[00:00:00] Welcome to the Scary Goals Club. I am your host, Hazel Robertson, and I believe that to make the impact that you know you were 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 are diving into with mindset, tools, tricks, really simple, practical, actionable steps you can take and start applying straight away.
Because whatever you believe, we have this one life that we definitely know about. Start making the impact you know you wanna 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 Goals Club. So come on in, come join, hit Subscribe, and let's get started
Hello and welcome to the Scary Goals Club podcast with your host, Hazel Robertson. And I'm sitting here. This is my second day back after maternity [00:01:00] leave. I had my first day coaching last week. Oh my gosh, it was amazing and scary. It was the first call of the Scary Goals Lab, and it's been a while since I have done a group coaching, and so my heart was racing as I was joining the call.
And of course, there were some tech issues that even though I had tested out different things and I forgot bits to tell them about, and anyway, it was amazing. I managed to pause, draw a line under the tech stuff, and remind myself that in any moment I can start again. I can begin again. That was from a meditation teacher, Sam Harris.
In any moment, and this is for you too, in any moment, you can choose to begin again. And then we brought the energy back, helped them imagine their future, and we started off a year from now building that vision for their life and then working back to, okay, what is it you wanna create by the end of the lab?
And it's so interesting [00:02:00] because Oftentimes, like, we think that there's some goal that we want, and we're coming at it from, like, where we are now. And actually, when we anchor it to some bigger vision of where we're going, this bigger vision for our life, and then think, "Okay, what is it now that fits into that?"
It's maybe not the, the goal that we actually thought. And I give an example, like even for me, when I was doing-- like making the decision around launching the Scary Goals Lab and doing it in more of a group-based format rather than one-on-one coaching, which I had been doing before, it was from starting and building that bigger vision for my life of thinking, "Okay, in a year from now, how do I want my working life to be, also hanging out with my kids like, how do I want that to look?" And for me, the decision was, oh, okay, at the moment, certainly for the foreseeable, definitely till the end of the year, and we'll figure out beyond that, I wanna be working one day a [00:03:00] week.
So I'm figuring out, okay, what is it I can do? How can I help more people create their dreams, their scary goals, what they wanna create in the world?
How can I do that in one, like, literally a day a week of working? And it was like, okay. My brain was like, "Here we go. It's time to do it in a group format rather than on the one-on-one format as well." And so y- last week was a bit like, ooh, can I? You know, it's like, can I hold space for everyone's goals? Am I gonna remember what to do and how to coach and with other people watching?
Like, how does that work? And of course, I got into it. And then this week it's felt even more flowy and even more intuitive and just like how I would normally coach. And I'm sure I'll get more into the swing of it as well. So it's so fun. if you're, like, whatever scary goals you're going after, just a reminder that it's okay to show up and be messy and not get it, quote, unquote, "right," and to make mistakes and to forget [00:04:00] things, and to stumble through bits.
It's okay. It can feel a bit like, ooh. And, and the key thing is just being so kind to yourself and taking care of yourself, and knowing that Yes, other people might see you not doing everything perfect, and like I, I promise you my old internal perfectionist wanted to have everything perfect and everything polished, and yet I would not be doing this right now if I was trying to get that.
I would be waiting and building this whole thing before actually launching it and making it all perfect before having anyone on it, and I know that's not what I wanna do, and I also know that if I show up messy, imperfect as a human, then that hopefully helps other people, including yourself, be like, "Wait, I can do that too."
Because that's when we really create the magic is when we give ourselves permission to do it scared, to do it messy, to not have it perfect, and to just go and give it a go anyway. And of course, that's how we're gonna learn is by keeping doing it. I still need to remind myself to do this with social media.
I'm just so [00:05:00] out of the habit with it. But anyway, we're back on the podcasting, and it feels good to be able to be fidi- like figuring out how to get this into my weekly rhythm as well. But I am surrounded by milk because I've been pumping milk.
It's, it's one thing, like, going back to working and having, like, these are the things I wanna create in a day and, like, a l- a bit of a rough plan of like, okay, these are the things before the call, then after the call I wanna do this, and like these are the things to think about and blah, blah, blah. I have my, things to create by today list I don't always put pumping milk onto it so I'm trying to look.
I'm like, "Oh yeah, wait, I need to go and eat lunch." It's like, right, okay. "Oh wait, I need to go and sterilize the milk stuff and pump the milk stuff." So here I am. The milk has been pumped. Maybe too much information. Has it been, has it gone in its bag yet? No, but at least it's pumped, so we're good. Okay. So today I just wanted to share something [00:06:00] really fun that came out of today's call, so today's Scary Goals Lab call.
So today we were diving into how to be our amplified self, and it's so fun. I love this work, helping people understand that we get to decide on purpose how we want to be, that we're not actually... Like, oftentimes we can, until we learn this work, we, we can go through life being more reactive to things going on around us.
