Episode 010 - The Champion's Journey - Reflect on the year
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Christoffer Endresen: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to episode number 10 of The Champions Journey. I hope that you've enjoyed the episode so far. Uh, I've had the privilege of interviewing some of the champions out there, but there are so many more to, to go out and interview, and I'm really excited about the list of people that are joining the podcast.
Now, in the future, if this is the first time you're listening to one of these episodes. Check out the others as well. But you can also complete this one before you go over to the next. One thing that you can do in order to ensure that you will get the latest and the greatest episode is by subscribing to this podcast, whether that's on, uh, YouTube or Apple Podcast or Spotify, whatever floats your boat.
But if you subscribe, you'll be notified every time a new episode comes out. When it comes to this podcast, the purpose of the podcast [00:01:00] is really for you to have a tool. It's a tool for you to build that growth mindset, and I truly believe that by listening to the stories of champions that have accomplished great things in agility, both in the past and the present, and are great athletes and handlers and dog trainers.
You can start to relate to their story, not where necessarily where they are today, but where they were in the past to understand what is required. To understand that they didn't come out of the box as a fantastic agility handler. They actually had to put in the work. And if you can associate or relate to their stories, that will help you to understand what is required, but also give you the motivation.
To put in the work. It is so easy to glorify these champions when they're standing on the top of the podium thinking, wow, they're so unique. They're so special. They put they're normal people. That's my message. And they put in [00:02:00] extraordinary work. And if you can do the same thing, you can also accomplish the things that you want to accomplish.
One of the things that I always talk about, and it's very related to the topic of this episode, is that success that is something you set. You are the superstar of your life, and you have to define what sex success is for you, and that is very important. And by doing that, you're also defining the frameworks upon what is required for you to get there and work towards it.
In today's episode, we're actually gonna talk about what, how you can use this period that we're entering into. At the current moment. We've just been finishing a WC and Norwegian Open and that. For us means that we're at the end of this year's competition period. That means that we're entering into what we call active rest [00:03:00] period, and in this period we are taking a step back.
We're not training specifically agility or joining any competitions, but we are enjoying time together with our dogs walking in the forest, reflecting on the year that has passed and then starting to lay the foundation for the coming year. And I wanted to talk about that because when it comes to performance, a lot of people think that you have to be at peak performance.
Every single day, 365 days a year in order to become great. But that is not necessarily possible. There are periods where you need to be in a very good performance state, but it's not possible to stay there the whole throughout the whole year. That's why we divide our year into different periods. This is something that I learned from sports.
In [00:04:00] sports, um, science. I. Any sports or a good trainer, they know how to plan their training. And the plan is not necessarily what are you going to do today type of planning, but it's every single level. And that is going back to what is the yearly plan? What is the plan for this period? Which periods have you sort of created within the year?
How? How about what does your calendar look like? And then dividing that or breaking it down into weekly. Training plans and then daily training plans and breaking that down even further into the next action once every next action is connected. To what you would like to accomplish. That is when you're making progress.
And if we go back to the definition of success from Earl Nightingale, he said that success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal, which [00:05:00] means that you set a goal of something that you would like to accomplish. That is what you define as success. Then you break it down and you start to take action towards it.
It's not when you reach it that you're a success. It's actually when you take the first step and you decide to take the next step, that you're progressively realizing that which you want to become or do or have, that you're actually successful. That means that people that are taking action towards a goal, those are the successful people once you reach your goal.
It is time for you to stop, reflect, and maybe set new ones, and that is what this active rest period is all about. So in this period, we ask ourself, okay, let's look back throughout the year, what went well, what did we do really, really well? And we also set goals for the year. We have to [00:06:00] look at those goals, which are very specific, they're measurable, and we ask ourselves, how well did we reach our goals?
And sometimes we really hit it. In other years we don't, and that's just a part of the game. What we do then is that we ask ourselves new questions like, what do we want for the coming year and what other challenges are we facing? What challenges did we face this year that we might have to overcome in the following months?
