Planning for the best time of your life.

This article was published in SisterShip Magazine Australia 2020.

Was the past year a good year for you? Did you feel truly satisfied that you had enjoyed the journey as much as you hoped, achieved as much as you hoped, grown as a person as much as you hoped? You have a wonderful opportunity right now to make this year a better one, to build on the steps from last year or rectify any disappointments. When I was a landlubber in New Zealand 15 years ago I was a Life Coach and a specialist in Time Management among other things and would be asked by large companies to teach their staff how to manage their time better. Basically, it was a way for a company to become more productive but even though life is not about being ever more productive to increase a company’s bottom line, similar goal setting principles can be very effective as a baseline for enjoying more of what Life has to offer.

The actual act of sailing a boat and living on a boat makes huge demands on time and energy and your major goals that you share with your partner will be the major focus; your boat and your voyaging. But there will be some time that is yours alone to pursue your other goals. When sailing, the boat always comes first and sometimes I feel that my personal needs are at the bottom of a long list of things that need attention, and I tend to get disgruntled. This is when I work on feeling fulfilled in other ways by making time to focus on goals for myself. Naturally I discuss my ideas with my DH to see how or if they will fit in with our joint overarching goals as well as including his personal goals too. We sit down and discuss what is realistic and what is not and how we can compromise on some issues. We will not perhaps be able to realise all the goals we want which is when we need to be willing to compromise. This is when HOT communication is required; honest, open and trusting.

When I first became a sailor and cruiser the intensity of preparing to leave friends and family, take the sailing courses I needed to, selling properties, finalising paperwork and finishing my two jobs, the strong, swift current of things-to-complete pulled me along, and there was no time for thinking of my Self.

It was a very strange feeling when we set sail for Tonga to find all of a sudden I had plenty of time and nothing much to do. I had no obvious purpose where I could use my land- based skills and I still needed to be useful. But useful to whom? My DH of course, but I had left myself out of the equation. From the many interviews with other sailing women for my book ‘Blue Water Women; Making the Leap from Landlubber to a Life at Sea’ I found I was not alone in feeling a lack of identity and purpose in those early years of cruising.

Cate Storey says she had intense ‘post work blues...’ and wondered who she was if she was not ‘a high achieving Aid worker who was going to save the world’. She suffered deep depression for the first ten months. ‘Mostly’, she says, ‘it was loss of control I felt.’ Focussing on sides of herself other than ‘work/achievement’ was alien to her. However, making plans to take control of the medical kit and other facets of boating life enabled Cate to start feeling useful, and thereby overcome her depression. And as she learned more on her voyage across the Pacific she became more useful as crew and her feeling of self worth improved. As she said to me, ‘I learned I am an alright and at times, interesting person, [even] without my career’.

Mary Anne Unrau felt guilty about not making better use of her talents and time than to have the luxury of constant travel. She looked for a job at most every anchorage until she came to terms with her guilt at no longer being a contributing member of society. When we set sail we need to be prepared to become a different person, open to learn about a very different world and what it can teach us. But this is not always easy. This is when we need to have personal goals which will stimulate us and support us when we need them, like the friends we left behind.

My DH and I have a wonderful life together, and it keeps getting better, but it needs work. To be happy being 24/7 with a loved one full time on a boat for 15 years requires a good dollop of awareness and constant effort. I found if I was busy most of the time thinking of the boat and how I could contribute, plus supporting the captain the rest of the time, even though we were experiencing amazing things together, a small note called ‘resentment’ could sometimes creep in. To begin with I couldn’t put my finger on where this was coming from. And so I examined possibilities. Was it that my brain wasn’t being used enough or that I needed more stimulation or was simply grieving for my old self? I felt I was stagnating. I felt the ‘me’ I knew was disappearing. At the time I couldn’t see this was a good thing as I clung to my past habits which were all I had that was truly ’mine’. It was time to create a new ‘Me’. As the motivator Anthony Robbins says, we do not change unless the pain of not changing gets too much to bear.

