 Are we good? We are indeed. Hello there. This is James Swannick. Great to have you here. Courage. How do we learn courage? How do we get motivated? How do we step up in the face of fear and make things happen? We're about to talk to a woman who has crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian oceans in a rowboat solo. She has literally rowed across three oceans. The only woman in the world to have done so. Her name is Rose Savage and she joins us from just north of London right now. Rose, great to have you here. It's fantastic to be here James. Thank you so much for having me on your shame. What the hell were you thinking? It's a very valid question. I've always wanted to ask that question. I remember Jay Leno asked Hugh Grant that question when he got busted with the hooker off Sunset Boulevard. He walked out on the Jay Leno show and Jay Leno said, what the hell were you thinking? I remember that well and it's funny because I watched that video again just a couple of weeks ago when I'd done something particularly embarrassing and I was just explaining that we Brits are really good at embarrassment and I don't think I've ever seen anyone quite so close to dying of embarrassment on that particular Jay Leno show. It was classic. What were you doing? Why did you want to row across an ocean? Can I also say that I have never before heard rowing cross oceans compared with being caught in your pants down. It was the first time for everything. Yeah, absolutely. We're off to a good start here. So what was I thinking? Well at least I would like to think that I was thinking with the headbrain unlike Hugh Grant. It was kind of an extreme reaction against having spent 11 years of my life working in an office as a management consultant. Trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up and I reached the point where I still didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up but I knew it wasn't management consultancy. So I quit my job, quit a few other things as well including marriage and tried to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. So you were a management consultant in London. Is that right? What does a management consultant mean exactly? What we do is it a nine to five desk job? Was it long hours? Was it what was it? It was sort of eight till six or seven. It was kind of project management. It was a, to be really brief, it was just kind of one of those gray jobs that involves lots of PowerPoint presentations and pieces of paper and I'm sorry I'm probably alienating an awful lot of management consultants in your audience. But in terms of a job, it was a career that just didn't light you up. It was a career that didn't give you any passion. It was a nine to five kind of job, which is fine for many, many people in the world, which is absolutely fine. But for you it was dying a slow death. I get the impression. Dying a slow death or having my soul eroded was the rather more drastic way that I described it to myself. I'm not actually sure that these kinds of jobs are fine for most people. There are these surveys that year on year show that around 85% of people either not engaged or actively disengaged from their job. I was definitely in that 85%. Yeah and how old were you when you were doing this? Were you in your 20s? Were you in your like what stage of life were you in at this point? I was a law degree. Growing up I was really good at passing exams and the trouble is when you're good at passing exams you end up going down a very sort of predictable path and so Julie when I graduated I did what everybody else was doing and back then this is 1989 she said giving away her age and everyone wanted to be investment bankers or management consultants and so I just kind of followed the crowd and thought I ought to be happy. I know it's definitely a first ball problem. I should have counted myself being really lucky. I had a decent salary, reasonable job security as secure as anybody ever is and life should have been perfect but the trouble is on the inside it just felt like I was being crushed by the machine. Yeah yeah I felt that way at times over my you know in my adult life. There are first world problems but those first world problems can be very stressful. I mean if we're not growing in our lives like if we're not moving forward spiritually right if we know there's something that we're capable of doing but we're not doing it and we're not moving forward in that aspect then we are dying inside. We are dying spiritually. I mean it's not like we're not going to have food and shelter and and water and things like that will always be okay but spiritually we're just dying inside. It sounds like that's where you are at now Let me ask you this Roz were you a rower? Were you like in did you row in school? Were you naturally good at this or is this something you just picked up before you decided to go and cross three oceans? You'll laugh at this I mean I'm actually hideously unsporty and I'm only five foot four so if anybody listening to this thinks I'm some sort of Amazonian type woman I'm just absolutely not. I was useless at physical education when I was at school. Couldn't catch couldn't throw was kind of small and uncoordinated and nobody wanted me on their team but then when I got to university I thought well I really ought to do some exercise. I was mostly motivated by wanting to be able to eat more without getting fat and so I took up rowing and found my great surprise I actually really liked it so I rode pretty seriously at university but then pressures of work and start giving up rowing and