9781844886432

Conquer Your Hang-ups

‘An incredible life-changing guide to achieving true happiness and success’

Kathryn Thomas

Unlock Your Confidence Find Your

Purpose

Five powerful tactics to be your best self

Anna’s Game Plan

ANNA GEARY

Anna’s Game Plan

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For Ronan.

Dream your dreams, chase them hard and never be afraid to be yourself while pursuing them.

‘The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be’

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction: Game Plan for Life

‘Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you’

– Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

Given the busy nature of our daily lives, with all the stresses and demands placed upon us, it’s only natural that we sometimes lose sight of who we are or what we want out of our lives. We can all live on autopilot mode, going through the motions but not really engaging fully with ourselves. We tell ourselves that tomorrow, next week, next month, next year will be different, and yet we find ourselves on the same interminable merry-go-round, unable or unwilling to get off.

I am no stranger to this. Days sometimes fly past in a haze of busyness, where I’m constantly on the go. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being busy: it gives me a sense of purpose. But sometimes you need to sit down and take stock, think about what will make you happy in both the short- and long-term.

For me, the idea for this book has been swirling around my head for some time. There’s nothing I love more than spending a quiet hour browsing in a bookshop. I love the sense of

peace and calm that envelops me as I scan the bookshelves, seeking inspiration, motivation, solace and encouragement. There’s nothing better than a book to help you disconnect from real life for a while. Immersing yourself in the words and worlds of others is balm for the soul. That is the true power of a book.

I passionately wanted to write this book, but I kept putting it off. I have asked myself so many times, why did I resist writing it? Allowing myself the time to sit and absorb myself fully in the writing process was one practical reason. But, being honest, there were much more fundamental reasons, and I guess you could say time was just a convenient excuse. In reality, it was the fear of judgement from others – I could almost hear the ‘Who does she think she is?’ remarks in my head. It was the fear of unrealistic expectations, mine more so than anyone else’s. And it was because of doubt – doubting the capabilities that, deep down, I felt I possessed. And more than all of these, I worried whether I was enough.

Something I have learned over the course of my career and life experience to date is that many of us struggle with this feeling – the feeling of not being, not having, not doing enough.

What even is enough ? I don’t earn enough money. I can’t lose enough weight. I don’t go out enough. I haven’t achieved enough status in my job. I haven’t had enough success in my life.

How do you decide what enough is? Or does someone else decide it for you? Is it others’ barometer of enough that you live by? We convince ourselves that if we could just get to

the next thing – to lose two stone, to get promoted, to buy a bigger house, to afford a designer bag – our lives would be so much better, and then we would be happy. As you read this book, I want to help you to define what enough means to you, in your life, so that you can learn to be happy right now.

The power of saying yes

I’m sure I’m not the only one who can say that there have been times in my life when I questioned whether I was good enough or if I was doing enough. Be it studying for exams, training for sports teams, preparing for radio or tv shows, and even in personal relationships. That negative voice in my head always had the power to drown out the reassuring voice.

The power of that negative internal voice means that we can often be too terrified to try. There’s a crippling fear of stepping outside of our comfort zones in case something doesn’t work out. But what if it does work out? What if on the other side of that comfort zone are opportunities you deserve to experience?

All you need do is to move out of your own way and be willing to say yes. Yes, you are enough, and yes, you can do it.

I wrote this book for that very reason. To say yes to an opportunity, to see what was on the other side of my comfort zone, because – and believe me when I say this – I have never been so far outside my comfort zone as I have been during this writing process. I am not an expert, and I can only offer

the insights I’ve learned over the course of my journey, only share with you my own lived experience.

I’ve played with the Cork Senior camogie team for twelve years.

I’ve captained the team to All-Ireland success.

I’ve won All-Stars awards and have amassed over twenty All-Ireland medals during my sporting career.

I have been a coach and mentor on the popular rté tv show Ireland’s Fittest Family for almost a decade (and won it three times, but who’s counting?!).

I have presented tv and radio shows. I have stood on stages and spoken to thousands of people across the country in my career as an executive and performance coach.

I have been a finalist on Dancing with the Stars and was the 2014 Cork Rose of Tralee.

And yet, somehow, this book has given me more sleepless nights and a deeper feeling of nervous energy than anything else I’ve ever done. I’ve poured myself into this book at a time of constant change in my life. Enduring a global pandemic, supporting a sick parent, grieving a parent, going through my first pregnancy. I’ve experienced it all while writing this book.