And what will be required of us in order to overcome those challenges? And as we go through this reflection phase, we're starting to. Figure out new ways of solving things. We're looking at new ways that we can improve, gradually get better at. It could be that we actually focus in on something that we're really good at, but trying to become a little bit [00:07:00] better because we believe that by becoming better in that area, we will see an increase in performance.
We also look at our plans that we made previously and how well we executed on those plans. And if we don't execute it well, we need to go back one step, not blaming ourselves or being harsh with ourselves, but trying to understand what are the reasons that we didn't actually accomplish those plans that we set?
Because execution is more important than planning. Planning will. If you do it properly, it'll help you to execute. It could be that understanding what the reasons are for not taking the actions will help us to make better facilitation so that we increase our chances for the next year. And it's also good to look at.
The plans that we did set, that did go well, why did they go well? And understanding that because then we [00:08:00] can most likely replicate the success in a different area or in a different category that we're trying to improve upon. Thinking and reflecting in this way takes a lot of work. It is not always fun.
But it's such a great way to harvest all the things that you learn throughout the year and making sure that you can leverage that new knowledge into the following year, and that facilitates growth and that growth is what you want. For us, we constantly have to remind ourself that when we set goals, we don't set goals because we want to accomplish something.
We set goals because we want to grow as people. We want to grow as a team, and we want to grow our dogs so that we can actually reach the potential that our dog have or has. And if we can do that and if we can improve our [00:09:00] processes and improve our systems that we have. Then we will also see better results, and then it's really up to circumstances to determine how well would that result be in the result list.
But that's just how the game works.
It is also a perfect time for you to. Go for a walk in the forest and start to discuss with yourself or maybe someone that you're, um, joining the walk with. It could even be your dog talking to your dog and ask yourself, what are the goals for 2026? What do we want? What do we want to accomplish? And as you're walking in the forest or walking on the trails or whatever it might be, you start to let your mind wonder.
You start to let that fantasy dream about potential things that you would like to accomplish. What is the next level for you? And imagining [00:10:00] yourself being in that place, envisioning it and almost like trying it on. If you really feel that, wow, that would be fantastic to grow into that, then that should be your new goal.
A common mistake that I see a lot of people do is that they set goals that are within their comfort zone. They are usually things that they have accomplished before. That could be one thing, and then it could be that they set goals that are just on the border of their comfort zone, but still within their comfort zone.
And we call this, uh, they call this system A, B, C. So A is the things that you already know how to do. The B goals are goals that you make a plan for that you think you can do. But what I would really like to challenge you on is to go for what you want. By setting a [00:11:00] goal of thinking about what do I want to accomplish, not what I think I can accomplish, not what I know that I can accomplish, but what do I want?
That is a different type of goal than the goals of that are within your comfort zone. What it that is forcing you to do is that you need to grow and develop. In order to reach that goal, you might need to develop new skill sets. You might to string change your strategy of how you train your dog or change the system of how you train your dog.
You might have to go out to different experts in order to gather that knowledge. But by setting a goal of what you want, it could be also that that goal scares you and that is perfectly okay. What that will force you to do is that it might have to. You might have to change your beliefs, but what is possible for you?
But by [00:12:00] pushing that limit, by stepping outside your comfort zone, having that goal that is actually pushing you outside that comfort zone, you will grow. And I talked about this in a previous episode, that you have to leave your comfort zone in order to experience the growth. The consequences of not leaving your comfort zone is that your comfort zone will shrink.
And what once was. Within your comfort zone has now become outside of your comfort zone. That doesn't constitute growth. That's a rapid decline. So by taking a vol, voluntarily step, deciding on what you want, yes, you don't know how to accomplish it, but that doesn't matter. That's a part of the game. But you set a goal that is outside of your comfort zone, and then you start to figure out.
How you can actually do it. You start to reach out to people that might have accomplished that before or have that skillset that is required to accomplish it, and then you learn from them. And by doing that, [00:13:00] then you're starting to put things into a system. So you actually go from what you want, which you could call fantasy or your imagination, but then you take that and you actually turn it into a project or a plan.
That plan, if you do it well, will, will enable you to take continual action towards that goal. And I want to share a skillset that I think falls within mental training, and that is learning how to plan. When I was studying sports science, when I was starting out with sports, I figure out that that skillset would really put me at a different level.
