030 - 7 Lessons I've Learned from Finding My Next Finish Line - a podcast by Natalie Sisson

So this weekend I had the honor of being invited to go and speak in front of around 80 to 90 Ultimate Frisbee players who were at their first training camp trying out to be selected for the World Championships in Netherlands next year.

And for those of you who don't know, I have been an Ultimate Frisbee player for the last 16 years. It's been a long held passion of mine and it was really neat to be able to be a guest speaker at this training camp and to talk about finding your finish line, which is a big tribute to Nathan Martin, my triathlon coach.

I wanted to recreate that presentation for you. This talk is specifically related to being your best self, pushing yourself, challenging yourself, crushing your goals and setting those intention.

If that's what you need today, that's what this episode is all about.

Listen to the podcast or you can read the full transcript below.

 

Imagine a room full of slightly sweaty, smelly Ultimate Frisbee players who've just spent the entire day playing, training, drilling, strategizing and trying to be their best selves so that they will make the team to be at Worlds next year representing New Zealand at the World Championships of Ultimate Frisbee.

They've had a big day. It's been raining. It's been wet. They are a little bit cold. They've just eaten. And I'm the final person to speak to them at the end of the day and it was such an honor.

It's always a little weird to be speaking in front of some people you know especially when you probably realize that most those people don't know about you because if you've played a sport before you get on really well with your teammates but typically you're talking about the sport and of course you get into personal lives and things but often you're so focused on the competition and the team, the drills, the strategy and the game plans that you don't always get to learn about who each person is and what else is going on in their life. So I think this was quite a surprising evening for some people.

I will share the pictures that go along in my slides. I'm a big fan when I speak and present of having lots of visuals and very few words. All of it was 16 slides and most of those had very few words on them and images.

I called it "Find Your Next Finish Line - Tap into your potential Master your mindset."

So who the heck am I?

Well, I am Natalie Sisson. Originally born here in Wellington, New Zealand and for about the last ten years I've been running an online business teaching other people how to travel the world and run an online business. I've been to 70 countries during that time and lived out of my suitcase for six and a half years full time which is fantastic, if you're into that kind of thing.

And during that time I actually got to play a lot of international Ultimate Frisbee tournaments especially beach tournaments which I love. If you're ever going to travel and spend some time overseas I highly recommend checking out the international scene for Ultimate Frisbee tournaments. It's also the quickest way to make fast friends because you basically arrive in a strange country you've never been to before and you have this instant community of like-minded people who adopt you as one of their own. So I highly recommend it.

I have been playing ultimate Frisbee for 16 years now.

Is anybody here in the room 16 or under?

I did ask that question because I was a little bit worried that somebody might be younger than the amount of years that I've spent playing Frisbee.

Luckily nobody was.

The next slide was my two books: The Freedom Plan and the Suitcase Entrepreneur.

So I basically put those up and I said, "So I've written two books but I'm posting them here really more to tell you that they are probably the only two business / lifestyle and mindset books out there that talk about Ultimate Frisbee" and that mentioned Ultimate Frisbee for a start and also talk about it in a really positive way. So I just thought I'd put that out there.

The next slide was a track and it was the finish line there and it said on it "7 lessons I've learned from finding my next finish line".

Speakers note: One of the best ways to build credibility is to obviously show what you've done and achieved but that can also come across as a little bit wanky if all you do is go "I've done this and that".

I had visuals of all of my sporting or individual pursuits and achievements but with every single one of those there was a story and from each of those stories there was a lesson.

Once again I'm just going to roll straight into how I sort of presented.

1. Sacrifice and visualization counts

In 2004, I had actually just hired a personal trainer to help me with training for triathlons and she was so amazing in terms of how she looked. She was strong. She was lean. She was muscular and I just never seen a physique like it and I asked her what she was training for and she said I was training for a body sculpting championship. And I was like, "What the heck is that?".

I went and looked up the sport and I thought, "What a bizarre sport". You basically get really lean. You put on a lot of muscle. You eat chicken and broccoli. It's pretty much what I ate. And then you stand up on stage with this ridiculous bronze tan on you at the end of that and strike some poses.

There was something about it that really just intrigued me because in all my years of playing sport I had never ever changed my body shape. I'd always pretty much look the same. And I was so impressed and fascinated by this lady that I was like, what would it take to change my body and do something completely different?