didn't row for about 11 years until a sort of weird coincidence of sort of decision points and awakenings came together and led to the ocean rowing. Wow okay we're talking to Roz Savage here if you're watching on Facebook live as we have some people here hello Facebook live if you have a question for Roz please do type it in here and we'll make sure that we ask her the question and she will answer it for you so if you've got a question here I know we've got a few viewers here let's have a look here Jaycar says I'm just getting out of college I don't want to do a job I want to be an entrepreneur what do you recommend Roz? Go for it yeah if your heart's calling you to do something it takes courage as we're talking about today to go out on your own but going back to that survey about job satisfaction and engagement people who've got their own businesses or work in small companies where they really have a voice that's going to be heard today are so much happier than people who were the small cogs in the very big machines yeah if you've got a passion then I would absolutely if you know what you want to do just go for it don't even think twice but how did you get to the point where you knew you wanted to set forth on a rowing expedition and just I know we're sort of fast-forwarding saying that you cross three oceans but let's do the first one I don't know if that was the hardest one you can see it absolutely well yeah so there's the context and you know the build up to that and how that came about then sure when I was trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture during my dying days as it were in management consultancy it was almost like my soul had been worn away until I was just like this little it was almost like the dying spotter of what remains of of my soul that just somehow refused to give up and die and I was trying to find an answer to this question like if I'm not happy with this superficially perfect life and what will make me happy and I did this exercise which I highly recommend although with the government health warning that it really can seriously change your life I imagine that I was writing my own obituary or what they were the eulogy that they were going to read out at my funeral and I wrote two versions of it the one that I wanted and the one that I was actually heading for if I carried on living my life as I was then and the fantasy obituary wasn't really about what I would do it certainly didn't mention ocean rowing but it was about the kind of person that I would be and I thought about the obituaries I really enjoyed reading and they were these these colorful characters who would just get out there and try stuff and it didn't even really seem to matter all that much whether they succeeded or failed but they just really seem to live without fear without limits and as I was writing it was almost like I'd opened a portal into a parallel universe when I was where I was living the life that I was supposed to be living it felt incredibly real to me even though it was worlds away from how I was actually living at that point so I think the writing was on the wall from then on and then I had an environmental awakening um became very concerned about what's I wouldn't say what we're doing to the planet but actually what we're doing to ourselves um and it's really not going to go all that well for the humans if we don't get our act together seriously and I was so fired up about this I just really thought I had to do something and I didn't know what I was going to do I was just a recovering management consultant but I just knew I had to do something and then I had a chance meeting with a with a guy who'd rode across the Atlantic and and just somehow all of these ideas collided and a light bulb went on and I just went brilliant that's what I'm going to do I'm going to row across oceans and use my blogs and my podcasts and my my books and my talks to raise awareness of our environmental challenges and so I it was pretty out there I mean it's someone like anything I'd ever done before and I'm sure my friends thought I'd lost the plot but to me it made perfect sense so did it make perfect sense in the moment where it was like oh I know I'm just going to row across the Atlantic I mean did you have any idea about how hard it would be to row across the Atlantic or if I'd have had any idea how hard it was going to be I I would have taught myself out of it I think I knew immediately I knew in my heart that it was the perfect project for me but then my head or my self-protecting ego kicked in and was saying don't be stupid like you haven't even been to sea before other than you know on a cross-channel ferry and so I kept trying to think of convincing reasons why I shouldn't do it but it only made me more determined that I was going to do it and so after having this sort of in a dialogue backwards and forwards for about a week I just knew I absolutely had to do it and in fact right from the start the ambition was to well originally it was to row around the whole world and then I found out you can't actually do that in a rowboat because they're not that believable and you can't really go upwind so I decided I would only row across the the three big oceans so just just describe what the particular rowboat that you rowed in looks like how big is it because I know I'm sure the listener or viewer might be imagining a rowboat and it's kind of like row row row your boat gently down the stream and they're imagining just a little two-person thing here so can you just describe what it looks like and what provisions you can keep