I had a wonderful teacher that really taught us and he was used to football players who usually show up to a training where they have a coach that has done all the work for them. They basically facilitated so that they only [00:14:00] needed to execute what was in the plan. For me as a cyclist, as an individual sport and not having a coach, I had to learn this myself, and that gave me leverage later on.
Yes, there was a lot of work that I needed to put in initially, but later on that skill set was extremely valuable. It starts out with you setting a goal, and you have to make sure that that goal is clear, that it's not vague. It's not getting better at agility, it's crystal clear. It could be something like our completion rate has gone up from 60% to 75% and the number of clean we have, 50% of all our runs are clean.
That is very specific and also it depends on where you currently are at, but. Let's just use that as a goal. That's very, very specific. It is clarity. You can measure it. It [00:15:00] is hopefully attractive and it's also realistic. You can set that for the year, like statistic within the year. So it's also time-based.
So that's the smart framework, but it, the purpose of the smart framework is to create clarity. You. We talk a lot about that in dog training, that you need to create clarity for your dog. The same thing applies to you. Once you have that clarity, we need to figure out what is required for you to accomplish that level of performance.
Once that is done, you need to figure out where are you compared to that set of standards that is required in order to get that. And what you often experience then is that there's a gap between. Where you want to be and where you currently are. And that gap could be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
But it also creates a motivation. It creates a motivation to change. [00:16:00] And I shared this in the book, the agility mindset, the formula for change. That is having a vision that is having, um, some dissatisfaction, then you need to have steps and or a system, and then you need to have belief. But once you set a goal that is outside your comfort zone.
You map out what is required and you figure out where you are. You have the dissatisfaction, you have the vision. The next thing that you need to do then is to create a plan or mapping out the steps or building a system. And that is what training planning really does. One of the things that I really require, um, recommend people doing, and this is the short version, but as figuring out what are the top three competitions during the year that is most meaningful to me.
Knowing your top three competitions, that those are the big pillars for the year. Everything is about supporting [00:17:00] those competitions, meaning that the competitions before, let's say a tryout or the national championship, those are training trials. There are training sessions where you're training on competition, specific competition training, and that also gives you a different label that you can put on that competition as you go into it.
But you set first the most important competitions, and that is really up to you. What are the important competitions to you? Then once that is done, you also ask yourselves, since agility people are attending a lot of seminars, you should ask yourselves, what are the seminars that I would like to go to this year?
You look through the calendar and you plot them in. Then everything else becomes training sessions or training competitions. You start to make a plan, making sure that you don't have [00:18:00] too much before those important competitions so you have a rest period, but at least that you get enough experience so that you have data that you can use in between those competitions to improve your skills, and then that's your yearly plan.
It should be very rough, not super detailed. And then you can also divide that into different periods. So we, as I said, we're going in now into our active rest period. It lasts usually for a month. So at the middle of November, uh. We're finished with that. Then we go into the foundation period. That is when we're building the foundation in terms of conditioning, strength and skills for the dog.
It might be the AI goes back a bit in order to retrain some of the skills. Could be the seesaw, it could be the dog walk. It could be. Uh, making some changes to commands and, and sort of shaping that new behaviors in or reinforcing them based on the [00:19:00] data that we collected throughout 2025. And that is the foundation period.
And then before, since we set the biggest competition throughout the year, we a month or maybe a month and a half before the first one, we start going to pre-competition period. That's when we're increasing the load. We're probably changing the training a little bit, and then we're prepping ourselves and the dog for those competitions.
And then once you enter into the competition phase, it's basically maintenance, but also making sure that you have a sufficient amount of rest before the next competition, managing the total load, because most of you, you have not just agility in your life, you're not. Agility professionals, so to say. You have work, some of you might have kids, some of you, um, might have additional, um.
Responsibility that you need to take care of and all that adds up [00:20:00] and you meet, need to find a balance because if you push it too far, if you put too much load on yourself, that's also going to have implications for your performance. So by measuring that and planning these things out in advance, you are better set for the year then.
