Breaking Out Of Your Comfort Zone with Roz Savage

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Hi, Greg Faxson here. In the spring of 2015, I had the honor of interviewing a select group of incredibly brave entrepreneurs. Some of them, like Seth Godin you may recognize, others you may not. All of them have done the hard work, mentally and emotionally, of building businesses that support them while making a positive difference in the world. These interviews will give you the inspiration and strategies you need to do the same. I hope they help you take action on something that scares you today. Thanks for listening. Welcome to the Bravery Project. Today I'm talking to Roz Savage, which is probably the most badass name I've ever heard, and she has the most badass occupation that I've ever heard, which is she's an ocean rower. And Roz has rowed across three oceans, the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean. She's the first woman to row alone across three oceans. And I'm so excited to talk to her today. So, Roz, thank you for being here.

It's a real pleasure. I hope that I can even begin to live up to that introduction.

Well, it's funny because I was watching your TED Talk to prepare, and everyone wants to know, how do I get a TED Talk? How do I get on the TED stage? You know, all you have to do is row across three oceans.

It's that easy.

You got it wrapped up. So, Roz, how did you tell people? A little bit. How did you get into doing this stuff? Give us a sense of your story.

Yeah, it was kind of an unexpected career move, given that I don't particularly like exercise and I'm not too sure about oceans either. I guess it was an extreme reaction against having worked management consultant for 11 years, got a law degree from Oxford, kind of did the kind of thing that everybody expected me to do, went to work for this big consultancy. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But there's sort of this pressure of expectation. And so I carried on living someone else's life for 11 years, until one day I was really trying to figure out, why am I so miserable in this job and what do I really want to do when I grow up? And so I wrote two versions of my own obituary. I imagine that I was a little old lady looking back over my life and saying, so how did I spend my time on this earth? And the first version was the fantasy one, the one that I wanted. And it was. It certainly didn't mention ocean rowing. It wasn't really about what I would do. It was more about the kind of person that I would be. And I realized that when I read obituaries. I really admired those people who just had the guts and the courage to get out there and really grab hold of life. And they seem to be living fearlessly. They weren't afraid of trying something new. They weren't afraid of failing. They weren't afraid of what other people would think. They just kind of get out there and just do it. And then the second obituary was the one that I was heading for if I carried on as I was then, getting on the commuter train and going to work in an office cubicle every day. And I realized that just wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But even then, it was sort of a gradual process via a few other kind of experiments in other careers before I had this big environmental awakening. And I thought, what can I do to raise people's awareness of our environmental challenges? And it was around that time I met a guy who'd rode across the Atlantic with his mother. And so I thought, well, if someone's mother can do this, how hard could it be? And the fact that I'd rode in college was enough to give me the sort of delusion that this was something I was vaguely qualified to do. And it seemed like it'd be a great platform for environmental messaging. So it seemed perfectly logical at the time to buy myself a rowboat and sign up to row across the Atlantic.

I love it. And that's so powerful, thinking about I might do this after the call. I love the idea of writing two obituaries. Yeah. When you get to see that physical proof. Because a lot of times we can kind of hide. There's ways of hiding from ourselves. But when you see it out in front of you, that's. That's serious, Greg.

Just don't blame me for the results. Okay, so I didn't warn you. It could really have quite a big impact. I mean, for me, like I say, it was sort of slow burning because that sort of fearless person just going out and grabbing hold of life that was so far removed from the person that I was at that time that I couldn't even begin to see how I was going to get from where I was to. To this courageous person. But when I wrote that fantasy obituary, on some level, I really connected with something deep inside me that felt real, very real, scarily real. And once I'd had that insight, I couldn't pretend that I didn't know what I now knew. And so I think Just subconsciously, I ended up realigning myself to get myself on track for that fantasy obituary. When I look back at who I was then compared with who I am now, it's like night and day. I don't know if people outside would be able to tell the difference, but from the inside, I feel so different and a lot happier.

