Life update and goals

It's been a while, and I am not making these 'public' in the sense of advertising them on social media for now, if you make your own way here, firstly, thank you for taking an interest, I'd love to get a dialogue going so if you can relate to anything being said in this blog then feel free to comment and I'll get back to you.

This blog this time, is mostly for reflection, whilst also an accountability checker. I have let myself be taken over by bad habits and have really struggled to be cohesive recently. I know where my passion is but also, I am having a hard time letting go of my past life of swimming. Identity will be probably quite a big theme moving forward. But anyway. let's first see if I can be consistent with this and with the goals I am inevitably going to set myself in this process. Day by day I want to set a couple of goals and reflect on each one as I go.

Lets start with my passion - helping athletes on their sporting journey. I know that previously I have spoken at great length about my relationship with swimming, but since 'retiring' (still don't know if I can call it that as I still enjoy racing, but since I have given my goals of the sport a rest it encompasses my state) I have been very confused, all over the place and struggling to find my purpose. Luckily my venture of Jay Lelliott Athlete Mentoring has really stepped up and showed me where I am of most value, helping athletes. I know that from the last 18months I have helped athletes improve, and I can hold my head high and be proud of that. The mentoring programme has also helped me see where I want to be in the next few years, with a job in this field or similarly, performance lifestyle. So I want to think about what I have to do to achieve this.

Similarly to if I was to use the OSCAR model in the process of athlete one-to-one sessions (Outcome, situation, Choices and consequences, Actions, Review). If the outcome is be a qualified Performance lifestyle advisor, then this is my first goal. The situation I currently find myself in is with the course half done - with half the bookwork done, the practice sessions and review sessions complete and with my athlete talk finished. Therefore I have to complete the bookwork and schedule my review session with the course leader to become a qualified sport psychologist. consider this as my action section moving forward. My timescale I want to achieve this by is November, I am not going to set a strict day, but if I am fully done by then, I will feel like I have achieved my goal. This blog will be my review section, and I am writing this before midday as I have just had a wakeup call of not getting a job I had applied and worked hard for, so this is one of the first steps I would use to be more prepared if I had another go.

Another goal is I don't feel very active at the minute. I REALLY enjoyed training for the London Marathon, but since then, I have felt abit goalless in my approach to training. I started running to work and did that for about 2 months until I rolled my ankle, so now it is time to try and get more consistent with exercise. So, my goal in this category is to do 1 piece of exercise per day moving forward. I do not care how severe, what this looks like but I just know I felt happiest when I was challenged in multiple ways. As I said, this is day 1, pretty much hour 1 of me knowing this is what I need, so I imagine I will have a challenge planned within a couple of weeks, but for now, the nice basic challenge of exercise feels right to me.

The 3rd goal is related to my mentoring business. Recently, I have not put much time into this. I know it is the new season and I want to be able to do the mentoring well, but sometimes my 'perfectionist' side won't let me start. Now I am fully aware of my job outcome, I feel I can put alot of my effort into where I know I have lots of ability to help. No new 6-session plans for now, but I just want to show, to remind my athletes that I care and I will be there for them when they need me. Being there is more important than being perfect. This is a lesson I am beginning to realise. Again if any of my athletes read this, know that I have been absent for a reason but I still care and will do what I can to help you succeed.

My goal for this, to follow on, is to show that I care, to email and to send out all follow up emails I should have done before. This is my passion, so as most of my athletes settle into the new season, I am going to show that I am here.

To recap, my three goals are

1) Complete my performance lifestyle course (deadline November (something, maybe before cruise is a good date)

2) to get one piece of exercise in per day (a walk counts, just something for my own personal clarity, challenge TBC).

3) To reach out to my athletes I mentor, to help them this short course season, whether that is through one-to-one sessions in the pool, or on land and aid them on their journey into Short course nationals (Late November, early December)

Accountability check. each goal here is fairly large but fairly manageable. Therefore I am going to break this down into more manageable chunks to achieve each day.

1) complete a question of my PL course (currently if you couldn't tell, talking about the OSCAR model

2) Ive walked 2miles already today, but I may still decide on abit more? Again this is normally enough but clarity post-finding out about job may need something extra

3) Send. The. Emails.

I'll probably reflect on different elements of my life moving forward, but this is enough for today.