and how it's you know whether it's set up with satellite navigation and all that kind of stuff it is a lot more seaworthy than the little ones on the lake in Central Park it's it's especially designed for crossing oceans it's about 23 feet long seven meters or six feet wide two meters and it's got a cabin as each end the one in the bow is for storage the one in the stern is for sleeping those are relatively watertight and then in the middle you've got this open deck which is where the rowing seat is and that's where I would spend 12 hours a day rowing and so there's plenty of storage space I could easily the longest voyage I've ever done jumping forward a bit here was five months alone at sea and I had plenty enough food with me to last that long so I'm on my own out there there's no supply boat no chase boat it's just just me and my little rowboat so uh I've done a 10 day silent meditation called vipassana but I haven't done a five month silent meditation stuck at sea I used to think that I was pretty cool and I had some pretty cool bragging rights like I could say yeah went 10 days without talking once yeah I'm pretty cool solid meditation people go wow that's amazing you just blew that out of the water rose well actually um let's even things up a bit friends keep telling me how amazing vipassana is like keep looking at it and then I think it was that you're not allowed to take in a journal that for me I'm afraid was the deal breaker so I have not yet done vipassana yeah you can sneak a piece of paper and a pen in I may or may not have done that I'm not saying I'm not going to reveal in case anyone from vipassana is listening okay so you set out on this this this journey you're in this rowboat how long was it supposed to take where did you leave from and where were you where were you to end end up on the first trip yep so this is the Atlantic yes 10 years ago now I was heading out from the canary islands just off the coast of Africa okay 3000 miles to Antigua in the Caribbean and one of my sponsors had offered me double the money if I managed to break the women's record which was 56 days at that point unfortunately I picked the worst possible year um 2005 year of Hurricane Katrina and more named storms in the Atlantic than right any year since records began so my timing could have been better um it ended up taking me 103 days and for most of that I did have the use of my satellite phone which was how I could check in with my mum each day less I know that I was still alive and still okay um but in fact that broke 24 days before the end so that was definitely the more vipassana like yeah did people still know that you were okay when your phone broke for 24 hours that people could still track you okay yeah I had a transponder on my boat that was sending back my position via satellite but I'm sure my poor long-suffering mum in the the wee hours of the night was probably wondering if the tracker was still on the boat and if I was still on the boat and um we'd lost my dad's just the year before and she later told me that when my phone broke it was like being bereaved all over again yeah I can imagine she did have a few more gray hairs the next time I saw her I know we're bouncing around between few of the different trips that you're having we're talking about the first one and then we're kind of talking about the other ones um and I know we're talking here about courage and how to overcome fear let me ask you this question um what was the lowest point that you had on any of your three journeys and just to go over it you crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to to to Antigua and then you crossed the Pacific from where to where um San Francisco to Papua New Guinea and I stopped off in Hawaii and bonus points for anybody who's heard of the Republic of Kiribati um I stopped off there as well on the way across the Pacific um Kiribati got the distinction of being the only country in the world that's in the northern and southern and eastern and western hemispheres okay and then the Indian Ocean you left from where and you ended up where yep from your home country isn't it Australia yes yes man I left from Perth and went to um to Mauritius which is just off the coast of Africa so that was about four thousand miles and on that last trip there you would have sailed across where they suspect the missing Malaysian MH330 flight is is it 310 MH310 they're they're still searching for that Malaysian airlines plane that went down and I think that that's gone down over the Indian Ocean there between Perth and and uh and East Africa I think it really goes to show just how huge the ocean is um I think I've worked because you know they've been trying to find it and they they just can't find it with all of their sophisticated um equipment yeah I worked out when I was doing the Pacific which was 8 000 miles altogether that um like if my boat was the size of a pinhead like you know one millimeter across yeah um the Pacific would be three miles so imagine on a three-mile walk trying to find a pin a pin that's been stuck into the ground like great analogy pin just a jet-making pin we're talking to ross savage who is the only woman in the world to have crossed three oceans solo um ross the lowest point on any of those three trips where you know you're in the in the famous you know analogy of the hero's journey you have someone who's in the pit of despair and they don't think they're going to get out and then they find a way to dig deep and get out and we see it in many movies and themes um everyone has their own hero's journey where at