Row men, I want to talk to you today about the simple act of…
Row men, I want to talk to you today about the simple act of journaling and explain the powerful effect it can have on your cycling performance. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. Welcome back, roadman, it's another roadman's cycling podcast. Today I want to talk to you about journaling and how it's just a powerful view to get a bird's eye view of our lives. I've long held the belief that success leaves clues, that if we want to be successful we just need to look at people who are successful in other areas and by success I don't necessarily main monetary success or success winning bike races. Success is different for every single person out there, but modeling and this concept of finding someone who has that goal, that that state is objective that we're after, finding someone who's achieved that and reverse engineering, looking at the steps they took to get there. Anyone who's a long term listener in the podcast will know, I took a lot of time, which I took nearly two years out away from coaching, away from racing, and I pressed pause on everything. And during that period of time, I went, yeah, I had a little period of introspection. I went soul searching, but I also went searching through literature. I went searching through academia. I went studying top performers in many different niches, looking for common treads and one common tread. What kind of little golden tread, if you will, it's journaling. It just seems to be something that comes up over and over again among top performers. So today, I want to talk to you about how you can use this simple process to achieve a little bit of health happiness and longevity True cycling before I jump into the podcast topic today, please Can you head on over to patreon calm press pause on this nail head on over to patreon calm the link is in the boil It's patreon calm forward slash Anthony underscore watch Honestly guys patreon is how I keep the lights on this podcast It's the motivation for me going forward every day because I can see that patreon grown little by little week by week Month by month and tanks for everyone that signed up to patreon so far and if you haven't signed up I would encourage you to pause this podcast now and head on over to patreon.com Brian by me the price of a beer once a month as a thank you if you're getting some value out of this and Pay me for the work that's getting done. It's not you wouldn't get a plumber into the house without paying them for the work so it's your chance to go and pay me for the work. It's a little bit of an honor system we're running here. Guys, let's talk about this. Now, I'm from North Dublin and I'm Irish, obviously. And what we have built into us, it's an inherent skepticism of anything that sounds self-help-y and journaling definitely falls into that category. So I will preface this by saying I started out with an inbuilt bias and reluctance against wanting to do this. So the fact that I'm now on a podcast advocating to you to go and try journaling speaks to how much of a difference and an impact this has made on my life. So I'd ask you to make a commitment now to me and make one to yourself to try just 10 minutes of this a day for the next 30 days and then judges. So we're deferring judgment. My favourite example of this deferring judgment. It's a Sean Kelly quote and you guys love this one. It's when asked about training in the rain. Sean Kelly said the best thing to do is to just go out and train and get your three or four hours done in the rain and then come home and then decide if it was a good idea to go training in the rain or not. And often you'll find that you're happier that you went out. And that idea of deferring judgment I think is quite powerful here because when we start We're journaling, what we do is we take control of our life and it becomes purposeful. We move from reactive to proactive. I've often spoke about this idea of not getting up and checking your phone and checking your email straight away because what these things are, your WhatsApp, your email, your Instagram messages, you end up responding to them and that's like living your life off somebody else's to-do list. Journaling brings it back and it gives you control of this and you're living life off your to-do list. becomes powerful and one of the primary things I do at the very start of a journal is I define what my North Star is. By that like what's the guiding principle? What am I striving towards? Because each day I'm gonna take little micro steps but I need to know what direction I'm stepping towards and that becomes my North Star and honestly to tie back into that Patreon sort of plug at the start but it's not a Patreon plug because that's my North Star at the moment.