And then I asked her how she went and she said well she couldn't give up sugar so she ended up just not competing. She clearly hadn't wanted to sacrifice sugar and so all her hard work and dedication had gone nowhere as a result.

I just thought that was really sad to put in all that effort and not take it further. Plus for me it was a nine month period of eating really clean and healthy, going to the gym seven times a week, working out really hard but also being very mindful of my nutrition and partway through that I started visualizing.

I started of visualizing being up on stage, on doing these routines onstage, on winning to be honest. I had actually written down on a piece of paper that I used to take to the gym every single morning. It was actually in a little booklet. It was my workout routine, the weights and what amount of weights I had and what exercise and I used to in a very disciplined way fill that out every single time, seven times a week, sometimes twice a day. And at the top of that piece of paper in this booklet I had written, countdown to comp win.

Basically somewhere in my head, I decided that I was going to win the competition. And so I wrote it on that piece of paper and that's the same piece of paper I looked at seven days in a row for close to nine months.

Strike forward to basically October of 2004 and I'm standing on the stage in Hamilton at the regional Body Sculpting Championships. I'm in figure. I'm in the novice figure tool division. So basically Body Sculpting is also called figure because you're not buff. You're actually quite lean and feminine. But I did have an eight pack and an awesome arse. My muscles on my arse was so amazing and lean that's never going to be like that again but it was pretty impressive looking back at the photos.

Anyway I digress.

I'm standing on stage in these sexy heels that I actually had to buy at like a stripper shop (That got a laugh in the audience). I've got way too much bronze, fake tan on and I hadn't tanned my face enough. I'm on a tiny little blue bikini and I'm posing and showing off my abs and my biceps and my triceps and my lats.

At one point during the competition they basically started calling out names of people that were going to make it into the judging round and I realized in that very moment that I had not prepared to not win. So all I thought about in the back of my mind and also in the front of my mind was visualizing winning. And here I was on the stage and they were calling out who they were going to take forward and I was like, "Oh my God, I haven't prepared to not win".

How am I going to deal with this if I don't make it?

It just hadn't even crossed my mind and it wasn't coming from a place of ego that I was definitely not going to win but that's what I'd focused on that's what got me to this point. And so luckily I won the whole thing which was awesome. I won my division. They called my name. I got a tacky big trophy and some more protein powder and I was thrilled and the very next day I was eating like mellow puffs and all the things you shouldn't. And basically my eight pack disappeared overnight but it was such a brilliant lesson for me to learn that you need to sacrifice some things to get to where you want to be.

I sacrificed a lot of social events, a lot of socializing with my friends. I sacrificed a lot of late nights for early starts, a lot of the time in the gym. I was super disciplined during that time because it was a nine month period where I really wanted to be my best and see what I could achieve. Then I achieved the win which was amazing.

The other I learnt was that visualization is one of the most powerful tools ever. And while I was presenting for the ultimate Frisbee crowd I did talk about a study with soccer players and they'd had half of the team train as normal that they would for a competition that was coming up and they had the other half just purely visualize. Visualize training, visualize being on the field, striking the ball, running around, doing everything perfectly.

When it came down to the actual competition, both sides of the team turned up pretty much exactly the same. So those who had done nothing but visualise were performing as well as those who had been training and putting in the effort.

2. Set and smash your own records.

For this slide, I had the Sisterhood Dragon Boating across the English Channel and then I talked about what this event was and what I learnt from it. So this was 2007 around August when 20 of us ladies set out from Shakespeare's beach in England. We went 21 miles across the busiest shipping lane in the world and landed in Shakespeare's beach in France.

It was epic. We absolutely smashed the time. We did it in 3 hours and 42 minutes and the previous record had been set at around seven hours.

It was incredible we fell out of the boat when we got to France. We drank champagne. We were super excited and I was the person in charge of making this a Guinness Book of World Records attempt. We had a timer and we had people photographing it and videoing it and we had all the rules and regulations and we stuck to them and then we found out about a week after that we weren't awarded the Guinness World Record for this. Even though we had smashed it and I found out that we should have had a dragon head and tail and somebody beating a drum on the dragon boat while we were crossing because that's how you apparently hang out in dragon boats.

