1.From Pro Cyclist to Healer

I I I entered with a bang I won the national championships that year as my first year as a pro having the green and gold Stripes really put so much extra pressure on me a term we using cycling quite a bit to describe a bad day is I was just blocked kind of come to accept that as justification for a bad day but you talk about emotional blockage can you explain the kind of impact that these blockages have on a person's physical health especially as we age in a way I feel like a lot of us would benefit from actually going how do you get from that dark place back to a place of light it sounds really simple and its advice but it's really powerful because it's just do something positive like 100% there is never a point of no return and I feel so emotional right now hey everybody and welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Anthony I'm a former lawyer turn cyclist turn podcast host who's based in Ireland my goal with this channel is to introduce you to the people and to the ideas to help you optimize your health your happiness and your longevity today we dive deep into a story of rebirth transformation and Breaking Free from the limitations that tie us down if you've ever felt trapped whether it's in a job or relationship or even mindset this episode is a must listen I'm honored to be joined by Shannon maled Shannon was once a professional cyclist with one of the biggest teams in the world Shannon faced a pivotal moment in her life realizing the patch she was on just wasn't her true calling now she's on a mission to help others recognize and dismantle the emotional blocks and self-imposed limitations holding them back from embracing the idea of being Limitless to providing practical techniques for profound transformation Shannon sheds light on the Journey of self-discovery and aligning one's life with your true self before I jump into the show I do have one small favor to ask please take a second to subscribe to the channel as still around 90% of viewers aren't subscribed and bigger this channel gets the bigger the guests I can attract this is the road man cycling podcast and now my dear friends it's Shannon maled Shannon welcome to the Roan cycling podcast thank you so much for having me on it's a pleasure to be here this podcast people think it's a cycling podcast and I guess cycling is a central them in it I think it'd be more aptly characterized as a rebirth or a transformation podcast people that are going One Direction they check in with themselves and maybe think there's a better direction that would make them happier that would make them healthier that would make them better family people I think that's why your story today is going to resonate with so many people I love that so much yeah so you're riding for one of the biggest teams in cycling that's a dream for so many people but it wasn't a dream for you could you could you share with me like an inflection point in your life when you realize that Pro cycling was no longer for you was there like an aha moment yeah look like when you are a domestic cyclist aspiring to be a pro there's so many things that you look up to and you think that's going to be such an amazing lifestyle and then you do everything you can to get to that spot and once you get there often it's not all that it seems right it's not all that it's cracked up to be and I think I really got hit hard with that in 2018 when I first turned Pro and like I I entered with a bang I won the national championships that year as my first year as a pro and I think the having the green and gold Stripes really put so much extra pressure pressure on me especially as a Neo Pro and then every race that I did that year was World Tour Women's World Tour and I was just getting thrashed like I was getting smashed and smashed and smashed and smashed and I thought man I don't know how much longer I can just keep getting beat down and I came back the next year with a bit more after like a massive burnout and just being like finishing that year just like like dragging myself through every day um I came back the next year feeling like I could really I I'd learned some things about how to how to how to do it better you know how to travel better how to recover better how to race better and felt like it was a good year and then the pandemic hit and I was stuck in Australia um racing bikes on zwift and it all just wasn't what I wanted want it to be you know I wanted to be racing in Europe I wanted to be really racing my bike and then once I got over there um again it was like I was trying to fight for my position in the pelaton and in my team as well and that fight just wore too thin and I I realized that I was putting so much pressure on someone else to believe in me and I wasn't believing in myself I wasn't backing myself I didn't have that inner worth and I was relying on my team to keep telling me that I was good enough or people in the pelaton to tell me that I was good enough and to keep going and once I kind of did a lot of introspective work in 2020 when we were in lockdowns and all of that crazy stuff was happening I realized that once I found that that self inner selfworth that no longer needed cycling to to be the pathway of that coming to me if that makes sense so it wasn't like it wasn't like I needed the sport anymore to prove that I was good enough and I also didn't want to keep on battling these people that kind of had lost faith in me because I hadn't put results on the board so um yeah I I just found myself you know that year and I I realized that I didn't need um cycling anymore so many people struggle with the identity piece as they exit professional sport because for a long time if you were to ask a friend a family member to characterize Shannon they would say Shannon the cyclist and you even start thinking about yourself as Shannon the cyclist Anthony the cyclist so when you're exiting a career where you're walking away from what was your dream for so long and you're trying to find a new life how do you go about shedding that identity of shann and the cyclist and rebuilding it into something new yeah look I think I've always known that I'm more than that and that was part of the frustration right that I was coming up against um in 2020 when I was like just trying so hard to prove myself but I was only racing on Swift for example um we did get a stin overseas but it was