That's what I want to do
That's what I want to do. I want to figure out how to make this podcast a full time career that I can come to you guys day in, day out and it's financially sustainable. And that's my Nordstar at the moment. So every day then, I look to see if my daily actions, my weekly actions are aligned with my Nordstar. Because if you look through your daily actions and your daily actions don't involve things like being guests and other people's podcasts, research and podcast growth strategies, recording podcasts, distributing podcasts, engaging with podcast comments. If this sort of repetitive actions aren't built into your daily to-do list and your daily to-do list is instead responded to emails about X, Y and Z which is not related to podcast, your daily actions aren't aligned with your North Star so you're very unlikely to get there. Success and failure doesn't just show up accidentally as these catastrophic events, you can take a glimpse like I can look at somebody's training diary and if their goal is to win a stage in the Ross the tour of Orleans 12 months from now, it's not a shock if they win a stage or don't win a stage in 12 months, I can look at their training diary and I can say well look you're not doing enough training, you're not doing the right types of training, I can almost say with certainty you are not going to win a stage in the Ross because you haven't aligned your actions with that disordered outcome and I think I see a lot of people, especially clients when they come into us at the beginning, and they're sort of trojing through life without ever embarking on this journey to accomplish something. They haven't set out what they're looking to accomplish. They're hoping that, you know, inspirational, grab them along the way. So instead of an adventure and striving for that task and being ambitious, staying up settling for safe, unexcited stories and kind of succumbing to the status quo. So that's the power of setting that North star for yourself that it just means you're not going to succumb to that status quo and tread water. I would encourage you to pick a goal and I always think it is. I said this when I had the podcast and goal I was looking around and I was like podcast was like think of Joe Rogan and how cool is that life to have that you get to talk to your heroes. And you know I can already get a small glimpse of it. I'm a massive cycling fan and spoke about having posters on my bedroom wall at Euler Hamilton growing up and now to be able to talk to Euler Hamilton on the podcast account Euler Hamilton as a friend. It's pretty fucking cool if I'm honest. And that's the power of having a goal that you just think how cool would my life be if I hit that goal. Now I'm not, I haven't fully accomplished my goal in this. I'm just on the path. But I hope I'm on the right path. So what I do at the start of every week, I want to talk you through the fields I have in my journal and you don't need to buy a purpose built journal for this, you just need a blank page and you start making these headlines yourself and I want to talk you through that. But first I want to talk about at the beginning of each week, what I set out at the beginning of each week is the end of my week. So I say if I'm to be totally happy and I'm reviewing next week, I'm reviewing this week, next week. What has to happen this week? What are all the cool stuff that has to happen this week for me to be really happy with how the week went? So I'll start listing things. I want to go over and hang out with my parents at least three times this week. I want to record five podcast episodes. I want to get my coaching done for the week. I want to train six times this week and I make a long list and then I open my my calendar pages and I start plotting in what days I'm going to do this stuff on. So I'm going to train each morning from 9am till 11am. I'm going to record a podcast episode from 1pm to 2pm. I'm going to edit that podcast episode from 2pm to 3pm. I'm going to spend time with my parents from 6pm to 8pm and taking that list of what your dream week looks like and putting it in an action and putting it into your into your calendar because if you don't put it into your calendar, it's not really a goal, it's more of a wish. So then every morning I get up, I do that once a week and I have my list of how my perfect week will transport and I get that list and I put it in to my calendar for the week. And then I obviously build in my regular work store for Zoom calls, training calls around that. But each day when I get up, I have at the top of the page a call at my quest and this comes from a book by the author's name is Keller, the one thing and the idea of this having a quest that one singular focus is it's the big domino.
What's the big domino today that's going to make the rest of my day…
What's the big domino today that's going to make the rest of my day successful? So I have that at the top of my page. Then the next thing I do is I try and a lot of this stuff that I'm giving you here. This is like I've spoke about this concept and it's prevalent across the whole podcast and if you're a long-term listener the pieces will start coming together for you. This is like real cruddy kid wax on wax off stuff. At the start of the movie he says to him wax my car, waxes the car until he's bored out of his mind, waxing his car and then he says paint the fence and he paints the fence for days. And it's years since I say the story but I might be getting the timelines wrong but it's the moral I'm trying to get at. So he paints the fence for days and eventually he comes back to the teacher and he says to him look I came here to learn karate not to learn how to clean your car and paint your fence and in that moment Mr Miyagi the teacher travels upon Chatham and he blocks it in the exact same motion of wax on he throws a kick at him and he blocks it in the same motion as paint defense and Grady Kade has this big aha moment there going oh my god this stuff that he was having me to do paint defense wax the car it's not useless it's part of a bigger picture that isn't clear to me at this moment so when I'm giving you some of this stuff that headings in my journal, some of this stuff would be like, what is the inclusion of that? And it won't be clarity at this moment. But as you follow me on this journey on the podcast, this stuff will begin to be clarity. So I start off with my quest, my big thing, my big domino for the day. And then I list three things that I'm grateful for. So three things that I'm grateful for, you know, my dog had an accident the other day and I'm