couldn’t do those, I decided to walk the Ridgeway instead, the Ridgeway I was originally going to walk in April and update the book then, but I could bump that to this year, because it was easier to do domestic travel rather than international travel, so that was exciting so I bumped that sooner. And I added new goals, I added my Into The Woods short reads series of books, which were based on podcast episodes, I really enjoyed working on those, I want to add to that series and see how they do. It was just so easy to do and I think they are really useful books. If Trees Could Talk, is coming out really soon in Spanish, that was in the works, but I had never really put a date to it, so that was a new goal that I added for this year. Sometimes you need to take things off your plate and push them to next year. About half way through the year I got the idea of doing the plant-spirits short reads which was going to be a new short reads series based on communication with different plant spirits, but then, I don’t know, I like the idea but somehow it just didn’t happen, it didn’t seem right, so I have decided to maybe push it to next year or push it on the back burner. (We shall see. If you are super-interested in reading a plant-spirit short reads series drop me a line and let me know, that might motivate me to get moving on that! I like the idea of it, but I don’t know, something is stopping me.) My OBOD work, my Druid work, I have not done much of that at all this year and I am really missing the morning routine, than I had where I would do my OBOD ceremony and I would do the Druidry work and I really miss that, I really feel like that is missing in my life, so I kind of took it off my plate, but I know it needs to come back because I feel like my spirit is missing, my spiritual side is craving that morning routine that I had around my OBOD work. So I had to take it off my plate because things got crazy and weird this year, but I miss it, so it needs to come back on.

So those are kind of some thoughts as you are reevaluating your plans and projects, take a look at your list, take a look at everything you planned this year and see, is there anything that you could maybe bump up and get done before the end of the year? Is there anything new that you could add to your list between now and the end of the year? Is there anything that you need to take off your plate and push it 2021? And as you do this, be kind to yourself. I was actually really impressed with myself and my ability to not beat myself up as I went through my list of goals and looked at how things had changed and looked at what I hadn’t achieved and what I had achieved, because I realised that this was such a strange year and I needed to be flexible. Flexibility is something that I haven’t been so good at in the past, and I have been good at beating myself up when I don’t achieve my goals in the past and I haven’t done that this time, so. Be kind to yourself and realise that sometimes life needs to be flexible, yes we set goals because we want to achieve them and want to do these things, but 2020 was a very strange year, so reevaluate. Think about what you still have time to do between now and the end of December and think about what you want to push to the next year. This whole process is a formal process that I go through when I am doing my year end review and my planning for the next year and it is all a part of my planner that I will be releasing very soon. But, in the meantime, these are some very useful things to be thinking about. So have a think about your goals, your plans, your projects and what you can do sooner, new goals that you can add, and things that you can take off your plate for next year and be kind to yourself – I don’t think I can say that enough because that has been such a hard thing for me over the years.

So I hope you found this interesting and useful. And that is about it! This is short and sweet, I wanted to share with you my story of the 10k, because it was such great an experience, I had such a fantastic weekend. I kept saying to Agustin, so many times, I think I have told him 97 times what a good time I had. It was such a quick trip, we drove up, stayed one night, drove back after the race, short, sweet and really, really, satisfying, it was such a good trip. And one of the things that I have learned from that trip is that we are going to use races as a way to see more of the country. We had never been to Exmoor before and we really loved it, it was so gorgeous, it was so, so, beautiful and the race was just absolutely wonderful, great organisation, everything was fantastic, so highly recommend it. Highly recommend getting out of your comfort zone and doing events like this because it helps formalise your outdoor adventures and your hobbies and your plans, projects, for doing the stuff that you want to do whether it is hiking, walking, running, there are a lot of events out there that will take both runners and walkers and there are a lot of events that designed for runners but the cut off time is so long that you could walk it. One of the guys that did the 50k with Agustin walked it, but he speed walked it and he showed up I can’t even wrap my head around this, he walked so fast. Maybe that is not your thing, but just open your mind to the possibilities and I think that is one of the biggest things I am learning here, as a result of doing this work on my sports mindset, my fitness mindset, really opening up my mind to the possibilities for what I can do physically. There was a time, not that long ago (2015 like I said!), I walked the South Downs Way and I really really struggled with it, if you have read the first edition of that book I have cleaned it up a little bit in the second edition but I really had a rough time of it, there were some meltdowns, there were tears and to think that I am even entertaining the idea of running the South Downs Way, what is that! It is a dream that I have, and it is something that I know if I train properly I can do it, but I only believe that because I did that work on my mindset. So I know it has been a while since I badgered you about the importance of doing mindset work, but it is so, so, important because it just makes you see new possibilities in your life and that is so priceless. Priceless, priceless, priceless.

Feedback/Contact

So that is all for now, please let me know what you thought of this week’s episode, you can email me at: [email protected] and get in touch there.

Thank you for listening and 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 it would also help get this podcast out to other people because they will see how much people enjoy it.

Next Week

Next week’s episode, I am super excited about—is very timely!—my friend Sarah K Brandis is coming on to talk about training burnout. So as I am at this point where I am really stepping up my training and I am doing the marathon and the half marathon, I am aware of that fact that I don’t want to burn out and Sarah has already done that for us so we can learn from her experience. She is going to be talking about marathon training and burnout and she was planning to do four marathons last year and ended up having a rough time of it and now she is recovering from chronic fatigue. So we will be talking about lessons learned from her journey, what she would do if she could do it over again, what she would do differently this time and how to avoid training burn out. How to avoid getting burn out when we work towards these goals that we have that are super exciting and we get carried out of control and we do too much.

So as always, I think balance is important which is why I am super excited to have Sarah on the show, so that is next week.  

So that is all for now. Remember to visit: https://hollyworton.com/379 for the show notes on this episode, thank you.