one stage they were struggling and seemingly out but they find found a way to triumph um tell us about your lowest of low points oh so many to choose from um the first one was about six hours into the first voyage when i'm hanging over the side of the boat being just horrendously seasick and it's getting dark and i'm feeling really alone and actually really quite stupid just thinking as you asked at the start what the hell was i thinking when this seemed like a good idea um the first two weeks that first crossing were just incredibly hard um i was in quite a lot of pain and oh but um i think it's a lot to be said for having enough naive optimism to get yourself into something it may go to your entrepreneur listener enough naive optimism to get yourself into something and then too much stubborn pride to get yourself out of it find a way to hang on in there and keep on going um there was a really low point my first attempts on the pacific when i left from north of san francisco and about 10 days out ran into a really big storm and my boat was just capsizing and capsizing and somebody um reading my blog became rather concerned about me and without asking me first sent out the us coast guard to come and pick me up um which didn't go down very well with me at all but um yeah that one ended up in the back of a coast guard helicopter and i'm very grateful you know that i'm not dissing the coast guard they do a fantastic job i just didn't really want to meet them in those circumstances so you would think you you could you were confident you were going to get out of that situation and you didn't need the coast guard to come and help you is that what it was yeah this is the stubborn pride bit that um i i really wanted to keep on going but we argued it backwards and forwards for about well we discussed it backwards and forwards for about six hours and i'd lost some of my equipment in one of the capsizers and ultimately i just thought well it's better to be alive donkey than a dead lion so i accepted the rescue but it was a horrible horrible feeling um after i'd spoke to them on the radio saying you know okay said because i was talking with people in the fixed wing plane and when they when i said okay send out the helicopter i just hung up the radio and burst into tears and it didn't help that then all the internet trolls came out and just had a fields day and there was all this you know people who didn't know the facts of the story didn't know i was already very experienced and really knew what i was doing and i had private rescue insurance if i had wanted to rescue it would have been from the insurance company not from the US coast guard etc etc but it helped me to develop a thicker skin anyway that's for sure was that um was that uh when you got back to safety were you like how long before you went again how long before you got up and went again um well when i got back to safety i still have salvaged my boat because when they airlift you they don't airlift your boat so we managed to do that and i really wanted to get going again that year i was just mortified by the whole experience and just wanted to sort of erase and rewind and get back out there but it was too late in the season by then so i had to wait another nine months before wow okay so that was a that was a what you would call i guess a failed attempt to cross on the second time and what did that teach you what did that experience there teach you um not to put so much heavy data gathering equipment on the top of my boat more deeply it taught me that there are more important things in life than other people's opinions and in fact all that vitriol that came out said much more about those people sitting on their backsides in their nice warm comfortable homes just you know tapping on a keyboard criticize you know i love that theodore roosevelt quote about it's not the critic that counts you know it's it's a poor dude who's in the arena covered in sweat and blood and mud and you know just getting and um so i um i think i'd already come along the way in not caring too much about what other people think of me before i started the rowing but that definitely helped me to to get a thicker skin about public humiliation yeah i remember i experienced something very minor compared to what you just explained rose but i i i interviewed the the rock star john bon jovi when i was there 35 and in 2010 and at the end of the interview i asked him a couple questions about my favorite english premier league soccer team um tottenham hotspot just as a joke i said let me ask you some questions about tottenham which you'll have absolutely no clue what the answer is and that will be that will be funny and i'll just put it on my tottenham blog because i had a tottenham blog and there were some other tottenham blogs out there and so i recorded this thing with john bon jovi and it was hilarious it was really really funny and then i posted the youtube link which you can still see to this day if you type in my name james swanick john bon jovi tottenham and i posted it in a few tottenham fan forums and i wouldn't say it was most people but i'd say like maybe 30 or 40 percent just smashed me and said this is stupid you're not a real fan well get this crap off here what the hell's this guy got to do i hate that guy's music stop wasting our time and only talk about only talk about tottenham here and i was like depressed for three days now this is nothing compared to you being rescued by a u.s the u.s coast guard we know when your life is in danger but i remember i remember feeling like really hurt for like three