grateful that he's healing. Well, I was my birthday the other day I had family over and grateful for that. It doesn't have to be every single morning that you're grateful for something big. It could be, you know, I'm grateful to Wether's noise today. I'm grateful to their air quality. I'm grateful for the quality of my thoughts. I'm grateful for the muscle soreness I have because it means I worked out hard yesterday. But starting the day and listening to three things that you're grateful for in this journal, it's very powerful. I also list today's allies and today's threats. So by today's allies, I'm talking about I'm recognizing what helps me. And by identifying today's threats, I'm recognizing what hinders me And I just maybe list one or two things that are common to mind. Like, at the moment I had for today's threats, it's working on projects that aren't necessarily aligned with my quest for today because I get pulled in different directions. So I've got shiny object syndrome where I see something and I'm like, oh no, I have to go and do that. For someone else, today's threats might be aimlessly scrolling on your social media, on your phone through social media feeds. This is the sort of stuff that you're identifying as today's threat and you name it to tame the next thing we're going to rank daily tasks and this is because we're all tempted to progress to need and I know this is a trait this was run so deep among many of my clients and among me as well so by ranking your tasks you're putting your tasks in order of priority and it's that saying that eat the frog and if you have two frogs eat the bigger one first because you want to get through these tasks fast and I actually at some days I'll even do the little frog in beside the forest one the biggest task I have for today. So for me waking up today getting training plans done for the week that's my big task for today it occupies the bulk of my time, sipping through, training, foils, communicating with clients. It's a task that needs energy, it needs focus and I have to leave it late in the day it becomes a much more difficult task but by eating the frog getting that done early, it creates this unstoppable momentum as well. So that's my little C's the day section I call it where I have my tree tasks, but they're alligns to my bigger quest. And then I just have a little section where I just reflect on yesterday. I just reflect on what I said. I kind of think about myself as an eagle hovering above yesterday. And I go, what could I have done better yesterday? What went bad. What worked for me? What didn't work for me? Because life has constantly given us lessons. And sometimes it'll give us the same lesson 10, 15, 20, 100 times until we learn that lesson. The classic example this is you go drinking, you get a hangover.
Hangover is the lesson to not drink as much, not drink the same…
The hangover is the lesson to not drink as much, not drink the same drinks, have more water with your drink. But yet some of us have to learn that lesson 15, 20, 30, 50, 100 times before we heed that lesson. So by having this reflective section where I just go okay here's how yesterday went what lessons can I take from this and then I finally finish off the diary by figuring out did I get my morning routine completed and that's just simply it I just write morning routine completed yes or no my morning routine it's the same every single morning it takes me about 30 minutes to get through I get up I tried down at least 500 millil of water with some salt and some lemon I use the Jew of light unit, it's photobiole modulation, I'm trying to do a full podcast topic on photobiole modulation and its effects, but it mimics the song rising and it gives me access to light at a frequency which is very difficult to obtain from the song with cloud cover and the benefits it is for everything from enhancing your mood to increased college and production, testosterone It's powerful at reducing seasonal affective disorders. It's a brilliant piece of kit. It's made by Juve and it's part of my morning routine. So are you water, Juve, journal, meditate, culture. Takes me about 30 minutes every single morning. And then when I go into the journal phase, I just give it a little, is that completed? Yes. So it seems like it's a complicated journaling process. And I know I jumped around a little bit. So I'll put the headings for it in the show notes down below. So it's really what's my main quest for today? What's my tree's sub headings? Like my tree? What's my biggest frog, my second biggest frog, my tour biggest frog that'll lie into that main quest? I talk about what I'm grateful for. I identify today's threats, I identify today's alloys, I reflect a little bit on yesterday and then I just have a little note on whether I complete my morning routine or not. I promise you I was as skeptical as they come when I started out with this process of journaling. I would encourage you to try it for 30 days without judgment and then come back and label it a success or a failure. If you're having problems and you're wondering, oh should I start? How do I get started? Where do I start? Jumping over to Instagram, I put my handle in the shown outs as well. Pop me a DM and I'm totally happy to advise you on getting started with that but it makes such a powerful difference, especially when we apply this to our training, because when we look back at last week, did we just head out the door aimlessly? Or did we have purpose in every single session? Did we know what our training zones were sitting in our? Did we identify at the start of the week how much time we had to spend in each of these training zones? What is our target? Is our target the National Criterium Championships? What are the three subheadings below that? Have we worked on our bike position? Have we worked on our nutrition, fueling strategy for have we worked on our position on the bike, you know, just pulling stuff off the top of my head. It's just completely depends on what your goal is. But I'm using that for illustrative purposes. We need to figure out what that big goal is because that informs our actions. Guys, that's journaling. Hopefully you got some value out of that and I will be back to chat with you all. I'll you good roadman folk tomorrow. Until then, roadman, ride safe and take care. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days, training plans, regardless of what your level is. There's the master's beginner, advanced. There's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmancycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmancycling.com slash 14 day