When you see an insight like that, you can't unsee it. And we were talking about coaching before we hopped on the call. And that's a lot of the work that I do as a coach. When you see that part, you can't unsee it. And you. Everything's changed. What do you do once you've created? I think sometimes people will go to, let's say, a really motivational talk, right? They listen to one of your talks, they're really motivated, and maybe they've had an internal shift and it's real. But how do you take that initial spurt of inspiration and actually take the first step? How did you go from you have the obituary, you're motivated and inspired to actually getting to, then rowing across the ocean.

And I wouldn't necessarily recommend the way that I did it. A lot of things had to change in my life before I was free to do these other things. So apart from quitting my job, my new direction wasn't really compatible with my marriage. So sadly, that came to an end as well. Amicably, I'm glad to say. But I'm sure a lot of my friends thought I totally lost the plot. I was giving up this supposedly perfect life with what we tend to think constitutes security and just let all of my safety nets go of a regular income, of a relationship, of a home. Yeah, I looked like I was in free fall, but actually, it was incredibly liberating because I think when you reach, you know, so often we're held back from doing what we really want to do because we're afraid of what we're going to lose. We sort of know there's going to be an opportunity cost, that generally, when you get something new, something else has got to go. And I think it's really helpful to think through, well, what's the worst that can happen? Yeah, I'm gonna lose my job and my salary and my relationship. But to come through that and survive it is incredibly empowering. Because if you. Before I wrote the obituary, if you'd have said, what are the worst things that could ever happen to you? That would have been my list. After I'd lost all those things, I realized that, hey, now I'm I'm free. I mean, I'm broke and homeless, but I'm also really free to do whatever it is that I want to do. And so, as a sort of extreme exercise, I think if there's something that someone really wants to do, but they've got these fears holding them back, if they sat down and say, well, what's the absolute worst outcome from this that I can imagine, like, what am I going to lose? And could I actually handle that? I think often when you take those fears and you turn around and shine a light on them, you go, well, actually, I could survive that. Yeah, it might be pretty awful, but I could survive it. I could handle that downside. And, wow, look what the upside could be. Like, the upside could be huge. So it's just kind of balancing that. That's all right, we're recording, but that's okay. Greg, say hi to Howard.

How are you, Howard? So, Roz, when you. I love that idea. So it's actually. Literally, think about what's the worst that can happen. So at least you're being honest, and you know what that is, instead of having this fear that might be unrealistic. So this is called. This interview series is called the Bravery Project. So when you hear the word bravery, what does that mean to you?

To me, it means going into something with your eyes open about that it's going to be tough. And it certainly doesn't mean that you're not feeling fearful. It means that you're just so motivated that you found those resources that will get you through this. And I guess for me, well, two things, really. One is that bravery is learnable. I didn't used to be a brave person, but I gradually pushed my comfort zone or occasionally, like, just busted right through it in a rather scary way. But, you know, I really massively expanded my. My comfort zone, mostly in incremental steps, by just doing something a little bit scary and going, oh, well, that went all right. What else can I do that will challenge me? And the other thing is, I think you can overcome one fear by having a bigger fear of something else. So when I did that obituary exercise, I became really scared that I was going to reach the end of my life and think, oh, my word, where did my time go? I completely wasted my time here on Earth. And that would be such an appallingly bad feeling to have to look back and go, oh, heck, it passed me by, and I didn't notice. And so, so many things were scary. You know, the big life, upheaval, transformation, then committing to Doing the Atlantic, which was so different from anything I'd ever done before. But really what kept me going was I was just more afraid of the alternative of going back to the office or squandering my entire life.

So using the fear of regret to combat the fear of failure.

Yeah, yeah. Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah, I love that, I love that. And also I like the idea of kind of starting small and cultivating a habit of bravery, which is something that a lot of people have talked about it. Great. So what would you say, like, what was the scariest part for you? Between there's the initial life upheaval and then there was the journey itself of the rowing. I mean, it was there one moment that really you were feeling the fear in that moment.