But I did it, I faced my fears, I drowned out my inner critic, I worked to the best of my abilities, and I persevered. I found that there is power in the discomfort too, and strength in the vulnerability that it has unearthed within me.

Figuring out what you think about you

In this book, I want to help you reconnect. To reconnect with your whole self, with your everyday reality and with your dreams. I want to help you to reconnect to what you really want to achieve from life, instead of what you think you might want, or who you think you should be. You might have to shed some long-established habits, and change the way you view yourself, but in doing so, you can unlock the true version of yourself, a version of you that is ready to live life to the full.

Throughout the writing process, I often felt like I was talking directly to both my younger self and to my present self. It enabled me to remind myself that I am capable, determined and competitive, full of passion and enthusiasm. It also allowed me to acknowledge that I tend to overanalyse situations, be excessively self-critical and struggle with self-confidence. It allowed me to reflect on my career and understand that it enabled me to do what I love best, which is working with other people.

I get immense energy and joy in helping others to improve and develop their personal relationships with themselves through the myriad of roles I have found myself in: coach, broadcaster, speaker, captain and teammate. I’m hoping that this book might help you unlock some fundamental truths about yourself in the way that it has helped me. If my words can act as a support to you then it was worth every minute, even the tearful ones.

Over the past few years, I have focused and worked on

the relationship I have with myself – with both my mind and my body – and it’s this knowledge I have gained that I want to share with you, focusing on the concepts of Acceptance, Purpose, Consistency, Challenge and Kindness. In exploring aspects of each of these topics, I’m hoping that you will gain the confidence to say yes to opportunities, yes to challenges –yes to life.

How many of us say no to opportunities, not because we don’t want to explore them but because we don’t have the confidence to say yes, or we worry about what others will think? This book is for anyone who wants and needs to back themselves more. It’s time to care less about what others think about you and focus more on what YOU think about you.

We constantly demand so much of ourselves. We give ourselves such a hard time for stumbling, for stalling, for being uncertain or indecisive and for coming up short. The destructive voice in our heads can intensify in all these situations:

Why did you do that?

What is wrong with you?

I can’t believe you did that.

But . . . in these moments are the lessons, the learnings and the growth that can elevate us to a higher level of experiencing life. These are the stories of resilience and perseverance that we will come back to again and again when talking to our kids and grandkids. Embrace and celebrate these stories too. Because it takes guts to try.

Being involved in high-level sport has afforded me oppor-

tunities to work on my mindset: to challenge my thinking, to reflect on my habits and to re-evaluate my priorities along the way. In the lead-up to my first Senior Club All-Ireland Semi-Final back in spring 2013, we had a final team meeting that I will always remember. We were going into the game as underdogs, facing the current All-Ireland Champions on their home turf. We had never reached that far in the competition before, so it was new territory for us. We were full of doubt and insecurity. Were we enough?

Two questions were put to us in the meeting:

‘Are you willing?’

‘Are you able?’

These are questions I have come back to again and again since then. I have challenged myself with these questions throughout different moments in my life, whether it be tough gym sessions, coping with grief, demanding job interviews, struggles with body image, and everything in between.

Am I willing?

Am I able?

During the times in life when you are faced with difficult challenges, hard decisions and tricky moments, my hope for you after reading this book is that you will have the tools, techniques and tips to help you feel willing and able to cope with anything that life throws at you.

We all need to be reminded in our lives that we can do tough things.

YOU CAN DO TOUGH THINGS

!

A game plan for your future

I want to enable and empower you to drive forward, towards creating the life YOU want to live. So, whatever the reasons are that brought you to this book, you are here. Now, it’s time to get excited about what’s to come.

Learn to love and accept you for who you are and have confidence in your abilities – because you are capable of great things.

Learn to identify your purpose, set goals and keep motivated to achieve what you want out of your life.

Learn to embrace consistency in your life – discover how to show up for yourself and for others.

Learn to reframe challenges as opportunities. Stepping outside your comfort zone, confronting your fears and focusing on progress can be genuinely life-changing.

Learn to demonstrate kindness in daily life. Showing compassion to both yourself and others can unlock an unparalleled sense of happiness and contentment.

Together, let’s go for it, create your game plan and put it into action.

Record your thoughts and progress

This book is called Anna’s Game Plan, but my ambition is that as you read it you will feel empowered to come up with your own personal game plan that is a fit for your life.

On a practical note, you will find it useful to have a notebook or journal handy to jot down your ideas and reflections and to do the exercises I’ve shared. There are also some blank pages at the end of each part of the book where you can make notes and record your own takeaway tactics.