very shortlived but yeah I think I i' because I'd found who I really was from the inside out I started to De identify with that one label being my self value or like needing to identify as a cyclist to find purpose in my life I i' really started to explore outside the cycling bubble in 2020 and it was like a veil had lifted off my eyes because when you're in the Cycle World you think that all that exists is cycling like everything is everything you do everything you say everything you think about is cycling related right and and for me in 2020 that that fog kind of cleared and I could see holy crap there's actually a whole other world out here I can go on Hikes and explore nature from a different perspective I can really enjoy going out for lunch or breakfast or dinner with friends without having to like worry about my nutrition um I can just be a fully living and breathing human without having to think about what it's doing for my cycling career and I started to really enjoy my life outside of cycling and that really helped me transition because I already knew that there was so much for me outside of the sport I think where people get really um I guess experience they can experience really rough times like fall into depression and complete identity loss and not know what they're here for anymore when they retire from Elite Sport is often when they haven't chosen it I don't know if you resonate with this at all um with people that you might have had on the podcast or spoken to friends I'm sure you know so many people who have retired a lot of people don't get that to make that choice a lot of people get injured or they don't their contract doesn't get resigned or um something else happens where they can't be a pro athlete anymore and I think when it's cut off like that it's so much harder for you to make that smooth transition and know that there is so much more for you outside of the bubble yeah and it's actually very rare now that somebody gets to you know quote unquote retire like I spoke to Alex Delon not too long ago on the podcast and retirement was a planned retirement and the reason it was a planned retirement he felt if he went one more year or one more contract the retirement choice if he taken out of his hands and that's the reality for the vast vast majority of cyclists at the moment that they don't get to retire they just have a two-year contract and then they're shopping around looking for another two-year contract and they don't get one and then that's the end of the game like I know my friends that have done really good rides recently young guys their top 20 top 30 in in par Ru last year and theyve no contracts for the coming season and that's a hard piece to work through and I suppose that's why it's quite admirable that the second career you've built in such a short space of time and if anyone hasn't checked out your Instagram there's some brilliant stuff over there and as I was shifting through it last night one term I heard you refer to quite a lot was Limitless what do you mean by that everything um I guess in the context of what I I speak into most often and I mean Limitless is the title of my coaching mentorship program as well but I've always had this inner knowing right ever since I can remember ever since I was a young kid that our potential as a human being is completely Limitless and whatever we set our mind to or whatever we really desire to achieve achieve with Integrity is possible if we put the right steps in place right and the I guess the human conundrum is that we have so many limitations and that those limitations have been learned we're not born with them sure there's like epigenic epigenetics that come into it and there's ancestral wounds that can get passed down to you so you can have the same limiting beliefs as your parents for example and their parents before them but for the most part you are learning your whole life you're learning these limitations you're taking them on into your and embedding them into your subconscious and so what I mean by Limitless is if we can do the inner work if we can actually have some introspect introspection and clear out these limitations then we do become Limitless on not just on a physical level but on a mental level emotional level um spiritual level as well let me take a second to talk about today's show sponsor because of something really exciting to share with you it's a game changer that's been making a notable difference in my performance recently especially when it comes to sleep allow me to introduce you to 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2.Willingness to Face Your Shadow

Shop and use the code roadman on your local website for 15% off your first order or for us listeners if you head over to deed.com for/ pillar and use code roadman for the same 15% off your order the details of this offer are in the description below now back to the show so how do I start to identify and dismantle self-imposing limitations especially those that may be rooted in years or even Decades of self-doubt and negative talk yeah it's an awesome question you have to want it first right and a lot of people think that they want to change but then when it comes to staring change straight in the face a lot of people turn the other way because to our subconscious and and when I say subconscious this is the part of us that's kind of unaware it's the thinking that's always in the background that we might not consciously know is happening the thoughts the feelings the limitations right they're usually playing in the background and they go unnoticed for someone who's more self-aware we may have a a heightened level of awareness of these constant thoughts that are kind of playing in our background but it takes a lot of awareness to get to that point where you're catching your own thoughts so for someone who wants to dive in to okay what are my limitations I want to see them I want to lay them all out and I want to work on them well you have to want that you have to actually really really really want it because digging up some of your darkest thoughts and feelings and emotions is really confronting and all of us have confronting stuff to look at whether you've had a easy breezy life or you've had a really hard traumatic life we all have things that we need to look at which there's a reason why you haven't seen them yet it's because they love to hide in your