Alicia: Oh you’re going to Banff!! You absolutely have to: eat poutine while you’re up there…
Brett: And see a mountie…
Alicia: And quote Canadian Border Patrol…
Brett: You have to see Moraine Lake…
You have to see Lake Louise…
Brett: Of course the hiking is great. You have to go hiking…
Alicia: And just sitting around the campfire…
Brett: But you have to see the city of Banff
And the Banff Springs Hotel specifically…
Brett: And you’ve gotta camp while you’re there…
Alicia: And either kayaking or canoeing…
Brett: Since you’re up there, go up and see the Tea House…
Alicia: Oh, and take a gondola at the ski resort…
Brett: And you need to make friends with a bear…
Alicia: And also see Peyto lake…
Brett: Yeah…
Alicia: All of that.
Welcome to the Discover Your Wilderness podcast
Brett: Last week we talked about setting realistic expectations. We discussed how it requires you to take a step back and really internalize what is possible in the time frame, expecting or building in some float for things that are going to go wrong. Obviously, all of the things that we said at the top of this podcast cannot be priorities, especially if you’re limited on time or you’re trying to build in some of that float. So today we’re going to discuss how to prioritize, why prioritizing, and get more into that JOMO, FOMO, and what those mean.
Alicia: Right, and Banff was an interesting space for us because we really kind of were all over the spectrum of whether we were trying to get it all done, or being more intentional with our time. And so that experience, you know there is such a long list of things you can do, and then you could spend weeks there and still have things that you don’t get to see or experiences you don’t get to have. But it really was interesting to see that, sometimes we were overplanning and sometimes we were under planning. But we learned through it, and I feel like by the end of the trip we were doing so much better and I feel like we had a much better balance. So let’s talk about how that happened. Let’s talk about from the beginning to the end our growth through that process – both for us and for the group.
Brett: This takes a bit of self-awareness, and Alicia and I both recognized in ourselves that we lean towards under planning. And I know, for me at least, that’s the part due to the fact that I am busy and so I figure – whatever my priority in life is prior to going on vacation that’s what’s taking up my time. So I don’t make researching what I want to do on a trip always in the most time. I procrastinate, I guess is what I’m saying.
Alicia: You’re not prioritizing planning. That’s ironic.
Brett: Right. And so when it comes to wanting to go somewhere I don’t have all of the research and know-how that I would need in order to make informed decisions about the places that I’m actually going to visit.
Alicia: And I think we can dive for just a half a second into the fact that for us I feel like that works fairly well. It’s definitely bitten us on occasion. And it’s definitely been somewhat problematic on occasion. But for the most part, I feel like our expectations are generally flexible enough that under planning does work for us. Until we’re in a group that over plans. Or until we’re traveling with people that want to do all the things on the list. And then we have to talk through priorities and we have to understand priorities better.
Brett: And between overplanning and under planning, neither is preferable to the other. They each have drawbacks. And adequate planning or a balance in the middle is really what you need to seek. Because if you under plan, then you find yourself realizing that you didn’t travel at the right time of year. Or you didn’t travel with the right clothing in your suitcase. You didn’t realize it was going to be rainy season for example. When we went to Banff, we went in what was pretty early summer but still warm where we are in Utah. And driving hundreds of miles North it was still quite cool. And we kind of knew that but we hadn’t internalized that every day was going to be jacket weather and rainy. but
Alicia: We prepared physically, we had the gear we needed. But we hadn’t necessarily prepared mentally to be wet and chilly for most of the time.
Brett: Right. And then another drawback to under planning is that you expect to still have a positive experience, you still want to see things, but you don’t put them in any kind of an order that necessarily makes sense. So if it makes sense to go somewhere at a certain time of day and you didn’t specifically account for that, you likely won’t be able to get in the one thing that you might have wanted to do and just assumed that it would be available to you at any point.
Alicia: And then you end up running for the bus because you both under planned at the beginning and overplanned at the end. Ergo Lake Louise Lake.