As well as being a source of encouragement today, I hope you can use this book as an ongoing resource, a tool you’ll continue to use to review and revise your game plan as things change in life – because the one thing we all know is that nothing stays the same!

1. The liberating power of self-acceptance

‘You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress, simultaneously’

– Sophia Bush

Self-acceptance isn’t easy. It’s something I have struggled with over the years. But by going through this struggle, I have learned that accepting my whole self – the good and the bad –can be truly liberating. It allows for a level of contentment in my life that I might not have if I was constantly criticizing myself. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not immune to negative thoughts snaking their way into my mind, but I’ve learned ways of reframing this negative narrative into a positive.

Learning to accept yourself – your body, your personality, your flaws, your strengths, the inner essence of who you are as a person – is a journey. In this section of the book, I’ll share with you some of my experiences with self-acceptance, and some tricks and tips I’ve learned along the way.

When I was younger, my grandmother always used to say to me ‘what people think about you is none of your business’.

And now, whenever I feel anxious in some way about how I might be perceived, I always think of this saying. You cannot control how you are perceived by other people. They will make up their minds about who you are as a person, whether it’s accurate or not. But if you don’t know who you are, you can be shaken by the perceptions that others have of you. Ultimately, you can only control how you see yourself. And you can learn to be your biggest cheerleader.

Over the years, as a high-level sportsperson, media broadcaster and coach, I’ve had to develop coping mechanisms to deal with negativity – negativity that I have felt about myself and negativity I have received from other people. I have been met with negative comments about the way I speak, about my personality and about my appearance. I have had to learn how to deal with the level of negativity directed at me or else I wouldn’t be able to survive in this industry. But many of us deal with a similar kind of challenge daily, both professionally and personally – not to mention with the pervasiveness of social media in our lives. We tend to care more about what others think about us than what we think about ourselves.

Your critics are not your best advisors

A few years ago, I was invited to join The Sunday Game panel on rté as a hurling analyst. I had been involved in the camogie coverage as an analyst since 2015 but being asked to join and talk about the men’s game was brilliant, if a little daunting. Why? It wasn’t because I felt that I wouldn’t have anything

to contribute. I have played in countless All-Ireland Finals. I understand the game of hurling, and back my own opinions around it. However, I was acutely aware of an attitude that exists among a certain cohort of people that whenever they see a woman talking about men’s sport, they instantly dismiss her and refer to her as the ‘token woman’.

It was an honour to be asked, so I said yes, and on my first day I stood shoulder to shoulder with two former hurling stars. I was nervous but I enjoyed the panel discussion. Did I feel the pressure? Absolutely. But as American tennis legend Billie Jean King once said, ‘pressure is a privilege’, so I tried to embrace it.

I gave my opinion, commented on the match from my perspective, and generally got involved in the conversation. My opinions were listened to by the other analysts and, overall, I was happy when we came off-air. It wasn’t until afterwards that I became aware of the negative criticism from some people online. They wrote that I took over the panel. I interrupted the men too much, I said too much. I was taken aback because I didn’t feel that this was a true reflection of the panel discussion. It seemed to me that, on the playing field, people applauded my determination and self-assuredness, but off the field those traits were expected to disappear. I had to turn off that fire and that passion.

I was simply doing my job, but I took note of what they said and I decided to hold back a bit the next time. Looking back now, I was compromising myself to be more pleasing to others – whoever they were – and more self-contained. It felt wrong to sit nodding during a conversation about a sport

I had played my whole life, a sport I had reached the top of my game in more than once. I consciously listened more than I contributed. Afterwards, I was again criticized online. This time it was for my facial expressions. My attentiveness and concentration were mistaken for scowling, while I was also accused of not saying enough. I couldn’t win.

In the end, I decided to ignore those other voices. I would listen to my own voice and the voices of my support circle. A friend of mine said something that hit home: ‘If you wouldn’t take their advice, why would you listen to their criticism?’ Read that quote again because it might resonate with you too. We call these types of people keyboard warriors, but there is nothing warrior-like about what they do. Instead, we should call them keyboard cowards, hiding behind a screen, pointing out the mistakes and faults of others. It’s far easier to do that than to embrace the pressure that comes with trying something yourself.

I am the same person both on and off the field, whether it’s playing camogie, coaching on Ireland’s Fittest Family, speaking to corporate groups, or if you meet me on the street. My persona, my passion, my competitiveness, my work ethic, my drive . . . it’s evident. Why should I be made to feel I have to turn it off? I only know how to be me. And so I’ve decided that’s who I am going to be.

