[00:00:00] And welcome to the scary goals club. I am your host, Hazel Robertson. And I believe that to make the impact that you know, you're called to make in the world, it requires setting bigger, scarier goals, and then becoming the person who creates them. That is what I am here to show you how to do. That's what we're diving into.
Mindset tools, tricks, really simple, practical, actionable steps. You can take and start applying straight away. Cause. Or whatever you believe, we have this one life that we definitely know about. Start making the impact you know you want to make in the world. Fear is not a reason to stop. We keep going. We work through the fear.
That is what we do in the Scary Ghouls Club. So come on in, come join, hit subscribe, and let's get started.
Hi and welcome to episode 25 of the Scary Goals Club podcast. Now this episode, this is the freshest episode I have ever done because I'm [00:01:00] recording this at 9. 06 on Friday morning when it's going to go out. Normally I do put the podcasts out at seven in the morning and If you are listening and in real time, I podcast and go at this.
I didn't want to put out now. It's not that I had tried to record this and like hadn't recorded one. It, which leads me to what I'm actually going to talk about today. It's because I was trying to do something new and it took me so much longer. Then I actually thought it would to the point. Anyway, I'll get into all that and I'm going to unpick and unpack some of the lessons for if something is taking longer.
If you are doing something for the first time, especially something around your scary goal. Anytime we're doing something new for the first time that we have never done before, it is always Always, pretty much guaranteed always, going to take slightly longer than we thought. And that's okay. And I'm going to talk through like, [00:02:00] why this happens, why that's actually okay, and if that is happening for you, whether it's with your scary goal, whether it's with some business project, whatever it is, what to do about it, and how to move through it, so that, There's not also this heaviness attached that's taking more time as well.
So here's what happened. I have mentioned this a few times in the podcast, a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of my clients to be on the podcast. I had been doing bits of editing but to be honest I had been putting off the editing because I knew I wanted the podcast to be under an hour and I knew that it was like an hour and 20 we were chatting for so I knew that there was a good chunk of editing that I had to do more so than I do when I'm recording myself And also knowing that it was a longer chunk of time, my episodes are only about 30 minutes.
It was like, okay, there's more editing and there's more listening because the longer the podcast episode is, if you're listening to a few times and editing, you know, more times you do that every time it's going to be an hour and 20 getting it down to an hour rather than like 30 minutes. So, [00:03:00] knowing all this, I built it up in my head to make this big thing and I put it off for a few weeks.
I'd been doing a bit and I was like, uh, don't have time right now, don't have time, and put it off. And. Then earlier this week, I did a good chunk on Tuesday and a good chunk yesterday and I was like, oh, I'm totally gonna have this nailed by the time to put it out on Friday today. Spoiler alert, I didn't quite get it nailed.
I mean, it's so close . It's so almost there. And there were things that happened, technical things that I couldn't have foreseen. Because I hadn't done it before and I didn't realize it and because I didn't really have a contingency plan in place and this is some of the things I'll get on to when it did then take longer.
I like by the end of the day yesterday it was like and even I tried to take last night and I got up early this morning to try and do some more I was like it's literally not going to go out today like unless I spend another few hours on it. And I was like, I'm just going to record one with all my lessons and get that instead.
so [00:04:00] there's so many things that I have learned from it. And I just want to talk you through that. But firstly, I want to talk about why things take longer than we think they will. As humans, we often overestimate how long things are going to take in the short term. Interestingly, we actually underestimate how much we can do in the longer term.
Like when we expand the time horizon, there's so much that we can actually create. In a bigger period of time, which actually often puts us off even trying these bigger things, because we're like, oh, I don't have the time for it. And actually in the bigger time horizons, we can create so much more than we imagined.
But on the smaller time horizons, we always think usually that we can do a lot more than we actually can, because We're relatively optimistic. We are not accounting for the unknown unknowns. So there's things when we look at it, we're just like, Oh, cool. Yeah, I can totally do this. It'll be roughly this time.
And we often use like rules of thumb, like heuristics, like ways that things have happened in the past to predict how [00:05:00] long something will take in the future, which if you've done, if you're doing the exact same thing, Like over and over again, like I have been with the podcasting. It's like, I've been doing this for a few months now.
I have a good handle on how long it actually takes for me to stand up, to record, to edit, to get it, to publish it. If I chat for longer, I'm like, got more editing to do. But generally I have a good sense of how long that takes. That's fine. And I was almost using that, not consciously, but my brain was using that to think, okay, well, this is how long it'll take roughly to do this type of podcast.
