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Chapter 1: What pivotal life changes did Vicki Anstey experience?
Hello and welcome to The Midpoint. My guest today has had a proper midlife epiphany. What she thought was the life she needed, the one her family expected for her marriage and a settled job, turned out not to be the life she enjoyed. I first met her when she was in the first throes of coming to the end of the first life as a student in her bar class in Richmond. She was very good at it.
But she felt the need to confront fears and her own limits. She'd given up a successful corporate career to do something she felt passionate about. And then she signed up for a reality show, not just any show. She actually ended up being one of the first women to reach the final stages of Channel 4's SAS Who Dares Wins in 2018.
By now, she had an appetite to keep pushing herself mentally and physically, overcoming fears. And since then, she's become a double world record holder rower, an adventurer, award winning entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, stress resilience coach and a well-being expert. And now an author. Vicky Anstey is one hell of a woman.
Her new book, Other People Are Like the Weather, tells the story of how she rebuilt her life from the inside out and why the fears we try hardest to avoid might be the very things that set us free. So there's plenty to chat to Vicky about. Vicky, welcome to The Midpoint. Thank you for having me, Gabby. It's great to be here. We have a lot to talk about.
I have dipped into your book, which I've referred to in your introduction today. It feels like the coming together, your book, of so many things and And you've learned so much about yourself through your midlife experiences. So it's really relevant to our audience who might be wanting to make big changes, wondering how they can attempt what seem to be huge moments and decisions in their life.
Yeah, it's kind of been a journey of, as you say, like becoming myself, really. And it's absolutely not how I saw my life playing out.
Which you articulate so well in the early part of the book. And you talk really candidly about your family and almost the constraints with which your kind of childhood held on you. And one of the things that I felt really sad about was the young Vicky feeling she was a difficult child. Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely grew up with that sort of label attached to me. And I think in some ways, you know, that's self-perpetuating, isn't it? You hear that you're difficult and perhaps you live up to that a bit. Although, you know, I'd constantly be in my childhood searching for the evidence to back up. was I really a difficult child or did I just not fit in?
And I think, you know, over the years, I've sort of realised that actually the latter is really the case.
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Chapter 2: How did participating in SAS Who Dares Wins shape Vicki's journey?
And, yeah, there was just something inside of me from a very early age that felt that that wasn't the life that I was...
It sounds like I'm missing out a huge sentence here, like Vicky set fire to her school. I mean, you didn't appear to be doing anything extraordinary at that point. I mean, we'll get on to the extraordinary stuff you've done in the latter half of your life. But you didn't appear to be doing anything terrible or you weren't badly behaved.
But there was a friction between you and your mum from quite a young age, and a lot of that you trace back to an incident in the car, actually, that happened, a near-fatal collision your family had.
Yeah, and it's something that I go into quite deeply. There's sort of a thread of psychology through the book, actually, and, you know, I've done a lot of therapy myself in the writing of the book, and I sort of...
also do a lot of um coaching in my own professional work and come to really understand that a lot of things that happen to us in life are the consequence of i guess events that happen to other people and the projection of those events hence the title of the book hence the title of the book other people are like the weather um and that particular event
Was significant, I think, at the time, but became significant in terms of the ongoing ripple effect, the impact on my life. And I think to some extent, the relationship that I had and continue to have with my mom. So, yeah, they were they were in a car and this is my my mom was actually pregnant with me. My sister was a toddler.
And my mum and dad were driving back, I think from a family holiday in the dark. And my mum was driving and something woke my dad up and he reached for the steering wheel and realised that there was a guy in a car coming head on to them on the motorway, not on the other side of the road. And, you know, amazing near miss, quite a traumatic event for both of them, really.
But my mum suffered from whiplash as a result of that. And one of my earliest memories is that, you know, if I fell over as a child, my mum couldn't or wouldn't pick me up because she had neck ache or back ache as a consequence of this accident. And of course, as a child, you don't know that. You don't connect the dots. How could you?
And it's, again, one of the key themes of the book is about openly sharing our experiences, having a voice, sharing our stories, connecting more, understanding one another's backgrounds, experiences, past experiences, traumas potentially. And lifting the lid on those so that maybe we can have better relationships with each other through understanding of, you know, where those patterns come from.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Vicki face while rowing the Pacific Ocean?
If you're scared of harming someone, you're probably going to be a bit of a people pleaser. You're probably going to do things that you might not really want to do. And that feeds in quite a bit to what Self-editing. Well, the path of your life took, which was quite orthodox. I'm going to get married and I'm going to have a corporate job and I'm going to do the things that are expected.
These things are expected of me. This is what my family wants me to do. And it's not to say that you didn't love your husband, but you were going down a path that felt like the one that everybody wanted you on.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a combination, isn't it? A family and society and schooling structures and just systems that surround all of us. You know, and I think one of the most radical things any of us can do in our lives is just to become ourselves, is to find out what life we really want to live. and then live it.