If you've never dragon boated before you'll know that typically you race thousand meter races in these boats. They are very, very low to the water. You have a paddle. You start from high up and then you'd plunge that paddle down to the water and pull back and a short sharp stroke and the whole team has to be in synchronicity to make it go forward and go at pace. So we did this for 3 hours and 42 minutes not for a thousand meter race.

If we'd had a head and tail and a drummer, we would have pretty much drowned. Were going across the busiest channel with waves and everything. So that was super disappointing. But the lesson that we learned out of that as we still smash that world record.

We can still claim that and internally, personally and as a team. We were immensely proud with what we did. So we didn't actually need the official record to be proud of ourselves and to really congratulate and celebrate ourselves on that accomplishment. And we raised over a hundred thousand pounds for charity so that one was set and smash your own records.

3. Team is everything.

For this I had a photo up of my Great Britain gold medal winning Ultimate Frisbee team at the beach championships in Brazil from 2007. So the same year that I did the Dragon Boating couple of months later I found myself in Brazil where we had been training in addition to my training for the Dragon Boating for the world beach championships.

We were the British women's team and we managed to beat the US in the finals and up until that point the US women's team had won every single tournament at beach pretty much leading up to that. And so this was the first time ever that Great Britain had won and it was such a huge achievement.

And the reason why we won I believe was that we're a total team. We trusted each other, we respected each other, every single person on that team through to every single other person, even the weaker players versus the stronger. Nobody had ego. Nobody was putting themselves on the field all the time. We played the whole team. We trusted the whole team and as a result we won as a team not as a bunch of individual superstars.

So the reason I want to point that out is that there were probably a lot of people in that room who were individual superstars and that that only gets you so far and if you're gonna play at Worlds you absolutely need to have a team moving in the right direction and winning together.

4. You always have 60 percent more.

I have often been told that you know you've always got 20 percent more in the tank or even up to 40 percent. But I recently listened to, I have to say a fantastic book by David Goggins who's an ex Navy Seal and has done all these 100k plus, 100 mile plus ultra marathons. I listened to his book which is called, "Can't hurt me", a New York Times bestseller while I was out training for my triathlons and it was inspiring because, sure he's slightly crazy but he has gone to the depths and beyond and back to really master his mindset and to realize that your mind controls everything and that you need to control your mind in order to do the unachievable, to achieve the impossible, to push yourself further than you've ever pushed yourself before and to grow as a person, as a result of that and be the best version of yourself to completely unleash your potential.

In his book he says you always have 60 percent more and he talks a lot about some of the sporting events that he's done including running a 100 mile race with no training and making it to the finish. it is grueling and it is epic and he draws on every single ounce of his reserve and his stamina and his perseverance and his Navy SEAL training etc.. But what ultimately gets him there is finding this new lease of life somewhere within his mind that he is capable of doing this and that only he can do it and that it is possible.

I then talked about when I cycled down Africa from Nairobi to Cape Town six and a half thousand k's never cycled anywhere near that in my life. Every day it was pretty much 100K's of cycling. And basically some days I'd get out of my sleeping bag and my tent and I was just like, "I just don't know if I can get on that bike today. I don't think I have anything left".

I got known as Flatley because I had so many flat tires and there were just days where I was like I just I can't do this but I would like everybody else somehow. Well not everybody. Some people didn't but get myself dressed and get into my gear and get back on that bike and just push each pedal until I was moving and somehow or other, the body and the mind merged and was off cycling every single day without fail.

Whether it was for three hours or eight or nine hours, I would always make it to the end. Even on the super long days we were doing like 180K and it just blew my mind that we always have more gas in the tank.

We are always, always capable of more and you just have to dig deep to get those reserves and when you think you can't, you absolutely can. You're not even anywhere near your capacity for achieving for doing and for pushing yourself.

Just remember that you always have 60 percent more and when you're going to be at those events or those races or whatever you're doing in life right now that you feel like you want to give up know that you have barely scratched the surface. I think it's inspiring and it's going to serve me well in my triathlons coming up.

5. You can always improve.

The photo that I used here was at the 2016 World Championships where I played with the New Zealand Women's Masters team. We came fifth. It was epic. And during that tournament, I realized even though I was a master and I was getting older, I was 39 then. I was like man I still want to improve. I've still got so much more potential.