You take one chunk the first 90 days and you focus on that what is within my first 90 days, you focus on that period, and I only make a rough, more detail than yearly plan for that period. But as I go down from yearly plan to weekly plan and then down to. Sorry. From yearly plan to 90 day plan and then down to the weekly plan, I tend to become more and more specific.
The more I'm focusing in, and especially on the workout plan, that is when I'm very, very specific because [00:21:00] every part of it should be so detailed that you have full clarity about what you need to do. And you know that based on the top levels, so you know what's the goal for that period. You know what you need to focus on and what you need to improve, and you need to ensure that you're doing the proper things.
So it's the good warmup. It's, I'm focusing on these two skills for the dog. And then it might be that you're doing, setting up a course and you're doing one course run. If you follow this methodology, what you will end up with is that that big goal, that scary goal, that goal that's outside your comfort zone.
You break it down into pieces and spread it through time. Which makes it manageable. It's the metaphor of how to eat an elephant. You don't eat one elephant in one bite. You break it down, you break it down into pieces, [00:22:00] and then you break it down into even more pieces until it becomes pieces that are bite sized, and then you chew them even before you swallow and it goes into digestive system.
So that's how we do the same thing with the goal. But you need to take a big goal, something that excites you, something you want, and something that scares you. But once you turn that goal into a project. Start to make a plan. You go from wondering if you can do it to what is the next action. As my coach tells me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven is paved with the next action.
And once you get that momentum going, that is when you actually are reinforcing the person you would like to become. You're reinforcing that goal. And if you follow the definition of Earl Nightingale, that is a [00:23:00] progressive realization of a wordy ideal. The word, the ideal is your goal. Your progressive realization is the every action that you're taking towards that goal.
That is when, if you can associate that with being successful, that me taking action is actually me being successful, then you will have a different feeling with doing the work. You will have a different feeling with what is required and you're so aligned with it. That is. You just, every work that you do is just a testament that you're on the right path.
Of course there will be setbacks, of course, there will be challenges, but once you have this framework and this mindset, you will face those challenges with a different attitude, and it's really not about what happens to you. But who you are, when it happens, who, how are you facing those challenges? That is what really determines the difference between those [00:24:00] that accomplish something in the long run and those who don't.
So it's really the perfect time to stop and reflect on how the year was, and then set new goals. Or for some of you extend the timeline, but create new plans, create a new strategy so that you can reach the goal that you set. So the question is really for you, the listener, what do you want and what is required of you to accomplish that?
And then the third question is, are you willing to pay the price? If you can say yes to all those three, if you have a clear goal, you know what is required, and you say yes to actually you're willing to pay the price. You come a long way. The next thing you need to do is actually pay the price. And [00:25:00] if you would like help in setting goals for 2026 and even learn how you can actually create your own master plan for 2026, what you can do is that you can sign up for the agility mindset community inside there.
Not only will you have access to me and other people that are doing the same thing, but you also have access to the course that helps you to go through these different phases. These different stages on how to set a goal, how to figure out what is required and how you can actually create a yearly plan, a quarterly plan, a weekly plan, and a daily plan to ensure that you continually taking action towards your goal.
So if you want to do that, you can sign up to the community and I'll put a link in the show notes. And we also have a limiting offer when it comes to this community because there's something called the founding members. Um, price, and that's a lower [00:26:00] price than what would be the initial price for the community.
In addition to that, I've also said that the first a hundred people that sign up to community will get a fiscal edition of the agility mindset signed by me with your name on it, sent to your mailbox. And the rules there is that it's either the first hundred to sign up or within the 31st of October. So it's also with a time limit, but.
The most important thing for you to do now, if you're driving your car to the next trial, or if you're walking your dogs while you're listening to this, stop the tape. Stop the podcast and ask yourself, what do I want? What do I really, really want? Don't think about if it's possible or not. Just ask yourself that question.
And once you've found the answer to that question, then you have to ask yourself, am I willing to pay the [00:27:00] price in order to get that? And if the answer to that is yes, game on. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really hope that you appreciate and like these episodes in addition to the interviews, and I look forward to seeing you next week with the new guest and I'll keep it the secret.
Until next time, my name is Christopher Henderson from Dog Jelly Performance and this is the Champions Journey podcast.