And I think for so much of my life, really, until I was almost 40, I was living a life according to what I thought others expected of me. And even according to the narrative that other people had of me that I don't actually think was really the real me. And what a waste of a life that would be if I hadn't Realised.
And you appeared to have nice moments in your marriage. You met somebody who appeared to cherish you and gave you confidence and actually helped you to break off from your corporate life by encouraging you because you found the Lottie Burke technique, you found bar, which is where I met you.
So I kind of come in at this point in your life and see you as a bar instructor in Richmond, not knowing this previous corporate Vicky. You hadn't had a life of physical well-being, had you? you at this point?
No, not at all. My professional career started off in advertising and I'd studied French at university and that's where I met my ex-husband and I was 19. So we were together in total for 20 years, which is a really...
long time that's a long marriage well I mean I know you weren't married the whole time but that's that's a big relationship um yeah and you know I I think people change don't they over periods of time like that and I definitely did and I and I do think that that presented something of a challenge to him and um you know as as you know you've alluded there was that
shift in my career path away from the corporate world into setting up my own fitness business which sort of came about really because I had a moment of reckoning with myself at my computer screen late one night and realized that I needed to make some changes that I wasn't happy and I think there are lots of layers to why that might have been the case but
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Chapter 4: How did Vicki's childhood experiences influence her adult life?
created into this version of bar through my business that you obviously were very much part of. I did that because I wanted to reclaim some of my time. I did it to set up a boundary at work at the time that I would leave work two nights a week at six o'clock. Hmm.
in order to take this class that I'd fallen in love with and you know and then of course it just has this huge kind of knock-on effect into every other area of my life and I transformed myself physically and emotionally and in lots of other ways did you think that would be enough at that point did you think this is it this is the thing that I've been searching for this is this is going to make me feel yeah kind of I am Vicky this is the person I'm meant to
I don't even know if I thought that at the time. I think it was literally just I probably should move my body a bit. This is a really good excuse to leave the office on time, not even early, but on time twice a week. And then I just fell in love with it. And it was like reclaiming a part of myself that I hadn't.
I didn't even know was there at the time, which now when I look back, it just seems remarkable.
I can't imagine you having a sedentary life.
I mean, and I did. And I think in a way that was a huge shift in my marriage at the time. You know, that wasn't the person that he'd married necessarily. And then I think, of course, the physical resilience tips easily, doesn't it, into emotional, mental resilience. And I suddenly started seeing things, I think, for... what they were.
And and and then I think perhaps his behaviors changed in response to that as well. So it's certainly not to say that the whole 20 years was miserable because that's absolutely not the case. But it just reached a point that I couldn't tolerate.
You had renewed physical fortitude and that was feeding into mental fortitude as well. So you had the courage that it took at that point.
Just challenging certain things that I think I'd always accepted and starting to see through the... constructed complexities of the life that we were living, you know, and he took control of my business and I didn't have my own bank account and, you know, all these things that I look back on now actually with, to be completely truthful, embarrassment that I'd let that become the case.
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Chapter 5: What lessons did Vicki learn about fear and resilience?
I have filled out the application form. Now leave me alone. And then, of course, you go through a process and just, yeah, chain reaction. And you're there. And then I was there in Chile. And I thought it had been some big mistake or that I'd last for 24 hours and be out. And actually, at the time, I was meant to be running a retreat in Kefalonia for Barworks.
So I had to give that a miss and send some of my team to do that. And I thought, I'll probably join them.
In a day or two. And you ended up getting down to the final few. Yeah. Which is like the final, isn't it?
Yeah. So I got through 11 days. And as you just said, you know, it was the most amazing kind of concentrated, accelerated period of transformation for me. I don't think you could set that up if you tried. You know, it was literally like I'd left my marriage. I think this was about six months later that I did the show and
And, you know, day after day or not even each day, but several times a day, we were being tasked to do what seemed like impossible things. And I was having to confront every single fear in the book and realizing that I could do it and survive. And actually, I think my sort of stubborn streak was quite helpful because they did pick up on a lot of my fears.
And so they started towards the end of it to leave me to go last on these different tasks so that they could film my pent up.
So that you could get worse and worse and more and more anxious about it.
Yeah. And I think I channeled that into a sort of stubborn, well thought. Fuck you. I'm going to show you what I can do. I will not be beaten. And, you know, so I do things like count how many steps the other recruits took to walk across the ladder across the ravine. Heights terrify me.
I mean, I was literally shaking before doing it, but I was just literally counting the steps that it took me to do it. And the ice holes, which is another fairly famous moment. counting how long it took. And I was like, this is over in 60 seconds. I just need to do the thing. I need to just literally put one foot in front of the other.