I realised that just as we make joint plans A, B and C every year for the boat and our travels, I needed to make goals for my Self as well. It was a case of ‘doctor heal thyself’ – I had taught just under two thousand people how to expand their lives and enjoy bliss. It was time I did this for myself. I started to meditate on what else, apart from sailing did I want in my life. I knew I could write articles on our adventures and misadventures in various parts of the world, but perhaps I could write a book? I looked at the sides of me that I had prized in my former life – could I re-integrate some of them into my sailing life? One of these, a sense of style and pride in how I present myself to the world, found a place in my galley with investing in the best pans, the best coffee, good glasses and so on. Stardancer is my home. I am not simply camping. Even if my DH thought the upholstery just fine, I didn’t. It didn’t reflect who I am, so re- furbishing became another goal.

Going to classical concerts and visiting art galleries are what I love to do when in a city so that side of me needed some research. I now subscribe to radio stations and YouTube sites where I can keep up with the Art scene and listen to live classical music recitals throughout the world. I wrote a goal to listen to podcasts of interest once a week. There are a few rules when it comes to goal setting if you ever want them to move from dream-state into reality. When you physically write a goal down it becomes more concrete and more real, and it must have action and a timeframe attached. So grab a piece of paper and start thinking and writing about what Goals you intend to make for yourself; things to Do, to Have and to Be. Make your goals SMART, Specific, Measureable (How am I doing?), Actionable (Not Lotto!), Realistic and Timed.

Susan Jeffers in her book ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’ has an excellent diagram to make us look at the balance in our lives; what we need more of and what we need less of too. Draw a box about three or four inches across and divide this into nine boxes. Label each box with the most important parts of your whole life; e.g. Community/contribution, Hobbies, Leisure/Sport/ etc, Family, Alone time, Personal growth, Work, Health, Relationship and Friends/social life, etc. Then make a sort of wonky, coloured circle to include what proportion of these is in your life now, then make another coloured circle to include those areas where you may have a blank or wish to have more balance. You can then see what areas you want to make goals around.

Balance is a shifting thing as we are never static, but if just one of those boxes is your whole life, e.g. Family, when that is not in your life then you become truly out of balance with no other sides of your life to fill the space and support you. I found when interviewing sailing women for my book that many of us feel guilty about leaving family behind. When we are sailing long -term it is not always easy to keep in contact as much as we would like, and we cannot often be physically ‘there’ for our families. However, we can communicate on a regular basis.

With our three sons we have found it is easier for them to join us than for us to leave the boat to visit them, but this cannot happen that often so ‘facetime’ becomes a regular part of our lives (or as regular as sailing with internet coverage can be) if we diarise it either manually or electronically. Otherwise we may skip some chats, or forget. A goal must be written down and time blocked off to chat at a certain time each day/week/month or chances are this good intention will fall by the wayside.

So with a new decade starting take some quiet time to think – what DO you want for yourself? Think of things which will make you happy, things to integrate into your life or pull out of the hat when you are having a tough time on the boat. And plan for these. Write down the steps you need to achieve your goals, for example, buy the paints and watercolour paper you have always wanted, enrol for that course online you promised yourself, research the history and culture of places you cruise to etc. Then block off ’Me’ time to enjoy your goals. And do not feel guilty! You should feel a real sense of control, achievement and fulfilment from this exercise. Make your ‘Us goals’ with your partner the same way, and of course – your cruising, sailing, travelling goals, and share your personal goals, compromising where necessary.

Any feelings of depression or negativity will disappear once you take control of your life on board. You are not simply a sailor, you are a Woman with endless abilities and potential to feel happily fulfilled whether on land or sea. As Lou Holtz says, ‘If you are bored with Life – if you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.’ So, make time at the start of the year to make 2020 your very best year yet!

If members of WWS wish to have a one- off free consultation with me about their goal setting, please send me an email to bluewaterwomen2016@gmail.com to arrange communication either by email or chat.