And instead, when we decide who we wanna be and how we wanna show up in the world, that's when everything changes. Because something could happen in our day-to-day, we get an email we don't wanna hear, someone says something, whatever the thing is, something doesn't work out as we planned, we get a no or rejection or whatever the thing is, we can still choose.
And of course, sometimes we react and we just default into old behavior. That's okay. But we get to just choose and decide how we actually wanna show up, and when we are doing that on purpose. And so today I took everyone through, a guided [00:07:00] visualization of what it, what their amplified self was like.
it's you at your most vibrant, you at your most sparkly. It's you, just sometimes we add all these layers of shoulds and how we should be and expectations, and we take stuff on from society, and we think, and we start showing up in a different way.
And actually, it's kind of stripping that back to, like, who are we at our most vibrant, our most sparkly, our essence? Like, who is that version of us? And then what they're playing around with this week is actually tapping into that and building their own rituals and practices for how they can get back into their amplified self and just practicing spending as much time as possible in this amplified self.
And then it's way quicker to default into it rather than defaulting into behaviors and practices and habits that we don't actually want. Anyway, there was something that I shared on the call which I think would be really fun to share here, and it's what can happen, when [00:08:00] we actually make a decision around a goal.
So when we have lots of ideas and we're like, "Oh, I wanna do this, I wanna do this thing, I wanna do this thing," and then we make a decision Suddenly our brain can start to freak out. Either when we make the decision it can start to freak out, because it becomes real. We either make a decision, we put a date on it, we get really specific on the goal, our brain can freak out.
And when we start moving towards the goal and it becomes more real, sometimes we can start thinking about the whole goal in its entirety, and we're thinking about, "Well, what about this? What about that? What if this happens? How do I do that? I don't know how to do this yet." and suddenly it's like our brain is trying to search for a path to get there, and there's not one.
Because when we're doing something we've never done before, there's not going to be a clear path to get there.
If it's something that you've already done, then great, it can be a goal, but it- it's not the same goal as choosing something that [00:09:00] you've never done before and figuring out this dream that's been in your heart.
It would just be something that you've done, and you could do it again. So the nature of choosing goals that feel a little bit scary, and the scariness doesn't mean it's this, like, heavy, scary, horrible goal. The scariness comes from it's still something in our heart, it's still something that lights us up, but the, the scariness comes from this is new, this is unknown.
And anything that's new and unknown feels a bit scary to our brains. Like, ugh, and it can go to the what if this happens, what if this? What if I can't do it and I look s- silly? What if... Like, for the Scary Goals Lab for me, what if no one comes? So when, like, when we start actually creating our goal, sometimes what can happen is our brain can start to problem solve for all of the different things along the way, like way, way, way in the future towards the goal, and it can get overwhelmed.
My brain was doing that with the Scary Goals Lab. I was trying to figure out... I can't even remember what it was, and I caught [00:10:00] it, and I was like, "I do not need to make a decision around something in week seven right now necessarily," before no one... Like, no one had even said yes to being part of it. Hadn't even had a way for people to sign up and apply, and yet my brain was trying to solve for this thing so far in the future.
It was like, "Oh, but what about this thing?" And we can do that. we can get overwhelmed with stuff that at this moment in time doesn't actually matter. So Nine years ago, I thought it was only a few years ago. Nine years ago, in 2017, Luke and I did this expedition across Alaska.
We called it Due North Alaska, and we were aiming to go from the southernmost to northernmost point of mainland Alaska with kayaking and biking. It was about two th- I think it was, like, 2,000 miles. I can't remember the exact distance. Three months, or just under three months. It was a lot. But when we had decided it, and when we were working towards it, and the logistics and the planning, like, we were in it, and we were like, "Yes," and things were flowing, and it was happening.
And then we were in Alaska, and we were getting prepped, and it was like, "Yes, here we [00:11:00] go." And then we started kayaking, and we had our first day of paddling. We didn't go that far. It was more about starting from the drop-off point, getting to our first island that we were gonna camp on, setting up camp for the night, and then, like, that was the start, as it were.
So we had our first day. I remember. I really, really wanna make a video of... I'm just gonna put that out to the universe at some point, a video of our expedition across Alaska. We have footage. It's on a hard drive. It's ridiculous. We had no idea how to film. We had these really average cameras. Like, I remember we saw a pack of wolves hunting a caribou up in the Arctic, and we had these, like, little point-and-click, like, zoom cameras.
It was like... But we, we saw it. We watched it. But we d- we didn't have the full-on recording equipment. So even looking back now, it would be probably quite grainy. But I still remember there was like... I think we took some footage of the first night. We were in the tent. I was freaking out [00:12:00] about any sounds outside, thinking it was a bear.