subconscious and go unnoticed so yeah the the first step is having the willingness and I mean seriously having the willingness to do the inner work to to dive in and I I kind of picture this as doing a deep dive under the water into the depths of the ocean like that's what it looks like to to me because I'm a really visual person to dive into your inner world and like uncover the rocks and be like picking things up okay what's over here what's over here and the way that we follow that thought Trail is when you get triggered right throughout your everyday life you're going to come up against things that might trigger you and set off certain emotions and when that happens for the most part people let that pass by or they might cast blame on someone else or themselves even and they don't do any invest vation around why that trigger came up because it's never actually about the thing that triggers you it's about what's lodged underneath in in your subconscious so if your partner makes you have have a an emotional reaction you get really pissed off at them for I don't know not listening to you and not putting the laundry away for example that might be something that you just go oh they're so annoying they never listen to me but what's deeper than that why are you angry that they haven't listened to you there's something deeper and if we dive underneath that there might be I'm just using a really obvious example there might be this belief that you're not loved by them or that they don't care about you and so when we look at that it's like okay well where does that come from where does that belief come from there must have been a time in your life where you weren't loved or you weren't cared about was that it school was it by your parents was it a past relationship where does that actually come from and then in relation to things like professional sport a lot of the time it's self-doubt I'm not good enough um not believing in yourself having low self-confidence these sorts of things that are really common amongst a lot of athletes so finding those limitations requires that deep willingness to go within and find where it actually comes from yeah but the process of finding yeah do I need a specific set of tools for that Discovery process am I equipped with that set of tools is it a case of if I just identify these triggers throughout my day and then sit quietly and reflect on those triggers that I will ultimately come to the conclusion or will I need some help coming to these conclusions look I think help is always going to be a faster easier I put that in quotation marks because it's not easy even with help but a quicker and easier process because when someone's looking down with a almost third person perspective on your life it's easy to see someone else's blind spots it's not so easy for you to see your own blind spots that's why they're called blind spots so if if you have someone a therapist or a coach or a psychologist that you're seeing and you're able to tell them this is what I'm really struggling with these are the emotions I'm feeling and these are the circumstances that I get triggered by that person is able to see your life without an emotional attachment to what's happening and often can really easily see your blind spots if they're good at what they do so yes having someone is going to be a a much smoother process but that doesn't mean that you can't do it if you don't have the resources to um invest in yourself it doesn't mean that you can't get to the bottom of your own triggers it just means that it's going to take a lot more willingness and the the sorts of tools to add to your toolbox is literally that self-reflection like putting time aside in your busy day where you want to keep just doing doing doing actually remove yourself from the trigger and put time aside to sit down with yourself and ask yourself what is deeper what is deeper what is deeper yeah a term we use in cycling quite a bit to describe a bad day is I was just blocked you know you hear REM go have a bad day in the VTA lose a half an hour and his response will be I was just blocked and we've kind of come to accept that as justification for a bad day but you talk about emotional blockage can you explain the kind of impact that these blockages have on a person's physical health especially as we age yeah I'm not too sure about like aging I guess the the physical I suppose we it's getting out with ag is more to mounting pressures that people start to to encounter you know when you're 16 it's relatively Carefree your only job is to go to school come home and do your homework as you get into college then you're starting to balance social life with that and as we journey through the years we start to accumulate more and more responsibilities and build these walls we're nearly building you know miniature prisons for ourselves as we get through life and you know at a certain point we have so little flexibility in our physical environment but also in the way we think yeah I hear what you're saying in a way I feel like a lot of us would benefit from actually going backwards in time and learning relearning how to express our emotions so those emotional blocks that you're speaking into these are suppressed emotions essentially so they they're being triggered in the moment you experience a heightened level of emotions usually usually negative emotions right we can also experience joyful ecstatic emotions that that also can be um suppressed or repressed um so yeah when you are when you're triggered and you're experiencing those negative emotions what most people do is we push them down because that's what we've been taught to do that's what been what we've been conditioned to do by our parents it might be like hey stop crying or don't throw a tantrum and what that's done to us over time has created an adult who doesn't actually know how to safely Express how they're feeling we can see especially um especially males but not every male is told like not to cry because they don't want to be um considered to be weak so a lot of males show up in this Persona that they never cry for example and then maybe women in on the same hand have been told that like their anger is too much so they're suppressing themselves making themselves smaller shutting their mouth and not saying anything and over time this creates so much emotional tension within you that you might even not know