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Chapter 6: How did Vicki's experiences in the Arctic Ultra Run impact her?
Yeah. And I think I learned two really key lessons from that. One, that fear is not a wall. It's a doorway. It's a signpost. So then I started to think, OK, the things that I fear the most must be the things that I gravitate towards.
And the other was about sort of the relativity of resilience, I suppose, because there were honestly moments through that process that I'd sort of sit with myself with my thoughts or even in interrogation.
When your head is in a bag and you've got these headphones on and, you know, your sort of hands are tied behind your back and you're being brutalized, thinking I shouldn't perhaps make exact parallels, but just mentally thinking I've chosen to be here. I will get through this. And sometimes through those moments, it just wasn't as bad as the.
darkest moments of my divorce that I knew I had to go back to and that that was real life and I couldn't choose to escape that so did it accelerate your healing from the marriage yeah I think so and it helped me grow yeah new edges and just to to realize that we can get through almost anything
And you learned that in such a condensed period of time. Yeah. So when you came back and you go back to being a bar teacher, how quickly was the mind kind of whirring, thinking, what else can I do?
Oh, that was it was such a hard transition, honestly. You sort of. I came back with it, and I've spoken to lots of people who've done, and I've sort of had the same thing since I've done other challenges as well. You sort of come back with a sense of apathy a bit, where you just can't be bothered with the trivialities of life anymore.
So you've had this life-changing experience, and your brain is telling you that there's been this huge shift, but you've come back to a world... Mundanity. Well, just a world that hasn't changed, and you kind of have. So I found that really hard. But actually, the next...
challenge was kind of handed to me so I did a press event for SAS Who Dares Wins and someone came up to me and said do you want to row an ocean?
And I was in this kind of, yeah, slightly crazy phase of my life. Yeah, how hard can that be? Yeah, I just say yes to everything.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Vicki share about teamwork and relationships?
But it's almost unfathomable for most people to think about taking on rowing an ocean. So where do you begin?
The first thing I did was to sit on a rowing machine for two hours because that would have been the rotation for four people, two hours on, two hours off. And I thought, well, I'd better find out how two hours feels like. And I learned my lesson very quickly to be extremely selective with underwear because I ended up with the worst shape imaginable. So that was a very early lesson.
An awful backache. And so, yeah, I thought, my God, what am I doing?
Yeah.
Regretting my decisions immediately. But yeah, that sort of sudden streak came out. And, you know, I can't give up on something once I've committed to do it. So where did I start? I mean, yeah, just just increasing the training. How long did you have to prepare?
um so this was back in 2019 and we were planning to do the 2020 great pacific race so what else happened in 2020 major global event that scuppered things slightly and it did So, yeah, we'd spent over a year preparing, raising all the funding, £70,000. In fact, we packed our boat up with everything needed for it to be shipped to San Francisco the weekend before we all got put into lockdown.
And then they announced that the race was going to be postponed to the next year, which was just devastating. And not least because my teammates, who I'd got to know quite well,
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Chapter 8: What message does Vicki want readers to take from her book?
um couldn't defer their places and so i was kind of left with this mad project as a non-rower they were both rowing coaches actually so i was learning an awful lot from them um but just with this um you know strong conviction and commitment not least it would have been easy at this point to pull out But I'm an ambassador for charity Inspiring Girls. We were raising money for them.
I felt like this huge kind of, you know, duty and obligation to see it through. And also this was in my head the next chapter of my life. And this was what I was meant to be doing. And, you know, the world was just in complete disarray and my business was as well, actually. You know, we had to take everything online. You know, remember we did all the Instagram. The online Instagram classes.
Which was actually amazing in itself, but not sustainable. No. And, yeah, so for a period of time, it was just all in limbo, actually. And then I set about trying to find new teammates.
And that in itself was another lesson, wasn't it? The people you ended up rowing with. Yeah.
Tell us a bit about that. So one of them lived in Dubai, so I didn't get to meet her until we got to San Francisco. Yeah. And the other had actually sort of reached out to me through Instagram. So she'd been in the army and I think she'd seen me on SAS Who Dares Wins and she knew that I was looking for new teammates. So she reached out and just a formidable woman.
She'd also played rugby for England many years back. and just exactly the kind of person that you thought you would need to take on something like that. And she brought her friend into the team. So we weren't all in one place until we got to the start line.
Would you advise, if you were doing that again, that you would meet people and spend a bit of time?
No, not the best way to initiate a good team dynamic, I would say. So, yeah, lots of, I mean, so many lessons learned. But, you know, a lot of it was out of our control. And we kind of did the best we could to get to know each other. But, I mean, you're taking on something like that, it's huge. Yeah.
And, you know, I'll be honest, I think there were so many moments where I was so grateful to them for coming into the team and to, you know, making sure it didn't unravel again or completely that there were red flags, but I kind of chose to ignore them and
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