Why should any one of us need to be less because someone thinks we are too much? It says more about them than it does about ourselves. I’m determined and ambitious. I have learned to embrace these qualities. I have accepted that they make me who I am.

Why are we waiting for external validation to come from others? Do you let others decide if you are to be accepted? Think about the ways you might be letting that happen in your life. Instead, you need to strive for self-acceptance. This will help to build self-confidence and give you greater freedom, so that you can decide the best course of action for your life.

2. The acceptance mindset

‘You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, but still meet someone who hates peaches’

– Dita Von Teese

Looking outwards for acceptance is impossible: there will always be someone who you don’t gel with; there will always be people, for whatever reason, who just don’t like you. But you can like you – your relationship with yourself is the foundation for everything. It affects all that you do, how you present yourself, your relationships with other people, your job, everything. So, it’s important to check on that foundation regularly, and to make sure you maintain it.

Have you ever seen a bricklayer at work? They make it look so easy, don’t they? But we know that they are skilled in their craft. They’ve spent years learning the specific process that they need to follow. You would never expect to build a house in a day. We know houses are built on land that has been surveyed and prepared, before solid foundations can be placed, before the bricks can be laid. If you were building anything, you would take time, effort and care with it to make sure it would last, to make sure it wouldn’t fall down

or fall apart. Think of your life, and your journey through it, as a self-build. Give yourself time, care and love, and you will build a good foundation, and then build up brick by brick until you are able to weather the storm of outside critique and opinion.

Loving yourself and being confident in your capabilities and who you are doesn’t mean that you live without fear, doubt, worries or regrets. There is no end point, no final destination on this journey – it involves constant practice. Getting into this mindset can be difficult, but not impossible, and I want to share with you a few exercises and tips that I’ve found helpful, and which might help you too.

Practise compassion

‘If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion’

– Dalai Lama

Often, we are our own worst enemies, our own harshest critics. I think I can safely say that I’m not the only one who has a little voice ringing through my head at times, telling me I’m not good enough, berating me for my faults, questioning my actions. The central theory of self-compassion is accepting that we are all imperfect, we all make mistakes at times, we all have flaws – so instead of relentlessly criticizing ourselves, we embrace ourselves for who we truly are as people. Self-compassion is recognizing that life is a shared

experience – we all go through challenging times, and we all fail at times. It is not a unique state of being. When we practise self-compassion, we will find that we have an increased personal drive to make positive changes in our lives.

Empowering yourself

You will start to become an unshakeable force within your own life when you work on things that no one can take away from you.

Your self-compassion, your self-belief, your selfworth. They all start with the inner self. No outside influences necessary.

When I look back at my extraordinary time on Dancing with the Stars, I can’t believe that I almost turned it down. I have always been a girl who loved to dance – from illadvised Riverdance-esque leaps around my childhood kitchen to pretending to be a Spice Girl with my friends (I was always Sporty Spice – shocker, I know!). Dancing made me feel happy and free. But the offer really threw me.

At the time, I was at the beginning of regenerating my professional life, in a period of transition and trying to work out a new identity. I had been a sportsperson for so long, ‘Anna Geary, the Cork camogie player’, but now that I was retired and had started to dip my toe into media broadcasting,

I still hadn’t quite figured out who I was. The show was offering me an opportunity to explore a different side of myself away from my career in sports, a new one in broadcasting, and it offered me exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. So why was I so hesitant?

The truth was that I was terrified of being judged, and of what people would say about me. Would people think I had notions about myself for appearing on a show filled with well-known Irish stars and media personalities when I was just a camogie player from a rural village in North Cork? And this is before I had even contemplated what they would say about my looks, my body and the small matter of my dancing ability.

It took all my inner resolve to force myself out of my comfort zone to say yes. I had to ignore my self-critical, vulnerable side and reframe my negative thoughts. I had to practise self-compassion and identify what I really wanted. I asked myself those two questions: Am I willing? Am I able? I could do it, and I would do it. I would treat myself with the compassion I deserved and would support and encourage myself. I knew that being on this show could make me happy. I love dancing, I love a challenge, and it was an exciting opportunity.

Sometimes we lose sight of who we really are and what we really want because we are too concerned about being judged or failing. And at times over the seventeen weeks, I was faced with tough challenges, emotionally, mentally and physically. But what I got back in terms of enjoyment, friendships and incredible memories was worth it all. I’m