because it might be just something that you feel is normal like you're walking around feeling like everything's normal but there's a lot of pent up emotions in there that haven't being released and what I mean by emotional blocks is your Limitless potential that we talked about right at the start is the truth of you this is what you truly can achieve if you didn't have any limitations and I believe this is like available for everyone right that we can achieve anything that we dream of anything that we desire but when you have an emotional Block in other words an a limitation that that potential can't get through totally so if you're in a bike race and you just feel blocked it might be worth doing some digging yeah physically maybe you're you're not on a good day but what's going on emotionally for you how are you actually feeling in the days leading up to the race how are you feeling during the race what's happened in the weeks leading up that might be pressing on an emotional block and causing some internal battles that are going on and once you can release that by actually expressing the emotion that needs to be expressed again we can do this in a therapy type session or we can do this on our own we all have the tools to do that just by being human like it's very natural to express our emotions if you look at the way that babies um Express their emotions right and toddlers and maybe even to some extent teenagers like they throw tantrums and I'm not saying that we need to throw a tantrum down aisle three at the supermarket if we don't get what we want as adults but I am saying that if you feel triggered by something you can take yourself away from the trigger and just spend some time releasing what needs to come out of you if you feel angry release that rage like scream into to a pillow don't do anything that hurts yourself or others but release it in a way that's healthy for you if you feel like you need to cry learn how to release that emotion and let it out excuse the short Interruption but I wanted to find a way to bring our little Community together to problem solve to share training advice and to support each other in what can sometimes be a lonely road as we all Chase health happiness and Longevity through cycling to facilitate this I've set up a Discord Channel I'm going to leave a link in the description down below it doesn't cost anything to join it's totally free plus I'm also picking out random winners for spot prizes inside the Discord Channel if you'd like to join it click on the link down below yeah just to ground this in kind of practicality for listeners kind of pulling at that uh cord that I identified about people starting to build up a lot of responsibilities especially as we journey through life how do you address the dichotomy that some people feel between their practical day-to-day responsib abilities and this pursuit of a limitless life I think it's all possible like what my question would be what do you feel like you can't do that you want to do if there's if there's things that you'd love to do but you're not doing well the truth is the actual truth is you always are going to put time into what you value the most so maybe it's a case of going back to your values and and re evaluating your values if it's family that's at the top and you want to spend more time with your family but you're in a job that keeps you away from them well maybe it's time to pursue something different in your work space and then if it's like well I can't provide for my family okay how can you open up a like your story that you shared with me before we jumped on here you didn't want to just settle into something that wasn't for you so you explor other avenues to make your life work around your true desires and your true passions yeah so there there are people you know I spoke with a I spoke with a par Olympic Athlete Peter Ryan recently and he visually impaired lost his I side at 18 it's a tragic story but he went to alcohol as a coping mechanism for this new reality of Darkness that he was encountering and he was at a place where he was 19 where his whole life basically falling apart everything that he knew his job his girlfriend that he needed to drive to see her and now he couldn't drive anymore his social life his work life everything had imploded and alcohol was his coping mechanism and now he's in a place where he's thriving by any metric from public speaking to doing charity events and he's really a person to be you know that he should be proud of but I was asking him how do you get from that dark place back to a place of light and he said first slowly then suddenly and it's it sounds really simple and it's advice but it's really powerful because it's just do something positive like kind of marrying those two pieces of advice you talking about refocusing on values and his idea of for slowly just then suddenly it's like if you have your values and you've identified clearly what they are and you're not living a life that's aligned with those values right now make small daily Acts that are aligned with those values and start compounding those small daily acts over time and then for so slowly then suddenly you'll have a life that looks totally different to where you were I love that so much yeah it's so true because our life is ultimately just made up of every small moment that you live and we're so focused on that future destination waiting for like if and when we get to this spot then I'll be happy but we forget that there's so much available to you right now in this moment for you to choose something that you love to do even if it's after work I'm going to go to the beach and put my feet in the ocean or I'm going to take the time to prepare a picnic and take my family or my partner to watch the sunset right and these are things that I love to do you can insert whatever you love to do and actually do them because it's so easy to fall into the routines and the patterns of getting home from work switching off putting Netflix on and two hours later you're like okay I'm going to roll into bed and wake up and do it all again but what if you spent that time actually giving a about your future giving a about this moment so that you can live a life that you love an exercise I love to do in the evening is super simp I just sit down with a journal and I do called the General's tent and it's from a Navy Special Forces operator that