In the rowing part of that. Do you mean?

Sure.

Or all of it?

All of it is great if something stands out.

Well, the single scariest thing was the end of my marriage. I mean that was just so the circles that I'd been moving in for the 11 years before that, sort of London young professionals, you know, everybody was married, everybody was climbing the career ladder, everybody was getting mortgages that all the people that I knew just about, you know, apart from parents and whatever were in that world. And I just had no idea what was going to happen when I stepped out of that. Well, I felt almost like I was stepping off the edge of the earth. And I can remember the morning after it all happened and I sort of woke up and it was almost like open one eye and squint around and go, oh, well, the sun still seems to have come up and the earth is still turning and a bolt of lightning hasn't come down from the heavens to strike me dead. So, you know, maybe life is going to go on after all. That was the single scariest thing. I guess after that my comfort zone was quite a lot larger. And like I say, I wouldn't particularly recommend to other people that they do, you know, quite such an upheaving thing that obviously impacts on other people. Like I said, I'm fortunate it turned out okay in the end. But I think that. To do something that profoundly scares you, like if you're scared of heights, to kind of push yourself to just get somewhere high up, obviously with all ropes and everything attached, it does give you such to overcome those self limiting beliefs about what's going to be socially acceptable or about what you're capable of, to kind of just bust right through that I think does open up a whole new world of possibility in a most amazing way.

During the rowing itself, is there anything that I was going to say, is there anything that didn't go as planned? I'm sure there's a lot of stuff. Is there any particular part that was particularly hard or brutal in the journey?

I suppose the most dramatic occasion was my first attempt on the Pacific in 2007, when I got caught up in a big storm about 10 days out from the California coast. And my boat capsized a few times. And, you know, it's designed to recover from capsizers, but I banged my head a few times and I lost some equipment. And I would probably have just carried on because I'm pretty stubborn. But somebody reading my blog became concerned about me and decided that I ought to be rescued. And so he notified the Coast Guard without having asked me first, which did annoy me quite a lot. And so I ended up being, you know, not forcibly rescued. But she would say there was a lot of pressure put on to accept rescue. And the whole process of being rescued is not a lot of fun. You have to jump out of your boat into, like, these towering waves and swim across to the guy on the end of the line dangling out of the helicopter, and then get hoisted up, you know, abandoning my boat, which was really my only possession in the whole world at that time. So I wouldn't recommend that as a fun way to spend an afternoon. But in fact, I think for me, even tougher than that was the Atlantic, my first ocean. Because it sounds sort of stupid in retrospect, but I spent. I wasted a lot of mental energy asking myself, can I do this? And so my mind would sort of search back through my memory banks and go, oh, well, you've never done this before. We have no evidence that you can do this. So, no, let's assume you can't. And I really, really struggled psychologically on that voyage just thinking, I'm a management consultant. What the hell am I doing out here? Eventually I realized that I was asking myself the wrong question, that the only way to find out if I could do this thing of rowing across the nation was to just keep showing up and keep doing it day after day until either I succeeded or I didn't. That was going to be the only way that I would get a sensible answer to my question. So it was better to flip it around and say, do I have any evidence that I can't do this? That kind of worked better for me.

What are you most proud of?

Pride is not a natural part of my vocabulary. I suppose, like I say, at least 50% of the reason for rowing across the oceans was I was trying to raise environmental awareness because I'm really concerned about what we're doing to the planet and what we're doing to ourselves. And you know, I haven't yet saved the world, so still a lot of work to do on that one. I guess I am proud that I had the courage to take the path, the road less travelled because I had been so hemmed in, so constrained by wanting to be accepted, wanting to be liked, wanting to do the right thing. I was very caught up in must and should and ought to. And I can remember a friend asking me, but what do you want to do? And I was just like, I don't think that way, that doesn't compute. And so to overcome all that must and should and ought and I guess to really reconnect with my values. I think that's what was really going on in the obituary exercise was I reconnected with what was really important to me and what would make me proud and of my life. And it was so clear from that that all those years doing a job, I didn't like to buy stuff I didn't need, you know, it was completely disconnected from my values. My obituary did not mention anything about having a big house or having a nice car or, you know, having all the toys. So it really reconnected me with what was important to me. And it was really hard to admit to myself, oh my God, I've spent 11 years chasing the wrong rainbow here. And to actually, via a few disasters, to get back on track for a more values and purpose driven life. That was the hard bit.