Sure, I might not be the fastest person at all ever and sure I'm probably not going to be as fit and I'm not as young as some of these people because Masters is basically 30 and over so our team was actually quite old on average but I still wanted to improve and I found different strengths that I now had as an older player like as a thrower, a handler, I had different wily strengths and skills that I could use to my advantage, to overpower the ones that were more of my weakness now and it just you know, I just loved the game so much and I was like there's more than I can give.

There is more than I can do and you should never think that you're top of your game. You should never just assume that you're the best that you'll ever be. There's always more room and ability to improve.

I also got everybody in the room laughing on this one because the photo was me with my back to the camera throwing and one of my team members looking like she was about to be hit by my disc and literally cowering because I have quite a big throw with my left hand and also on the back of my T-shirt is my number.

And so I had to sort of share because the number is 69 which obviously has connotations and I just wanted to share with the room that the reason I chose that number is one, no woman will ever take it because of the connotations so I always get the number that I want in a tournament and a team.

And you'll be surprised lots of people like the same numbers and you can't get hold of them. So nobody ever wants 69 and 2 it meant that if I was ever upside down or laying out or whatever that you could always tell what my number was. But I think the phrasing that I used was that if I'm ever up the wrong way or round the wrong side or something like that and it just sounded all wrong so that got everybody laughing.

6. Spirit trumps all.

This was a photo of our team once again 2016 World Champs. We became fifth but we also won the spirit prize. We co-won actually which is a first with Germany and this is at the heart of Ultimate Frisbee.

If you've never played the sport before or never heard of it, the entire game has no referees and it is basically you self referee. So each person on the field makes a decision based on the rules. You discuss things. You discuss calls. You call fouls and you can retract them or keep them. It's an incredible game where basically you adopt the attitude of fair play at all times and you discuss and talk through anything and everybody is responsible for playing fairly and to the rules on the field. Once again no referees, no whistles, no umpires.

It's amazing and a huge part of their ethos and philosophy behind Ultimate Frisbee and why I adore it is that it's about the spirit of the game. So it is deemed to be spirited if you help somebody understand the rules on the field. It is deemed to be spirited if you make a call and you explain it why you made the call and you discuss it and then you either go ahead with it or you retract it. It has deemed to be spirited to clap and cheer for the other team and to celebrate a great play or a great throw or an amazing bid or a layout or defense and it's just this beautiful thing that comes through in the game.

At times over the years I've seen it lost especially when it's super competitive. Some people just get downright competitive, nasty, rude, aggressive etc. But most of the time spirit win through.

To win the prize for being the most spirited team was a real honor and more important than winning. And so I was really just trying to get that across because especially in the younger players sometimes it's all about winning and it's not. It's really not.

It's about your internal spirit, what you bring to the game and also the spirit of the game. And I think that applies in life not just Ultimate Frisbee.

7. Mindset is everything. (Well, 90 percent.).

In this example, I had a photo of me finishing at the national sprint triathlons in Kinlock which was in February this year in New Zealand by the lake. And I've got my hands outstretched in the air and I'm joyous that I finished this race. And it was a really tough race and I got my ass kicked and I got my ego bruised because I had started training in October of the year before.

So this was October, November, December, January and it was into early Feb so I'd done about four months of training and I really thought I was going to do pretty well. Like I didn't have any grandiose ideas I was going to win but I thought I could be pretty good at this sport because I've been good at other sports and won medals and done all these things and yet I came probably quarter to last in my race and division and age group and I was just pretty disappointed in that and I thought it sucked and I was like I'm not very good at this at all and I ended up speaking to a bunch of people after the race who had been doing triathlons for like two years, five years, ten years.

One woman was 77 and she just won her age group and she was off to the World Champs and it was amazing. And she's like I just love the sport. But it took me so long to get good at it and it's every single year it's just a small improvement at the time and every single person that I spoke to had the same energy. They were like you can't just get good at triathlon quickly. There are very few people who are naturally good at it. It's one of those things you just keep at it and you make improvements and you make these just continual upgrades to your training, to your nutrition, to your attitude. And it will come.

And I remember being there and just feeling a little bit like deflated and Josh was like, "Nat, your goal was to finish and your goal was to get the certain time and you hit that and yet you're not happy," and I was like, "No, because I came like in the bottom quarter of the whole field which means I suck", and he's like, "No, you have to set your intentions way too high. You've only been training for four months. This was the Nationals. This wasn't just some local event. This was the best of the best people turning up who were trying to qualify for World Champs and you made it and you did well and you completed it and you should be happy with that. And this is the first of many events".

