Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode 262 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode I want to talk about a way to approach your goals a little bit differently than maybe you are currently or maybe you have in the past. If I was to talk about setting smart goals, I think I’d lose 90% of you right now. It’s important and a good way to set goals, definitely the smart goals approach in terms of specific, measurable, attainable, all those things. Yeah, it’s a good way to go about setting goals and I’ve used that in the past and still occasionally today. But what I’ve found more useful, especially with where I am in my swimming career, my sporting career and where I am in life is I’ve approached it a little bit differently now. An exercise that someone had me go through about 12 years ago now was they said

think of your perfect day and write that down. What does it look like from when you wake up? Where are you? What do you have for breakfast? Go through the entire day and what does the perfect day look like for you? And initially when I went through that process, I felt a bit guilty going through it because I’m like, oh, there’s no, there’s no like work in there. There’s no, like I felt guilty about writing my perfect day. So if you do encounter some guilt when you’re writing down your perfect day, let it go. Imagine you’ve got no responsibilities. Imagine you can just do whatever you like and then that’s going to be your perfect day. Now for me, some of those things that I wrote there was I’m waking up near the beach, have a healthy breakfast. I go for a swim in the morning and then I come back, have some breakfast, say hi to my wife and kids and I go for a surf during the day, come back, have lunch, go

for another surf, come back and then I spend the rest of the day with the family and we cook a barbecue outside. It’s warm and we enjoy that meal together. That was roughly my perfect day. But I wrote down a few more details and specifics around it. I did that 12 years ago and it took a long time to have that perfect day exactly as how I had planned it out a while ago. And even then, so that was 12 years ago. That was that was pre kids. I didn’t know then that I’d enjoy spending time with my kids as much as I do. So even then, I actually felt guilty and like, oh, yeah, I assume I want to be hanging out with my kids and and enjoy spending time with them. I’ll put it in there just in case. But I did feel initially like, oh, yeah, maybe I just sort of leave that out. But anyway, so that took a while to play out. So that’s your perfect day. I think that’s a good thing to include as your as to what you might be working towards.

But the other kind of perfect day that I wrote down was in general life in normal life where you’re going to be doing some work. You’re going to have some responsibilities. What does your perfect day look like there? And mine is still fairly similar there. But I’m thinking of like a Monday, for example, where Monday morning I’ll go swimming, I’ll go training and then I’ll drop the kids off to school. And then I’ll go for surf, come back, I’ll do some analysis and some coaching, maybe record a podcast. Then I’ll pick up the kids, take them to the pool and then we’ll come home and have have dinner like for me. That is pretty close to my perfect normal day. And when I wrote down those two different perfect days, that gave me a really clear idea of what I’m working towards. Now, how that relates to my swimming is swimming’s in there. And I went into some details of how I want to feel when I’m swimming, how healthy I want to be, what kind of person I want to be.

And so getting into the nitty gritty of that and thinking ahead of how I want that to look. So for me, setting my perfect ideal day with no responsibilities plus my normal day where there are responsibilities involved gave me a good idea of what to wear towards this episode of the podcast is proudly brought to you by our sponsor, Form Goggles. They’re more than a pair of goggles. Meet the world’s most powerful swim platform. See yourself improve with FormSmart swim goggles, including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for only two hundred and twenty eight US dollars. Now, they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free. And then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forward, it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts, training plans and their custom workout builder.

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Now, what that includes is your habits or the process that you have to go through to be the kind of athlete or the kind of person that you want to be. So if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, episode 230 was on the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, I think it was. And if you haven’t listened to that audio book or read that book, I held off for a long time from listening to it. But I’m glad I did because it gave such a clear way of achieving goals that it explained it really differently than I’d heard before really. But the gist behind that book is if you want to achieve something, it’s not about necessarily setting the smart goals. It’s about what are you going to do on a daily basis or a weekly basis to to achieve it? What habits are you going to set in order to to make those things happen? So for me, that really came down to, well, OK, if I want to be swimming for the rest of my life and I want to maintain

my swim fitness and my speed as long as I can and be enjoying swimming, I need to put that into my calendar. I need to have this habit and this ritual. So that means that on a weekly basis, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and my swim mornings when I swim with squad. And if I can, I’ll normally try and fit one or two other sessions in there as well. And having the processes or the schedule, the habit, is what allows me to hit that goal. Now, I’m not that competitive anymore. I don’t have aspirations, at least at this moment, to chase after results or medals or events. I still enter some still compete and I enjoy that it still gives me motivation and it still gives me motivation to train and to to work hard. But at the end of the day, I don’t really care compared to what I used to. I do it more for fun and enjoyment and it’s just a challenge to myself. Now, I might be at a different phase of my sporting career than many of you.

So if you if you are driven to achieve something, then it is great to set those those smart goals. But it’s still going to have an element of the habits. And on a daily basis or weekly basis, what are you going to do to achieve it? So for me, I haven’t necessarily worried too much about the specifics around those goals or when I want to achieve them. They’re more just general goals with how I want to be as a person, how I want to live and what does my what does my life look like? So that’s what I’ve tried to orient myself to and and looking at it as what I want to achieve with my two perfect days there. What does that look like? That’s really given me something to strive for. So that’s that’s my slightly different approach to setting goals. I think both of them, the smart goals and then the more habit driven ones, they both they both tie into each other than they both have their purpose. But I found that to be really useful for what I’m targeting now.

So I want to share them with you on this podcast. So if you haven’t listened to the Atomic Habits episode that was episode number 230, but I didn’t think that book is available free on Spotify. If you’re listening to this on Spotify, I think that’s available for free as an audio book on there too now. So if you’re a member of Spotify, you can probably just go and listen to that straight away without costing you anything. Thanks again for listening to the podcast. If you haven’t left a review, whether you listen on Spotify or iTunes or elsewhere, that would mean a lot to me. It helps us get in front of more people when you do leave an honest review. So thank you to everyone who has done that. And if you haven’t, that would be amazing if you could. And I’ll see you next week with another episode of the Effortless Swimming podcast. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer,

go to www.effortlesswimming.com.