days afterwards and i was walking the streets of new york with my head down going wow this is the first time i've actually been really publicly criticized it wasn't even public it was just amongst you know thousands of tottenham fans but being smashed for doing something i thought was actually really cool and and really funny and then finally my friend said to me he said james don't worry about it there's always going to be haters in the world just do what you want to do and do it the way you want to do it and there'll always be people out there who are going to love you and support you and they're always going to be people out there who are going to smash you but just forget about the people who smash you and just carry on so i don't want to i don't want to take away from your story rose but that was that was you know just my own little first experience of that and i'm assuming maybe you felt something on a much grander level when that happened when you were rescued well i'm sure a lot of people have been through something parallel to this because whatever it is that you're creating whatever you're trying to do in the world you know when whether you're wanting to entertain people or to inspire people there's a certain vulnerability in putting yourself out there and people aren't always going to respect that and i guess we do open the door to occasionally get a complete smashing and um actually one of uh my sort of long time supporters in california sent me a little rhyme from dr seuss which is those that minds don't matter and those that matter don't mind oh that's i like that yeah yeah and so i just remind myself of that and in fact something that really helped pick me up i was staying in a tiny little surf town in in just north of san francisco at a friend's house kind of licking my wounds and trying to pluck up the courage to get back out there into the world and i watched a film about the dixie chicks and the time when the lead singer said that she was ashamed to come from the same state as george w bush i remember that yeah and people like burning their cds in the streets and sending death threats and you know just really overreacting to this and it caused you know obviously quite uh some consternation and soul searching within the band but um the two other girls really stood by the lead singer and in fact she just came out fighting she even said it again she really just said a big sort of fu to to all the people and you know what it actually did wonders for their yes for their profile ultimately and they found a whole new audience so after you've licked your licked your wounds and you know you had nine months and then you went back out and again what what happened then let's let's talk about the second attempt crossing the pacific and then the indian ocean and then we'll wrap this up with with lessons learn you know how to be courageous and how to overcome obstacles which we'll get to just in a couple minutes but can you just finish this the story as to what happened from there yeah to get some completion on that um by the way just before you do that i've got a comment here uh from one of our facebook followers uh melanie who says uh i love this woman her lowest point is when she got rescued and then um melanie says it's not the critic that counts brilliant she's just emphasizing what what what it is that you said uh jake asked can we have your website ross can we have your website now absolutely it's um all the w's and then uh ross savage coaching that's ross with a z or a z depending on your nationality uh ross savage coaching and i blog there about once a week and there's links to my the social media stuff as well there's also ross savage dot com is okay don't post there anymore but that's got the rowing archive on it we also have another question here how did you feel after you accomplished your goal of rowing solo let's get to that let's let's have you finish the the pacific leg and then move on to the leg and then i'll ask you how you felt can i just pick up on something um i'm sorry i didn't catch the name of your listener but um she made the comment about um the lowest point being when i was the listener was me it just occurred to me that's quite a nice twist on the traditional fairy tale isn't it i'm starting to get this one of my pet peeves these days is these um fairy tales that we're told when we're young and they're incredibly disempowering for women or for girls you know that the the princesses tend to be terribly passive and they're waiting there to be rescued by their prince charming or whoever and it's i was speaking at disney the other day and i was just going we definitely need more inspiring fairy tale heroines here and you know luckily they've now created meriser in the movie brave who's you know such a badass heroine lover but it's just an interesting twist that in the fairy tales the best moment for the princess is when she gets rescued right it was my worst moment yeah thanks melanie for that little thank you melanie so to yeah finish off the oceans um so failed attempts on the pacific was 2007 um set out again from under the golden gate bridge in 2008 took me 99 days to row to hawaii and i was that was one of my best voyages ever and what pleased me so much about that one was i struggled massively on the atlantic i know we're going to come back to the lessons learned um on the atlantic not only did everything break and i got injured but psychologically i made life so unbelievably hard for myself i just made every mistake in the book and we'll come back to that later on and then i spent really