We spend so much time thinking about what we don't want. We're really clear on that, most of us.

Yeah.

And I think it's hard. One of the things that I'm hearing from you to reflect back is it's, it's hard to be brave out of a, out of a should or a sense of duty or, you know, this is something I should be doing. It's, it's, it's so hard to be brave, period, doing these crazy things that if we feel obligated, it's not quite as strong. But when you got connected to something that you really, really deeply wanted and desired, that's part of what got you through.

It sounds like that's very well said and in fact, even better, I was connected to two things that I really deeply wanted and desired because it was 50% the environmental mission and like me being really scared of the future that we're creating and the other thing was the much more personal one of me wanting to test my limits and find out what I was capable of. And, you know, being alone in the middle of an ocean is a very good way to find out what you're capable of when you're on your own. Especially after my satellite phone broke, so I was really, really on my own. And, you know, there were days when, if it had just been about the personal mission, I think I'd have said, you know, I'm over it. You know, just, I just want to be rescued. And there were days when the environmental mission on its own wouldn't have been enough. But having the two, there was always one or the other that I was passionate enough about would keep me hanging on in there. I didn't always feel very motivated. I really struggled with motivation. It's really hard rowing for 12 hours a day, especially on that first one when my stereo had broken, so I had nothing but my own thoughts. And that can be a tough place to be. But even if I wasn't always motivated to do the rowing, I was always motivated enough not to quit. So, yeah, the more big reasons why you can find, the braver you get.

These are great. I love the strategies that are coming up. So I love the idea of having two missions because you often hear about them both. Either one of them in a vacuum. You know, like, figure out why something is really important to you or create this big, broader why or this purpose. And I like the idea of having both because they do oscillate and sometimes one connects with you more than the other one. Do you have any other kind of tips or strategies of how people who. Whether it's starting a business or running across an ocean, whatever it is, someone who's trying to do something that they're not familiar with themselves ever doing it, how they can step out and leap off that cliff. Because you've already given us one great one, which is the reframe of. You'll never know it until you try to do it. Are there any other tactical suggestions that you have?

Oh, wow. Well, so many. Okay, well, here's one. Going back to the theme of the comfort zone, it can be quite hard to keep going when you're feeling just really awkward about things, Particularly if you tend to operate from an intuitive place and you go, oh, this feels really hard. Is it supposed to be this hard? Like, if I'm really pursuing my life purpose, shouldn't it feel easier? Shouldn't it feel like I'm just surfing this great big wave across the Ocean. But I think, you know, nothing great is ever easy. And the way that I reframed that for myself, I can remember I was rowing along one day, and I was just uncomfortable in every sense of the word. I had tendonitis in my shoulders. I had salt water sores on my back bottom. I was really struggling psychologically. I was tired of sleeping in a wet sleeping bag. And, you know, just everything was miserable. And I was just in one of those real sort of kind of moods. And as I was thinking, why is this all so uncomfortable? This phrase came back to me that in the run up to the row, whenever a journalist or anyone had asked me why I was doing it, I sort of heroically said, it's because I want to get outside my comfort zone. And suddenly the penny dropped and I went, oh, getting outside your comfort zone is going to be uncomfortable. And so the fact that I am so uncomfortable means that I am way outside my comfort zone, and it means I'm really succeeding here. So that really helped to actually embrace the discomfort, the queasiness, you know, that kind of, am I doing the right thing? Ness of it all. And I suppose another thing that might be relevant for entrepreneurs particularly, is progress is not linear. You know, you can feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall for a while, or in my case, you know, rowing against winds and currents and just feeling like I'm going nowhere. And I called them faith miles. You know, you just got to keep showing up sticky rolls in the water. You know, just keep taking it one awestroke at a time. And if you just hang on in there, suddenly one day the winds and the currents will line up and you're going, wow, I can't believe the mileage that I'm getting now. But you realize that you had to do all the faith miles first in order to be in the right place at the right time to get that sudden, like, whoosh of progress. So I guess I'm just saying don't get discouraged when you feel like you're putting all the hard work in and you're not seeing much progress, you are making progress. It might just not be evident for a little while yet.