I'm glad Josh gave me a pep talk in that moment and I walked away from that and I went, "Yeah, triathlon is going to be all about the long game. It's going to be all about the micro improvements day after day, week after week".

It's about showing up, committing to consistent training and training with intention and just continuing to get better. And always, always enjoying it and I'm pleased to say that since that race it was in February I moved up to sort of halfway through the field in events that I did and more recently I ran a 10K race in Wellington which is a huge race actually, thousands of people competing in it. And I was in the top third of the entire race group, of my gender, of my age group. And as I said overall and I was just thrilled because that proved to me that I had made massive strides in my running over the sort of four month period and the discipline of running that I have always found to be my weakest as what I have often told myself unless I'm running after a Frisbee or a ball and so it was just really thrilling to see that OK I put my head down. I trained better. I believed in myself. I called myself a runner. I called myself an athlete and I trained with more focus and moved up from quarter to the bottom to top third.

I'm really thrilled with that and there's long, long way to go but it just proved to me that once I reset my mindset about how I was going to turn up and once I reframed, once I focused on being my best self and being an athlete and really focusing on that mindset, everything changed.

Everything changed and so my lesson there was that you know it's all about mind over matter and you have to have self belief and then you have to put in the work to make it happen.

Then I touched on to finish off, goals versus intention.

So I asked the room what is the difference between goals versus intentions? And it was interesting because you know in a big room most people don't answer questions but luckily some brave people put up their hand and there were some of them are a little bit on track but this is actually a really interesting question and I have an entire podcast about this so I will get the number for you. But basically goals are focused on the future. They're about a destination or a specific achievement and goals are fantastic.

If I didn't have goals, if I knew that I wasn't competing in my first ever half Iron Man in December I probably would not be getting up to train and do long runs and long bike rides and swims pretty much right now I'm starting to train every single day of the week and will be for the next four months. And it's only going to get longer and harder. But if I didn't have that goal in December that I want to be fit and ready for and I want to do really well and for myself and I want to enjoy it, I probably wouldn't be getting up in the morning.

Goals have an absolute benefit. They drive you. They give you a focus. They give you a deadline, a timeline. They give you something that you can aim for and achieve and they give you purpose. And so they're brilliant and they're about a future event. And so you can set up your strategies for it. You can train. You can really know what you're going for and then intentions are in the present moment.

Intentions are lived each day independent of reaching the goal or destination. And why I think this is so important to know the difference between goals. So just to recap goals are focused on the future. They're about a destination or a specific achievement. Intentions are in the present moment. Intentions are lived each day independent of reaching the goal or destination is that you have probably felt this before when you've set yourself a big juicy goal and then let's say maybe you've had it or you've missed it but after that even sometimes when you've achieved it or smashed it you kind of have the sense of disappointment after. You just often actually can have that sense of deflation and lie oh what was that all for over.

My major lesson there is that you also have to have an intention of how you're going to show up every single day. It's not just about that one goal. Your intention should be or I hope is to be the best version of yourself. To live with passion, to be on purpose, to be kind, to be generous, to be driven, to be ambitious. Whatever your intention is. How you want to show up in this world is the absolute thing that you need to put all your energy and effort into. It's what you're going to focus on every single day. It's how you're going to show up. It's how you are going to live and breathe and act with that intent.

When you have intentions that are backed up by these goals and milestones you're not going to get depressed or disappointed or upset after something because that goal will be all and end all of how you live. It's just the next driver. It's the next point that you're trying to reach but because your intentions are constantly with you those are the things that are always going to carry you through.

I think goals and intentions are needed but intentions are the thing that is going to be how you act and show up in this world and they're going to be with you long after you've hit and smashed all your goals that I know you're going to do.

Now it's your turn. This is what I challenged them with and this is what I'm challenging you with.

Within the next 30 days what is one goal and one intention you want to set for yourself?

You can share it with me in two ways, you can tag me in Instagram @nataliesisson and you can say that “@nataliesisson my one goal is X and my one intention is X #untapped” or leave a comment below.

I am going to give a copy of my brand new Freedom Plan audio book to one lucky person who comments in either of those ways.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Most powerful tools ever
• Importance of celebrating yourself
• Learn how to control your mind
• Goals versus intentions

 

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