Setting goals often involves setting expectations – we’ll do X, and it will feel like Y, giving us outcome Z. Yet, our sense of time, our sense of progress, is something humans seem to find particularly tricky to plan for.
Particularly in the self-development field, the idea of XYZ leading to a set path is that is unrealistic and therefore sets many of us up to feel like we’ve failed.
Today I share my own experiences of this, and remind us all that progress won’t look linear. Things move at different speeds, and our experiences will not match someone else’s. And that’s okay.
You can also watch the video of this podcast, and see why I don’t do videos often because the amount of cuts and takes is not fun to try to slip in!
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Episode Transcript:
One of the things I want to talk about and consider, when it comes to reinvention/personal development/self-help/self-development/identity/reaching your potential or whatever set of phrases that might come to mind is how the passage of time and how the passage of experience is kind of warped.
And what I mean by that is there’s a saying that “we often overestimate what we can do in a day or a week and underestimate what we do in a year.”
This is part of the human condition that we plan ahead, that we dream, that we dream big, that we— certainly for people I tend to spend the most time with, we tend to want to improve ourselves, improve our lives.
If there is something we can do to make things better, we’re interested in what that is and how to do it. And I think it’s really tricky to take experiences, take lessons, take theory, and apply it to real life.
One of the reasons I’m even making this is because it is September 2026, and next week I officially, officially begin my full-time role running Rooted Reinvention. This is a project that has been on and off, something I have tweaked and worked on and worked with since about 2011. There were some gaps in there where I kind of paused, stopped, closed things, had a period off, came back, new brand, new name, still similar but slightly tweaked mission.
And this time I’m keeping a lot of the kind of, I would say, old branding and mission because they’re just still true for me.
What I have built so far is working. It feels right. It feels like what I need to be doing. And I’ve— and I was really excited to start vlogging this process, showing behind the scenes the reality of running a business, of doing what I do, of taking the concepts that I talk about and making them real, applying them, showing them in my own life.
And then I’ve come here to sit down. I’ve got my cup of tea. I’ve got my microphone. I’ve got myself set up. And I think just the hindsight of the things I’ve tried, the hindsight of knowing where I was even 2 years ago, even a year ago what I was planning, what I was hoping, what I was expecting.
Life doesn’t work how we think it will or plan for it to, and that’s okay.
But I feel like in, particularly in the self-development field, this is an area where there is an expectation for you get the theory, you explain how it works, you apply it, and then you have success.
And even when you have those periods of ups and downs and it’ll take time and habits take a long time to form and those kind of sort of comments or theories or expectations, there is still this expectation and this kind of assumption of, well, this is going to go this way, or this is what I’m going to see here.
This is what I think it’s going to look like. And I am someone who has been reinventing herself for decades at this point.
I started my self-development journey at the age of 10 because I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt that I was broken and therefore I sought answers. I sought out truth to try and understand and make sense of who I was and what I wanted and who I’d rather be.
And then I get here in my mid to late 30s and I moved home last year.
I’m about to kind of— I’ve taken a break from full-time work in order to focus wholly on this project, which is not just a business. For me it is, it’s a mission I guess. It’s one of those things where I’m constantly doing it, you know, alongside every other job I’ve had, every other thing I do.
I come back to it. I come back to doing it. I do naturally. I talk about it all the time. I want to share what I know. I want to share what I’ve tried and I want to help people, you know, where I couldn’t find someone to help me.
I want to help those people who might be in a similar position. And I find myself in my mid to late 30s, you know, living in a new, newish place, starting a newish adventure. And yet I feel more rooted to who I’ve been than ever.
And that doesn’t mean that my life is perfect or that I have everything that I want and everything that I need and everything is easy.
You know, I’ve still got my archery equipment sitting in the cupboard as I have messaged the local archery place to sort of say, “oh hey, how do things work up here? I’d like to get back into it after a year off.” And they replied and I haven’t done anything.
You know, we are in the process of purchasing a home. And waiting on the forms of that, half packing things. We may or may not be moving in the next month. And I think there’s something I love about sharing and showing and being this real person.
And then there is becoming a business owner full-time – doing this project that means so much to me that I am hoping will give me an income, that I’m needing to give me an income.
And there is this kind of pressure and this kind of expectation of, “Oh, you are the guru. You are the person who knows it all. You are the person with all of the research and all of the experience and all of the qualifications.”
And my own blocks come out. I don’t want to be the teacher who has it all together and looks super professional and has a studio and a team and everything is minimal and beautiful and almost fake looking. Because that’s what success should/could/can look like for some people.
If they choose that, fantastic. If it’s right for them, I’m here for it. I wear ripped jeans. I’m doing my first video in over a year, maybe a year and a half, wearing a tank top and I pulled my hair back into a ponytail earlier so I could go to a chiropractor appointment because I’m still dealing with chronic pain.
And I guess there is that real twist of knowing how much to share, how much I want to share, how much people care to see and want to see.
I want to be me. I want to be real. I want to show the full process. I want to show the cons as well as the pros. The whole of my teaching is human, realistic.
Yes, we don’t ignore the science. Yes, we don’t ignore those kind of spiritual little like you know, intuitive nudges we get, but we pull it all together with realism, with actual experience that you’ve tried.
What did you find? What did you learn? Let’s tweak things. Let’s take the lessons we are learning in our experience in life and use them for you and your life, how you need it to be, how you want it to go.
That is the whole premise of Rooted Reinvention.
It is all about developing ourselves. It’s all about unravelling those roots from what we quote unquote should be doing, should be like, and figuring out who we are underneath the shell that we, you know, try to protect ourselves from the world with, and then putting it into practice in a way that is sensible, I guess.
And what I think I mean when I say sensible is that it’s realistic, it’s working within the bounds of what is physically possible. It is working with the stories that we know we’ve been told, the ones we know maybe aren’t true for us, and the ones we’ve found that actually are true for us.
It is a way of applying, you know, the theory to actual experience.
So when we’re thinking about the plans we want to make, the big dreams we’ve got, the expectations we have, it’s important to remember that the future is made through daily action.
You know, the, the, the only way I’ve got to here is through all the things I’ve done on the previous days for the last 30-something years. And really recognizing that while we naturally like to plan, we like to see the patterns in things, we like to dream….
There is this disconnect that when you’re in the moment, you know, as I am in this moment where I’m, you know, facing slightly different challenges and, and new things that I’ve not had to deal with before, things that I’ve not had to deal with in, in sort of previous jobs, for example, there is a whole other layer to things when you’re self-employed, there is that reminder of the disconnect between what we think things will look like or what we think should happen or what we’re told should happen.
The amount of misconceptions that society puts on us that we are sold as the answer to things that actually isn’t necessarily good for every person. It all kind of accumulates in this sort of disconnect.
And I feel like the main point, which I’ve rambled a little bit around, is that idea that sometimes what we are doing in the moment or what we are planning to do in the near future feels really different when we’re in it, really different after we’ve done it, and really different from years before we do it when it’s just a dream.
And that’s okay. That’s part of the process. That’s part of how life works. And I guess I needed that reminder myself, and therefore I’m sure someone else could probably do with it too. Thank you so much for your time today, and I’ll catch you next time.
Bye.