I was so paranoid about going to sleep in the tent and there being a bear that came in the tent. we would hang our food in a tree, like, 30 meters away, and high up in the tree. And then, like, even to do your teeth, you had to go over, get the bag down, get your toothpaste out, do your teeth, put it back.
And anytime you want a snack, you'd go over and get the the hanging food. Anyway, I was so paranoid about this bear, and I remember just, like, having the giggles of like, "Oh, my gosh. What is that?" Anyway, first day. Woke up the next morning. We had a pretty rough, next day of paddling, and I remember thinking, "How?"
Like, "Actually, how are we going to do this whole thing?" It was, it was, like, the reality of, it's like we could plan. We could do all these things. We got the sponsorship and the PR stuff and the social media stuff, and we were doing all of these things. Go, go, go, go, go. And then there was the reality of There's [00:13:00] bears.
There's paddling. how are we gonna do these distances? The weather, and there was storms coming in, and my brain kept going to, the enormity of what we had actually set out to do. And this can happen when we decide on our scary goal, when it becomes real. And sometimes it can become real when we make a decision, and we have a date, and we know exactly what it is.
it goes from all these ideas. Sometimes it can be real the time that we're about to do it or we are starting to do it. It's like, "Oh, wait, this is, this is big." And, and I think sometimes it's maybe a good thing that we don't have that when we are dreaming and, early on, because then we would never do anything.
So, like, when we're in the ideas phase, when it feels all, like, fun and easy And again, even when we were, planning for Alaska and, like, getting everything together, we hadn't actually done it yet. We could still say no at any point.
When we were actually there, we were doing the thing, and I was getting so [00:14:00] overwhelmed thinking, days ahead of the kayaking, how are we gonna do this? We're behind on time on this. How are we gonna do this? How are we ever gonna get up to the Arctic? How is that gonna... What's the sea ice doing?
What's all this? Like, it was all-consuming. I was in my head. I was spinning around, and I just felt so, so, so overwhelmed. And what I did, and I realized that I have done this also in endurance events, and actually I naturally default to it in lots of different situations, so it's very helpful with scary goals.
I guess I s- must have started doing it with physical goals, like endurance running and expeditions, but it can work with any goal. So in Alaska, I, instead of thinking, like, a few days ahead, weeks ahead, months ahead, like, how are we gonna do this? Was like, okay When are we stopping for the next snack?
I remember what the snacks were as well. They were sesame snaps. Is that right, sesame snaps? Is that what they're called? Not only were they sesame snaps, they were out-of-date sesame [00:15:00] snaps. We, because it was, we were trying to share stories of a changing Arctic and changing climate and how it was affecting people and place, we also wanted all the food we took to be low impact.
Okay, we were flying halfway across the world, but we took food that was gonna go to landfill. So all our snacks, almost all of it were out of date or were veggie, I think that was the other piece. anyway, these sesame snaps were, like, stuck together. but those, those were our snacks. What else did we have?
I can't remember. Anyway, definitely sesame snacks. Snaps, not sesame snacks, sesame snaps. So what I was focusing on was, when am I getting my next sesame snap? When is it? It's maybe an hour or two hours from now. Okay, we're paddling, and then we will stop, and then we will have a snack. And I did this also when I skied solo across the Hardanger Plateau in Norway in winter.
Instead of thinking about the whole day I would say, "Okay, I'm gonna ski for an hour and a bit." I think it was, like, 70 minutes, 75 [00:16:00] minutes. "Then I'm gonna stop, and I'm gonna have this bar or, this snack," whatever it was.
I broke the expeditions down and all my endurance stuff into snacks. Okay? Expedition snacks. How do you do a whole expedition? One snack at a time. So I want you to think about this for your goal If you have made the decision, you know what your goal is, you're feeling overwhelmed with the enormity of it, the scale of it, how are you gonna create it?
There's so many steps. You're thinking about things so far in the future. You're trying to solve for future problems, and it's just like, "Ah, I don't even know how that's gonna be." You will only know how to solve for those future things... I mean, there's, of course, there's practices we can do, visualizations, thinking ahead of time, like from our future self, from our amplified self, and solving it that way.
100%, there's practices we can do for, the future planning, 100%. But really, that is just a best guess. You will actually know what needs [00:17:00] done or what that step is when you get there. And yes, you can mentally rehearse it, and yes, that will help. Like, that preparedness and that planning will help in the moment, 100%.
And yet, there are always gonna be things that are outside of your control. Like for us on those expeditions, it's weather. We think we're gonna be camping here on day five, and yet, hang on, there was a storm, and we had to camp for, like, four days on this island, and we weren't there where we thought we'd be on, on day five or whatever it was.