I love that. And nothing's wasted, right? You kind of need that. And to your first point about being out of your comfort zone, the word passion originally meant suffering, right? It didn't mean, like, passion of the Christ. Like, that word passion really means suffering. So part of it is the I'm gonna love what I do, or I'm gonna do and that's fine. That's great. Partially that comes. But I think that there has to be some discomfort to really value the thing and to feel that depth of emotion. So I love the idea that you gave of. I've been telling people I was gonna be outside of my comfort zone, and now I'm outside of it. So I guess this is the work.

Be careful what you wish for. Yes. And in fact, we've talked about, like, the worst moments, the hardest moments, but for me, the best moment was after that first crossing, stepping ashore in Antigua. After three and a half months alone at sea, the last three and a half weeks with no communications, and stepping ashore just was the most euphoric feeling ever. And I remember thinking at the time, this wouldn't be as special. I wouldn't feel as amazing right now if I hadn't done all that suffering that, you know, it's like the harder it is, the. The more brilliant you feel when you succeed, especially when, you know it's all been down to your own efforts. If it had been an easy crossing, sure, I would have felt great stepping ashore, but it wouldn't have been that. It was. It was just the harder you work for something, the greater the sense of achievement when it finally comes right.

And I love that reframe of the sacrifice. One thing I'm hearing from you is there's almost, we can imagine, like, a bandwidth of emotion or living that you can experience in your life. And when you were doing the consulting, it sounds like you had a pretty relatively narrow band. Stuff was never that bad. It may have felt numb, but it was never that. That scary or hard. And it was also never that exciting or passionate. And when you decide to row across three oceans, you really widen up that bandwidth. Parts that feel like, I don't know if I can keep going. You know, I'm at rock bottom. And then when you land on the shore, you're totally to the other side. So what would you. If someone's listening to this because we're. I would like to wrap it up. And they're. Maybe they're feeling like they have a smaller bandwidth right now, and they're ready to step out into something and they're inspired, but they don't know what the first step is, what would you say is the one thing that they could go do now or go do this week that would get them on the path?

Well, I guess doing that obituary exercise is a pretty powerful first thing, and they didn't even feel that they have to act on it immediately. I mean, I was terrified of it, so I put it away in a drawer and tried to forget I'd done it. I guess ideally you think, well, what one thing can I do today just to get myself onto that track? But I think you'll find your subconscious takes over from there. If you found a path that feels really real to you, it'll start happening anyway, just sort of incrementally. Oh, I guess what I'm supposed to say at this point is, well, you know what? They should go and buy my book.

Such a hopeless so, but this is good how? If people want to learn a little bit more about you or watch your TED Talk or get your book, where should they go? Because I'm sure people want to know.

Well, I'm kind of in transition at the moment from ocean rower to coach. So for now the best place for them to go is to all the W's, RozSavage.com R O Z or Z Savage.com and they can sign up for my newsletter there. And so they'll get to hear what's happening and they get a little freebie, which is an ocean rower's top tips for happiness and meaning.

Awesome. I love it. All right, thank you, Roz.

It's been a real pleasure. Thanks, Greg.

Take care. Thank you for listening to the Bravery Project with Greg Faxson. To learn more about Greg and to subscribe to his weekly Updates, please visit Gregfaxon.com if you enjoyed this episode, send it to a friend or leave a rating interview in itunes. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.