Yet. I wasn't. Taking into account the fact that it would be different for the software, there'd be different elements that I'd have to pull in. There was a back and forth. So it's not just like cutting out a chunk of me, rabbiting on about something in these podcasts. Actually, I don't put that much out, but, but knowing that it's different because there's that rapport that I having to make sure that that's still held true.
And like, Okay, that thing I hadn't done before and didn't [00:06:00] have any last experience of how long that would actually take. So my brain predicting and using it's like rules of thumb of how long this has taken just completely fell flat because it was something I hadn't done before in this format.
There were these unknown unknowns that literally I've come up against. Last night and this morning, it's like, oh, okay, that's not happening. also there's another, another piece with ADHD is it's something called time blindness. So like my brain and anyone that has ADHD. I don't know if it works for other types of neurodiversity, but how I interpret time or how those with ADHD interpret time is different.
I'm trying to think. I don't want to get into it. So, Dr. Andrew Huberman has a really good podcast on this where he explains it's, it's linked to the amount of dopamine you have in your system. and the rate that you're blinking it's almost like a camera your blinks are like your shutter speed and when there's less dopamine in the system you're blinking [00:07:00] More or less, I can't remember which way around it is, meaning that time literally feels like it slows down.
So it's like, you think you have plenty of time and actually it's like, oh wait, I don't have as much or like that happened quicker than I thought it would. Or this time has elapsed and I'm not as far as I thought I would. So there's all these other elements at play as well. And actually time is this completely, I'm going to do a whole podcast on this, but time is just this mental construct.
It's completely made up.
I won't even get into that so there's all these elements at play with why when you're doing something for the first time it is Always, always, always.
Pretty much guaranteed always going to take longer than you think it will. So I just want to put that out there. So if you are doing anything for the first time, especially around your scary goal, just know that that is going to be true and give yourself space for it.
So so there's the practical stuff, the unknown unknowns, how our brains work. There's also the mental aspects of time. So just by how we are thinking, we can either [00:08:00] expand or contract time.
Again, I'm going to get into this in like a whole nother podcast, but we can make something take longer. Based on what's going on in our brain, based on how we are thinking and feeling, how we are approaching things, our energy, how we are being, and I'll give you an example, like for this podcast, this interview that I haven't put out today.
there was so many mental aspects that were delaying it. I was telling myself I didn't know what to do, telling myself it was this big thing and it was going to take so much time. Like the way that I was thinking about it was causing me to delay even starting it and looking at it. I'm like, Figuring out how long it was going to take.
And it was also when I was doing it, I was like, Oh, I'm not sure if it's this, not sure if it's that, like there was a bit of questioning and second guessing myself going on. So all of that. Like imagine if I had been really focused, really clear, given myself like a huge chunk of time to just be like, okay, I'm just going to go all in, get this done.
I know I can do [00:09:00] this. I know I can figure this out. Let's go. I would have collapsed the timeframe. I would have been focused. I would have been in that flow state, had creative thinking. I would have been really present. But instead, when we are, like, second guessing ourself and telling ourselves we don't really know and we're not really sure how to do it, that's when it's like, we stop and we start and it's like, oh, I'll go and do this other thing and then back to it and then something else.
And as soon as we are task switching, if our brain is not present, not focused, we have all these distractions, we're going from one thing to the other, that expands the time that something takes because it takes us, I think it's up to, like, 25 minutes to get back into what we were doing into the level. So every time we reach for our phone, we get a cup of tea, we go to the bathroom, we distract ourselves.
Then trying to get back into whatever we were doing, it just takes so much longer. So there's that element as well of how we are thinking and feeling about whatever we were doing about ourselves, about what other people think that is going to drive how we are showing up to that task that is going to drive how long that task is going to take.
So if this is you [00:10:00] just. know that it's totally normal. Okay. We're human. we're not like machines. We don't just focus on something and get it done. There's so many other elements at play, but just knowing that whenever you do something for the first time, it's going to take longer because of the unknown unknowns and because of the mental elements as well.
And just give yourself space for it and give yourself grace for it for when it takes longer than you thought, because here is the thing. So here are five things that really helped me move through this. And actually be able to put a podcast out today, which is jumping on here, sharing these things with you and not like beating myself up about it and getting stuck and spinning out.
Okay. Cause that's just not going to help be helpful. And that is going to cost me more time, use more energy as well. So here are the five things that have helped me. Okay. The first is be kind to yourself. I've always spoke about this last week. Honestly, like. This thing, like being kind to yourself changes everything because it's the difference between okay this thing [00:11:00] happened and taking a big stick is what I say to my clients like you're taking up this big judgment stick and like whacking yourself with it and just spinning out and not going anywhere.