the year or so after the atlantic really working hard doing the work on taking those lessons i'd learned and weaving them into the fabric of who i am because i didn't want to leave that smarter wiser woman i'd become by the end of the atlantic i didn't want to leave her out there on the ocean i needed to make sure that when i was back on dry land with all of the the old triggers from my old life around me um that i would respond in the new way rather than my old way so i was then able to put that to the test on that row to hawaii and it really works and i just coped with it so much better in my head which is really the only place that matters so that was great voyage and then the following year 2009 rode from hawaii to kiribati across the equator have my little party at the equator and then 2010 rode from kiribati to Papua New Guinea where i was greeted on the dock by about 5000 complete strangers it was just brilliant such a blast wow yeah that was a cool moment um i mean it's i've been so touched over the years just the kindness of strangers people just show up see some mad english woman in a row boat i don't know why but there's it's very humbling and i think they show up because they understand how how monumental and herculean that your feet is or that it was you know and so people respect and admire that and want to celebrate that maybe it it it it it lightens up a part of their soul or their or their their spirit if you like to see what is possible so maybe you know them coming to celebrate and and you know and congratulate you is them actually celebrating their own lives you know warming their own spirit to be able to understand what is possible that's lovely thank you james and i'll i'll take that i sometimes have difficulty really owning what i've done because i see so many people out there who tackle unbelievable challenges that they didn't get to choose you know they they lose a limb in a bombing or they um give birth to a disabled child or they have to look at aging parents and they don't get to choose that and they don't get to be interviewed on a podcast about it and so i sometimes struggle a bit to really own what i've done but i think we do need the people who are willing to go out there and do something out of the ordinary because it does lift us all up yes it certainly does you have lifted us up rose and so i would love to ask you just to summarize if you if you would um we've got a listener or the viewer who's who's heard your your story and followed you and i'm sure is feeling very inspired by it maybe some people are thinking that you're crazy but at the same time they can't help what points of view but at the same time thinking that you're crazy is is kind of exciting as well and just you know again like it makes people think what is possible but we started off talking about courage okay we started talking about courage um getting motivated i know you talked about having a vision and you know how to release inner strengths what what are the lessons that you've learned that that you could really you know pass on to the viewer and the listener right now and how they can live their life so i'm going to say so many things but uh if i had to prioritize um so when i decided that i was going to cross these three oceans i didn't even know how much i didn't know but i came up with enough of a plan to give myself the delusion that i knew what i was doing um had this huge to-do list and i really just started putting one foot in front of another and what i found was that because i had this real burning passion about the environment and probably equally matched by a burning desire to find out who i was or in fact who i could be really wanted to explore that and that massive motivation gave me the courage to do all of these extraordinary things i would never have done before like getting out there and seeking sponsorship and um doing just ridiculous amounts of training and um just it was so massively energizing i really felt like it's almost like in the in the Wizard of Oz you know when she's in Kansas and everything's black and white and then when she goes to Oz and everything's amazing technicolor i really felt like that commitment to make this project you know to row around the world or bust it just unleashed all of these resources inside me that the courage the resourcefulness the creativity the determination and i would just be well during that chapter in my life i'd be one of those really annoying people that bounces out of bed in the mornings just going what can i do today to make my dream come true it was it was just the most amazingly life affirming yeah thing to take on and be committed to only just be committed to it to a to a vision yeah and and things just mobilize i mean people would just come into my life when i needed them and it was almost like magic i mean it really felt like the universe i think fortune does favor the bold and i think really important thing that i've learned and to keep having to relearn is not to look too far ahead down the line and there were times during the preparation that i would get freaked out at everything that needed to be done it got even worse when i was on the ocean i made the classic mistake of looking at 3000 miles ahead of me and just going oh my god and i'm going at two miles an hour and i'm just extrapolating and thinking this is going to take me forever and i just absolutely crushed my own morale i just collapsed i just kind of folded in under the weight of the enormity of this project and i've really learned much better now just to take it one day at a time