It's the same with our goal. We have this idea. We have this vision. We know where we're heading. How we actually get there is always gonna be different than we think. And yes, we can prepare. Yes, we can plan. Yes, we can visualize. Yes, we can do all of these things, and it's still gonna be different in some way because life.
Because there are things whenever we're going after these things, there's always gonna be stuff that we didn't know about, like the unknown unknowns, things we didn't account for, things that happen that work out even better than we could ever have imagined. [00:18:00] And yet, what we can pretty definitely say is, "Okay, this is our next snack stop."
Of course, stuff can happen between now and our snack. So thinking about your goal in snacks, what is that next snack? The goal, the expedition snack, the goal snack. What is your next goal snack? The next one teeny little bite of something, something small that you can do, that you can create today that's gonna move you that little bit forward.
So not getting overwhelmed about the whole thing. Like, overwhelm comes in when our brain's trying to think about everything all at once. What's that film? It's like... I haven't actually seen it. Everything Altogether All at Once or something like that. I haven't seen it, but maybe I should watch it. Maybe that's, maybe that's what overwhelm feels like.
Everyth- Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like, our-- It's just not possible for our brain to think about all of these different things at once. So when we focus it down, what is the next snack? The one next thing. And if you could make that snack, that goal snack, [00:19:00] if you can make it small, just a bite, and if you can make it fun, so playful in some way, interesting and fun w- in some way, can you do your goal snack...
L- Let me give you some tangible examples. So For example, with the Scary Goals Lab, sometimes when my brain is trying to solve for this thing needs figured out in week nine, I can bring it back to, okay, maybe, and I will park that, what is the next thing? So the next thing is, okay, everyone needs to know what their experiment is for this week.
That's it. That's the next thing. Then I can maybe get to week nine, and then I will get all the steps along the way, but it's not trying to solve for all of these things right now. It's like, what is that next step? Okay, there we go. Everyone's got the call recording. Everyone's got their experiment they're playing with this week.
That is enough. That is the next snack. So that [00:20:00] was my snack for today. And even my brain's trying to think about as I am creating this first Scary Goals Lab, I'm planning to run it twice a year, so in spring and in autumn. So I'm going to like, "Okay, I need to be thinking about this for spring and this for spring," and I just asked myself and came back, like, what is the, the snack, the next step for spring?
And it's actually a decision. So sometimes it's not about doing something like emailing, creating, drafting, wording, whatever the things are, painting, drawing. Sometimes it's actually just making a decision. Sometimes the next step is saying, "I am choosing that it's this thing." So for me, my next goal snack for Scary Goals Lab round two is deciding the dates.
When is it I wanna do it in spring? When do I wanna start it? When do I want to finish it? When do I want people to apply by? And actually making the decision around that, rather than going into the overwhelm of like, how do I do this? And then this happens, this happens. Like, I've not even created this first one yet.
We are on week two. We are just at the start of week two. [00:21:00] So it's pulling my brain back from trying to solve for everything right now, staying really, really present with what's happening right now, and like what is that next step? So for you, what is your next goal snack, and how can you make it super fun?
Okay, that is what I'm sharing with you today. I hope you have an amazing day ahead creating your goal snack, whatever it is. And I hope you have a great week, and thanks for being on this journey. It's so good to be back podcasting. This is a little snack. I'm also allowing myself not to create these like 40 minute, seven steps to brr.
Like, I, I initially had for this podcast, like, here's what happens when you decide your goal, and like all the different things that can happen and all the different things that your brain can do when you actually make a decision around your goal, which maybe I'll do at some point. For now, again, easing back after maternity leave, figuring out how to create what is important for the lab, create what's important for me and for [00:22:00] podcasting within the one day a week that I have.
I'm allowing myself to do snack podcasts. A podcast snack, there we go. This is a snack podcast. It can be shorter. It's all good. One idea, so it feels quite like... I quite like meta and like inception-y style things. Like this
podcast is called Scary Goals Club, and it's all about me creating scary goals. The lab is the Scary Goals Lab. It's all about creating scary goals in the lab format. My scary goal, which is creating the lab. And today I am creating a podcast snack, a scary goal snack, all about scary goal snacks. Anyway, I'm a bit tired now.
I'm gonna go put this milk in the fridge Get this podcast uploaded. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll go snuggle my babies. Yeah, I'll go do that. Okay. Sending you so much love wherever you are. Thank you for being on this journey with me. It's so fun. I just feel so lucky to get to do what I do, [00:23:00] so grateful that I get to figure things out, share cool things with you guys, and that you listen and go and create amazing things in the world yourself is literally the best.
Ugh, so good. Right. Mwah. Love you so much. See you soon. 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, and making an even bigger impact in the world. And if you wanna take this work deeper and work with me directly, head to the show note, and I've 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 Goals Club.