Or being like, okay, here we go. This has happened. Like you had an idea, you had a plan, you had a best guess of how long it would take. Maybe you didn't give yourself enough space. Maybe you agreed to a deadline that actually was a little bit tight. Maybe you didn't take into account other things you had on.
Maybe you didn't give yourself space for like bathroom breaks and having a cup of tea and being a human and going out for a walk and resting and stepping away. Like, if this thing took longer, you can drop the judgment. It makes it so much easier to then move through it because any plan, like any idea we have of how long something is going to take is completely made up because we don't know.
We can have a best guess. We can do like the more that we can break something down, that's easier to predict how long it's going to take. We never actually know. There are so many elements at play of us, [00:12:00] ourselves, our internal state, if we got sleep last night, if something else comes in, if, who knows, there's so many things with life and so many things with what we're actually doing, especially when we're doing something for the first time, that, like, it's always going to be different than you plan.
It's literally made up. If you know that, like a plan is a best guess, is never factual, it is never like absolute, it's always evolving. And when you know that, then it's like you can drop the judgment about beating yourself up if it doesn't go to exactly how you planned. It's like, okay, you had a best guess.
You probably got closer than if you didn't plan at all. Now what? Okay. So drop the judgment and just be like, okay, now what am I going to do?
And the second one is again, it's like, now what it is, what it is. So this thing has happened. So when I realized this morning, it's like, okay, this isn't going to go through today or not even this morning. Okay. This is what it is. And [00:13:00] almost like, what if it is? always was always going to take this long.
it's easy to be like, it should have taken this long and it should have taken this long. What if literally this was as long as it was always going to take? Like, how do you know it was going to take less time? It was always going to take a certain amount of putting off a certain amount of like uncertainty in yourself, a certain amount of going back and forth on things, a certain amount of figuring stuff out.
What if this was literally All it was ever going to take doing this for the first time. Yeah. The next time it'll be quicker for sure. Like when I do my next interview, it's going to be so much quicker because there's so many things I've learned from this one, I will apply, but what if this was always the time it was going to take?
Now, the third thing that really helped me was to zoom out. Okay. Because again, this morning when I was like, it's not going to go out. It was very easy for my brain to be like, well, if people are expecting podcasts at like seven in the morning, they're not going to get it. They're going to think you're unreliable.
They're going to think you're not consistent. People are going to stop listening if they don't think they're getting them every week. People are going to forget about your podcast. People don't care. Like go into what others are going [00:14:00] to think and how they're going to think about me and how I'm showing up.
And then it's very easy for these old stories that I have about not being organized, not being reliable, all of this to come up like, see, you didn't do this. You didn't plan. You didn't do this. That was starting to come up and I caught it and was like, okay, I see what my brain's trying to do. I'm going to zoom out.
Like, is this going to matter in a week? No. Is this going to matter in like a month or five years? Will this matter in five years that I didn't get a podcast out when I said I would, but I got one out a few hours later because I recorded it on the day. Oh, and just knowing that whatever you were in, if something's taking longer than you thought pause and like all the judgments coming in and all the like, what others are going to think pause and just zoom out, like zoom to the end of your life.
Like literally, will it matter? Maybe it will, but I think most of the time it really doesn't.
So the fourth thing that really helped me this morning to show up to get on here to record this was to breathe.
So [00:15:00] take deep breaths in, deep breaths out. Because I could feel my body was in this slightly like rushed state. And I know that whenever I'm rushing, it's driven by some kind of anxiety, some kind of like panic scarcity. Like I have to get something out now. I have to get something out now. And again, driven from that, like, what will people think if they are looking and there's not podcasts, I have to go now.
And I could feel, even when I went to press record, it was like, oh wait, this isn't how I want to be recording the podcast. Imagine if I came on and was like, hi, so, okay, these things. Oh, you don't want to listen to that. And like, just because I've had a morning and something's happened and my brain is giving me this story, like, that's not what I want to convey to you.
So just knowing, give yourself a few moments. There is no rush. There is plenty of time is taking how long it's taken. You may as well just like slow yourself down, be calm and refocus. So like breathing in, breathing out. grounding [00:16:00] yourself and helping you then make a plan about what to do from a calm place.
So even again this morning before I even jumped on here, I was like, okay, no, I just need to go back and like edit some more and do this. It was like, no breathe. And then I was like, no way I'm going to record a podcast. on this whole situation, and I'm going to put that out. And then I'm going to put the interview podcast out next week, and it'll give plenty of time, and I can pull clips from it, and do all of that, but I just was going to be feeling too rushed to try and do that today.
It was like, okay, cool, and here is the plan, and now I'm executing the plan.