I had on the podcast and he said at the end of the day you have two types of conflicts going on during the day you have strategic battles and tactical battles tactical battles is the stuff you're getting into that's like it's your day to-day my new show I filled a dishwasher I washed my kit I went training that's the tactics but the strategy is the broader picture it's where he's placing his troops around the battlefield so I kind of took his lead on this and at the end of the day I do a general tent where I look at strategically where I've spent my time during the day and could I allocate my time differently more in the line of my values to live a slightly happier life and it's a really simple exercise but again it's really powerful I love that Jing is a powerful tool especially to do at night time I love that do you think there's ever a point of no return for somebody where they've spent decades building this life that they're just not happy in and it doesn't align with their true self or is transformative change Always possible absolutely 100% there is never a point of no return and I feel so emotional right now because like that question hit right in my gut because to think that someone has that thought that I can't come back from this or I can't trans trans form I can't change my life is so devastating and I wish that I could just take any people that feel like that and just insert them into their dream life for just a little second for them to feel that it's possible and like your friend said first slowly then suddenly if you're you're taking those small 1% changes every single day doing the best that you can it's not going to be easy it's going to be freaking hard but over time you will get there and then suddenly you get to look back and go holy look how far I've come look how I overcome all of these obstacles and I was actually thinking into this today oh what how do you pull yourself out of a place like that and I'm not just saying this I I really think that one of the biggest things that you can do is have a community around you build a support network that you can turn to reach out to people that you know have got your back or they've been where you are and now they are where you want to be those sorts of people are your are your people to surround yourself with and build a tribe so that you can have someone to hold your hand I think values and the idea of true self are so Central to this journey to being Limitless at least by my interpretation of it if somebody's wants to start this journey I love to finish the podcast with giving people really practical tangible advice from today's guest so if somebody wants to start this journey towards exploration of their true selves is there exercise you can share with them to help them on this journey yeah I think any type of journaling like self self-reflection work is going to be an amazing tool I don't have like um the five steps to finding your Limitless true self like throw at you right now but get out a pen and paper and start asking yourself what you truly want and that that question alone can be really daunting for a lot of people so if you don't know the answer to that question you know that you have some work to do but see that as something that's exciting rather than scary so lean into it rather than pull back from it if your answer is I don't know right now but I'm going to start looking around I'm going to start exploring what I truly love to do and slowly I will start to bring those things into my day and joy is your best indicator of finding your true self and becoming Limitless because those emotions are feedback from your from your inner World saying I actually yeah I love this like keep going keep going keep going if something is frustrating you if something is making you sad that's also an indication that okay there's something for me to work on or this is not my vibe so yeah always using our emotions as feedback and always sitting down to do the the self-reflection work they're my two things so just as we were using negative emotions to identify earlier on now we're using positive emotions so it's emotions whether are negative or positive are really they're the they're the compass that are showing us the direction we need to move towards yeah your body your soul your intuition is always trying to speak to you imagine imagine if that emotion is someone in the room with you just screaming at you to be heard like if it's anger who's screaming at you and you're trying to push it away and push it down first of all you got to listen allow that anger to move through you and come out and then understand why it was there in the first place so that you can grow from it and then same with joy if Joy is like wanting to burst out of you like dance around the room have fun enjoy yourself like it's okay it's okay to be weird it's okay to be silly it actually feels really good for your soul and then we can use that as like oh okay I get it when I'm doing things that I enjoy I actually experience more productivity I experience better results like it's so it's so so so obvious once once you actually start to put the wheels in motion and say yes to the things that you truly desire your life like the positive feedback is amazing it comes back around to you and goes yes keep doing this whereas if you're bangging your head up against a brick wall you know that there's something to change sounds so simple Sean I've I've Loved this conversation I think it's going to help so many people as you continue to evolve about your professional and personal Journey what's the best place for people to follow along with you uh I'm most present on Instagram so I'm just it's just my name Shannon moled and then I'm also on Facebook Tik Tok my website shanam moi.com all of the things just search my name and you'll find me shanana thank you very much for your time thank you so much if you enjoyed this conversation with Shannon please press up here for another conversation which I know you'll love her name is Meg Fisher the story is absolutely tragic heartbreaking and inspiring she lost her in a car crash along with her girlfriend who tragically passed away when she went on to become one of the most decorated par Olympians in recent history you got to check out this interview also if you have a second please subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on some amazing upcoming guests