How to DREAM Big and achieve your goals and dreams with Ian Hacon | EP#142

Ian Hacon is an age-group triathlete and CEO turned energy coach and business owner with the dream to qualify for the Ironman World Championships in Kona. To do so, he needs to shave more than two hours from his current best Ironman time (12:18). In this case study, he explains how he will accomplish this using a system he calls DREAM.

• Dream it - painting the canvas.
• Routines - including the importance of sleep.
• Effort - nobody said it would be easy.
• Accountability - the importance of having a coach and a peer group.
• Mindset - the difference of having a growth versus a fixed mindset. 

4:54 -

• I come from the East Coast of the UK in a place called Gorlestone, south of Great Yarmouth. 
  • I live on the coast so I have sandy beaches as part of my training environment, and countryside inland. 
• I've been doing triathlons for about 11 years now. 
  • I started off wanting to get fit, starting just before my 39th birthday. 
• I started with a couch to 5K, then did the London marathon a year later, then quickly found triathlon. 
• I've done 4-5 long distance triathlons - depending on if you count the Powerman World Duathlon Championships. 
• I have loved every minute of it, I'm addicted to the sport.
• The journey of self discovery that came with it has been great, in terms of physical fitness.
  • I started to think about how things like nutrition were affecting me at work, as well as my sports performance. 
• I was a CEO when I started triathlon, I'm originally a chartered accountant. 
  • I've owned a couple of businesses and was CEO of a local leisure business. 
  • People noticed I had more energy every day.
• I then started to invest in my mental fitness and wellbeing too. 
  • I really went on a journey with this, and that's what drove my career change to become an energy coach.
  • I formed my company Yellow Brick Road about 4.5 years ago. 
  • I've been helping other people unlock their energy ever since. 
• I'm married and I have 3 daughters. 
  • 2 grown up girls from a previous relationship, and an 11-year-old with my current partner. 
  • I've got the challenge of trying to put in the training hours and also being a father and a husband, which I know is a big challenge for many other triathletes. 
• My work is full time, but I try and adopt the approach of striking the right balance between work and training as that's what I'm working on with my clients. 
  • I've got enough income to pay the bills and sustain my lifestyle from my long term contracts so I pretty much do a normal working week. 

9:26 -

• The significance of my particular dream to get to Kona is that I'm not a podium finisher.
  • I'm not doing 2 hour Olympic races and finishing Ironmans in 10-10.5 hours. 
  • My best Iron distance time (in a Challenge event) is 12:18. 
  • I'm nowhere near where you would say there's likelihood of me qualifying without a seismic shift in performance.
• I'm currently in the 45-49 age group, but step up to 50-54 next year.
•  There are two reasons I have decided to try and qualify next year:
  • 1) Stepping up an age group will maybe give me a few more minutes in terms of qualifying time. 
  • 2) The journey of being in my 50th year - being able to celebrate that fact.
• The acronym I follow for this journey is D.R.E.A.M

11:40 -

• The D in DREAM stands for 'dream it'. 
• Ultimately it's about articulating that plan properly.
• We all have lots of dreams, but that's often as far as they get. 
• The Dream it part is about articulating the dream in much more detail. 
  • Painting every detail on the canvas.
• Thinking about how and what we need to do to get there before we take any action.
  • What are the key milestones and things we need to overcome. 
  • What are likely to be the challenges. 
• In the TedX talk I talk about someone who has climbed all seven summits - the highest peak in each of the 7 continents. 
  • What struck me about this man was his attention to detail on things that could go wrong. 
  • In exploring and mountaineering it's life and death. 
  • I took a lot from him about planning for things that can go wrong. 
• You start to think like that, planning all detail such as what will my qualifying race be, how fast do I need to be, what do I need to be at various different markers. 
  • You set mini goals around the goals. 
  • And then you start to think about what could go wrong and planning for that. 
    • E.g. planning more than one qualifying race to give me more chances. 
• The daily visualisation I do is me crossing the line at Kona, with a wreath around my neck and the finish line time stamped at the top. 
  • However I'm setting goals specifically for my qualifying race because I'm not expecting to be challenging for any podium places at Kona. 
  • The time is not as important in Kona, I want to enjoy the experience. 
  • The key is to get around about 10 hours in a qualifying race as that's what I think I'll need. 
• I'm pretty certain I'm going to book Copenhagen as my qualifying race, which is a fast, flat course, so that'll need to be 10 hours. 
• I think someone famously said a dream is a goal without a plan.
  • That's the point! The 'dream it' part is about the plan.
  • It bridges the gap between the dream and an actual way to get there.
  • This is why I can think I can qualify even though I'm maybe not as physiologically fit as other competitors. 
• My goal is to get there in my 50th year, but actually if I need to go a year longer I'm okay with that. 
  • I'm okay with stretching the dream as long as I'm still on target to get the dream. 