And then the fifth thing that's really helped me, and I'm going to do some more of that after I record this, It's just, what can I learn for next time? So thinking about that for you, if something has taken longer than you thought, there were unknown unknowns that came in, maybe there were some things that you could have predicted or you could have built in space for or contingency for, like, what are those learnings?
Because if we don't pause and, and doing this from a calm place is really helpful as well because you access your rational [00:17:00] prefrontal cortex part of your brain, not your survival brain. And it's like, you're a failure and you're terrible and blah. quiet that bit down and come back to like, okay, this thing happened.
What can I learn? Because when we can do that, we can draw so many amazing lessons and wins out of it that are going to make sure we don't do this again, or we're going to learn something for next time. So even for me, it's like. Okay, if I am doing some new type of podcasting and editing and figuring that all out, I'm going to do that when I know that I have the space of maybe a few weeks of scheduled posts.
So like if I had one going out already today and one going out for next week and knowing that like I had the space to try something new and do the new editing or whatever it's going to be, I'm sure there'll be some other variation in the future. And not be like, I have to do this now in the next few hours so I can get it out.
That is not a useful premise to give, I know for me, my brain space for that creativity and to not feel rushed. Like I know that when I give myself plenty of time and plenty of [00:18:00] space, what I can produce and the whole process of producing it and creating it just feels so much more spacious and enjoyable.
And I'm like, I have to get this thing out in a few hours. It puts this pressure on me and I just, it's like, it's not much fun. So I usually don't do this to myself. I did it to myself this week and the learning is just, Oh wait, why were you doing that? And like, unpicking that. And also today now I'm like, right, I'm going to shift a few things in my calendar.
I'm going to record a few more podcasts for the next week to get them scheduled in an advance to give myself this buffer space. Something I've been talking about, like doing for a while. I've just not done it. Now I've learned the lesson like so hard. I'm like, okay. This week is the week I'm gonna have a few more and be at least a week or two out like a week or two lag than being like okay literally trying to record one on the day and put it out like it's gone so far the other way I'm like This is not happening anymore.
And sometimes that's how we learn lessons. Like we learn it hard. We learn it when, yeah, for me it's [00:19:00] like, I'm literally recorded and like imagine if I was on holiday today or sick, there would be no podcast that would go out. And I know that that's also not what I want. So it's just giving myself, building for me in contingency space backup so that if I'm not feeling like it or something else comes up, some other unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown.
That's okay. And I can kind of weather that. So it's just something that I've got out of the habit of doing. And now I'm like, okay, I'm going to get back in the habit of doing that. So those are the five things. I'll just repeat them. So be kind to yourself. It's happened. Don't add this layer of judgment.
Number two is okay. It is what it is. What if it was always going to take this long just because it always was, how do you know it was going to take less time? You didn't. And it didn't. So like, it is what it is. Number three, zooming out. Like is this really gonna matter in a week, the end of your life, in a year?
Number four, breathe. So switch your brain from the like slightly fight or flight, go, go, go, go, go, rush, rush, rush. Anxiety driven, breathe, calm [00:20:00] down, get grounded, then make a clear plan for what you're gonna do now. And then number five, like when you're in that calm place, what can you learn from next time and start to implement some of those things as well.
So I hope that was helpful. And if you are loving the scary goals podcast, you want even more of this work, you want help in actually applying it to you, your own unique scary goal, your own unique business and brain.
I have just launched a monthly scary goals club party. It's completely free. It's free. on zoom. We're going to come together on zoom once a month. There'll be cameras off. So just come where you are. If you want to go like out on a walk while you're doing it, whatever feels most fun, like plug it into your ears, be there live.
Other people be there live as well. I'll be doing some teaching. And then if you have literally any questions on anything, you can ask me and you can get my coaching and my feedback there. And then like any questions on any of it, it's going to be so good.
It's going to be the first Thursday of every single month starting in September. So Thursday, the 5th of September 1 to 1. 30. Okay. So if you're out, [00:21:00] if you are, if it's during your working day, grab your lunch, go for a walk or come join. It's going to be so good.
sign up, you will get the zoom link just before the call and then come on live and you can like literally ask me any questions. It's gonna be so good. Have an amazing rest of the day, an amazing rest of the week, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If this was helpful, please hit subscribe and leave a review. This helps get this work in the hands of more purposeful people. That is more people creating bigger, scarier goals, making an even bigger impact in the world. And if you want to take this work deeper and work with me directly, head to the show note and I put all of the information there.
If you've got any questions or if there's anything you're like, ooh, I'd love you to talk about that on the pod, please just get in touch. I love hearing from you guys. And I'll see you next time in the Scary Ghouls Club.