i mean obviously when you're doing a huge voyage you do have to look further ahead because you need to take all your supplies with you for three months but then once you get out there really don't look too far down the road because that way lies madness you know really just it took me about a million ore strokes to get across the Atlantic and i could only take one ore stroke at a time and so i remind myself of that when i'm writing a book i can only write one word at a time so don't start panicking about finding enough words to get to the end of the book just keep you know just keep going keep putting keep sticking your oars in the water and like i think you can really apply that to any big overwhelming daunting challenge and how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time right you know to eat the whole thing at the one time so a lot of people who procrastinate get overwhelmed by you know all the steps they need to take instead of just sticking to that there's a famous rock climber so famous i've forgotten his name but he says just stick in your three foot uh your uh and your three foot space so don't look at the top where you got to get to just look three in your three foot wall your three foot room three feet here here here and here just concentrate on that and then just keep doing that all the way to you so you go to the top which is sounds like what you did so be committed to a vision don't look too far ahead uh down the line uh anything else was another one when i was trying to cross the equator there are lots of really tricky currents around there that were just playing merry hell with my navigation i was kind of squiggling around trying to get across the equator and i got really sort of obsessive about this and on my gps i zoomed the scale right in so that i could see as soon as i was going the wrong way and it was driving me nuts and eventually uh someone commenting on my blog said zoom out the scale on your gps and you'll see that you're still making progress in the right direction wow at the same time as you need to keep in the rock climbing analogy on the one hand you do need to keep your focus really tight and small but also if you are suffering setbacks and or going around in circles for a little while yeah sometimes it does help to scale right back obviously you don't do this if you're on a sheer rock face but you know in your mind to scale right back and get the big picture and see that you are in fact making progress towards your goal right okay and then uh anything else about when you get stuck in a situation in a bad situation how you get out of that how you have the courage to keep going um i just knowing that everything changes there were times on the atlantic particularly when i was being blown backwards by a headwind and um you obviously can't put an anchor in the ocean floor because the ocean's about two miles deep on average um so you're pretty helpless you are getting blown backwards and you can either get really frustrated about that or just know that eventually the wind's going to change back in your favor and you'll be able to get going again yeah it's the worst situation you're in it's temporary exactly um unfortunately that goes for good situations as well as bad situations but that's important too to love the success while it's happening but not to become too attached to it to always be appreciative of it and actually that gratitude thing is a really huge practice for me um it was one of the good disciplines about writing a blog every night while i was on the ocean was that it enabled me to get some perspective on the day and pick out the things like the glorious sunset or well hey i only managed three miles today but hey i managed three miles today and to to be grateful for the good stuff um and i keep my gratitude journal every night just kind of write down the things that you do yeah i have a journal called the five minute journal which your friends of mine own and i write in it every morning i wrote in it before we got we jumped on the call here just set three wires your brain and the neurons in your brain to be focusing on being appreciative rather than you know like always wanting things the whole time it's hard because i'm one of those people who's always i'm kind of don't give myself enough credit a lot of times and i'm always wanting more and i think it's you know it's a human trait but writing in that gratitude diary just forces the habit of just going hey look everything's pretty good you're gonna have well there's lots to be appreciative for absolutely and you know what the people who believe they're lucky in life do tend to attract better outcomes psychologists have demonstrated this so um if you if you are counting your blessings and you're right we do have a negativity bias because historically or evolutionarily we needed folks on the problem that was the two percent rather than the 98 percent that was going great uh it was the two percent was the same two tiger that was going to come and bite you um so that is the way that we're wired but i think we can really balance that out by practicing that gratitude and yeah it's probably like the single biggest happiness boosting thing that i do okay all right so let's just review that there which we've been talking to ross savage and we're going to let her go in just a few minutes here um but uh ross was the only woman in the world to cross three oceans and she rode she quit her high-powered london job to become an ocean rower and what are the lessons we learned well number one be committed to a vision be committed to your