17:40 - 

• The R in DREAM stands for 'routines'.
• Visualisation is very important to me everyday.
• My business goal is to energise 10 million people, and we have a very scalable product so I think we can do that. 
• When I sit down every morning, I draw the picture of me crossing the finish line at Kona.
  • I also, write down 'energise 10 million people' and draw lots of dots to represent all the people. 
  • Visualisation is a routine I've got every day. 
• Arianna Huffington used the same technique to get through her school years and pass enough exams to go to Oxford. 
  • Her mother actually took her to Oxford and had her walk the streets and halls so she could feel what it felt like to be there, and go home and really believe it. 
• The other side of this is playing into what I do with clients everyday - managing your energy. 
• Within routines, I'm not talking about the stuff you do for the actual goal itself, I'm talking about the things around that. 
  • If we don't look after ourselves, we won't meet the goals.
  • The is particularly important for athletes - if we're not sleeping well, eating right and looking after our mental wellbeing, we will burn out. 
• I meditate at least once a day, and I'm obsessive about getting enough sleep. 
  • I will interchange my morning training sessions based on my sleep pattern. 
    • It's not that I won't do a session, but I maybe won't do it first thing or do 2 in the morning if I don't feel fully rested.
• In terms of sleep, for me ​I need 8 hours. 
  • All the science suggests we all need at least 7 hours, if not 8, and athletes generally need more.
  • Unfortunately, as a society we don't value sleep. 
  • Out of all the things I talk to clients about from an energy management perspective, I now treat sleep as the fundamental building block to everything. 
  • If you're not sleeping, nothing else can happen.

21:09 - 

• E in DREAM stands for 'effort'.
• You can't expect to achieve great things if you're not willing to put in great effort.
  • If you're not prepared to do what's required of you, assuming you're fit and well enough to do so, you won't get anywhere. 
• If you know you're ill obviously that's a different matter. 
• In the talk I refer to Michael Phelps and how he worked every day for 5 straight years in the run up to the Beijing Olympics. 
  • He was young at the time, so I'm not suggesting someone my age can put in that kind of effort on a daily basis for 5 years without a break. 
  • But it's a good story of the importance of effort - he knew that by going in and doing more than anybody else, he was going to be better than anybody else. 
  • I try and think of Michael Phelps when my motivation wanes.
    • Especially in the pool, because swimming is my weakest discipline! 
• If you've done visualisation in the morning before you start the day, this can help feed the effort.
  • You've pre-conditioned yourself to see each workout as part of a bigger picture. 
• The notion of 'eating a frog':
  • If one of your daily tasks is to eat a live frog, there's no better time to do it than right now because it's not going to get any easier. 
  • You might as well just get on with it and get it done. 
  • It then clears you mentally for all the other tasks at hand, and you feel a load lifted once it's done. 
• I actually have Haribo frogs in my office so if I do a great session I reward myself with a Haribo frog. 
  • Making the connection with a reward: you've eaten a frog so you can have a sweet. 
    

36:20 - 

• For me it's about a holistic approach so you have the best chance of success but you also enjoy it.
• One of my clients asked me if I enjoyed racing, and I thought 'what would be the point if you don't enjoy it?'
  • I am the guy that's out on the course and always smiling. 
• You see so many endurance sports people who are so obsessed with it they're not even enjoying it anymore. 
  • They're just singularly obsessed on effort - doing more than everybody else. 
  • That's a key component but they haven't got everything else around it. 
• This approach makes you a more rounded athlete, makes you enjoy the experience and I think gives you a better chance of success.  

Connect with Ian Hacon

Connect with host Mikael Eriksson

Hi! I'm your host Mikael,

I am a full-time triathlon coach and an ambitious age-group triathlete. My goal is podium at the Finnish national championships within the next few years.

I first started the website Scientific Triathlon in autumn 2015 as a passion project to share my learnings with a larger triathlon audience. Later on, in early 2017 I started the podcast That Triathlon Show. 

I sincerely want you to contact me to

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