vision this will unleash your inner strength and your determination number two don't look too far ahead down the line just take it one step at a time yes understand what the end goal and the end vision is but don't get overwhelmed by all the the number of steps you need to take just just go one step at a time one step at a time uh know that everything changes whatever situation you are in it is temporary okay if you are struggling right now if you're down and out know that the darkest part of the night is right before the dawn it's temporary things will change the only thing that stays the same is that things are always changing and then gratitude always writes uh in a blog every day if you can or if not just always look at things to be grateful for the sun the bed that you're sleeping in the food that you're eating the friends that you have the conversations you get to have believe you're lucky and you will attract better outcomes so just before we go thank you for sharing those rods they're amazing the wonderful themes i appreciate that just before you go we're gonna i'll just take one more question from our facebook live viewers and if you're listening to this on the podcast be sure to go to james swanick official on facebook and hit like because you'll be able to watch some of these live calls if you're watching on facebook right now just ask one more let's we'll take one more question and um for rose and while we're waiting for that we'll we'll do a little snapchat as well for my snapchat viewers rose we might just do like your number one tip for for for courage or success i think maybe so i'll get you to prepare that while we're waiting for a question to come in here from facebook live facebook live we've got one question we want to ask rose savage the rower of who rode across three oceans uh here we go how do you have so much stamina do you say that it's training or dna oh that's really an interesting question i think i do naturally have quite good physical stamina um i've done a couple of marathons and um did pretty respectable times in those um i think it's actually more of the um the mental stamina i think i've always been pretty tenacious once i set my mind to something then i will generally see it through so um i i did train for up to 16 hours a day on the rowing machine in the run up to the atlantic row complete waste of time and not to mention phenomenally boring um but it did at least give me the self-belief that i could row for ridiculous amounts of time wonderful um yeah okay thank you for that so mostly in the mind uh thank you very much facebook viewer if you've been watching we're going to switch off now and just finish the podcast say goodbye rose you can just hi facebook there you go thank you so much rose i really appreciate it so we're going to say goodbye to our facebook viewers there we go and uh now we're going to do a little we're going to do a little snapchat just before you go um we're going to have my uh snapchat viewers get some words of his inspiration from you if you're willing um let's do this here so let's and if you're listening on the podcast make sure you follow me on snapchat it's just my name james swanick and you get little 10 second videos little words of wisdom every day you can follow the day and the life of me all right rose here we go so i'll set it up and then you're gonna uh give three tips three tips for success have you got three of them i've got one okay one one here we go here we go here we go we've got one let's have a look here and we've only got 10 seconds to squeeze this in by the way so uh it's because that that's what snapchat gives us so rose savage only woman in the world to row across three oceans three two one rose savage only woman in the world to cross three oceans in a row boat what's your tip for success find what you love and just do it and do it and do it until you get really really good at it hang on a second we've got the first part of it do what you love and do it exclamation mark hang on here we go one second whoops sorry about this rose and sorry about this if you're listening on the on the uh i don't think i've ever seen one person use so many different social media platforms all at once there you go so you can just you can finish that thought uh three two one i'm sorry i thought you could do your bit first no no hang on a second hang on here we go we're going to do it again so three two one find the thing that you love and just do it i love it thank you so much rose great work make sure you follow her on facebook details to come there we go so i will uh i will put that there so rose thank you so much i really appreciate your time thank you for inspiring me uh with your with your three trips and just you know your hero's journey and thank you for inspiring my listeners and my and my followers a really amazing effort and i know we all can can learn a lot from you and be inspired by you ongoing so i appreciate your time very much well i really appreciate the work that you're doing and thank you for giving me a chance to share my message with with your folks because um that's what it's all about and um i know that people do find the story inspiring and i really do think that that that rising tide lifts all boats so you know we're all we're all supporting each other other people inspire me and it's it's always kind of beautiful virtuous cycle so thanks james for the amazing work that you do you're so welcome and thank you rose all right rose savage there you are make sure you follow her at rose savage coaching dot com and i will catch you on the next one