Brett: Oh, Lake Louise. We knew the name. We knew that we wanted to see it. And so we went into our campsite, set up camp, and drove over to Lake Louise. Lo and behold the parking lot was full.
Alicia: And I don’t think either of us realized just how popular that location is. I knew it was very well-known I knew it was popular, but I didn’t know how popular.
Brett: Yeah, it was so popular that we ended up going to an overflow parking lot. A found out that there was a shuttle that went. And we had to wait for the shuttle to come. And even that we had to go… it was not ideal, because our lack of preparation made it a lot more wasted time, not doing anything productive.
Alicia: Right. And we were able to pivot, we had enough flexibility that we could pivot to a point. But then we catch the shuttle, we go over to the lake, we hiked at the lake. Or before that, we were taking pictures, enjoying the view, laughing at all the Instagrammers, that you can see are posing in a million different poses for their posts. And then we said, “Let’s do this hike up to the Tea House.”
Brett: Yeah, that was probably another one of those, not having known about it beforehand if we’d skipped it, I wouldn’t have had FOMO. Because I didn’t know that it was something everyone did. But as soon as we saw the signs and some people in the group were all gung-ho about it it was, “okay, well now we have to go to the Tea House.” But it’s a bit of a hike. It’s nothing super strenuous, it’s not too difficult. But it was a little time consuming, and we were cutting it super close to the last shuttle of the day to get us back to where we parked.
Alicia: So close. Like I still can’t believe that we barely, barely made it. And granted there was part of our group that was in line for the bus a second earlier. So even if they had caught the bus and had taken the bus up, gotten the car, and come back for us it would have worked out. But we were running down that hill in order to get back to the bus. And so it was definitely one of those, our lack of preparation, and our desire to do all the things, and see all the sights both combined to create a pretty manic afternoon.
Brett: Right, so that was the downside of doing under planning. But let’s talk a bit about overplanning because we also had individuals in the group who had done a lot of research and said, “Oh, I want to make sure I do this, that, and the other.” And, at other points in the trip, we went, “There’s literally not enough time.” It’s interesting because you’d think we would have learned our lesson. And yet it took us going to both extremes before, in the end, and even after in regurgitating (that’s a gross word) – processing what it was that we done, let us recognize how we could have done it better for the future.
Alicia: Let’s say “retroactively reviewing”, instead of “regurgitating”. But yeah, it was a lack of priorities in both directions. And it’s something that, the funny thing is I feel like all of us had pretty similar priorities at the highest level, but we didn’t distill them down enough to really understand “here’s what we can do and here we can’t do” to set realistic expectations based on those priorities and based on our values for this trip. So let’s dig into that process because you mentioned that we retroactively reviewed afterward and pondered on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what our priorities really should have been or could have been, had we been more intentional with them.
Brett: Yeah, I eluded to this last week. If you missed last week’s podcast definitely go back and listen to that, but I find it most efficient to literally make a list of a priority order of what you want to do. That if you can’t, you’re recognizing that not everything will fit in, drop #12 off the list, and then 11, and then 10, and then 9. That way what you’re focusing on, what you’re making sure gets in, are the big rocks. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the visual, object lesson of you have a container and you need to get rocks, pebbles, and sand into it. If you start by putting in the sand, and then you put in the pebbles, the big rocks won’t fit in. But if you say, “I need to do this thing” and you put that in first. And you say, “after my needs are met, I want to get some wants in there”, anything after that is the icing on the cake. So to kind of make it a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary o “here are the things that I know I really want to do and if I don’t get to these other ones, I recognize in the prioritization process I’m not going to really miss out on that.
Alicia: And you’ve set a baseline for “this is a satisfying trip, if I do a b and c, then I’ve met my goals for this trip and I’m happy.” And so you have, you’re almost guaranteeing yourself satisfaction, because you’re putting the first things first. You’re putting your priorities into place upfront. And then yeah, I love the frosting on the cake – everything after that is just sweet because it’s so much more than you expected to be able to do. And you’re not disappointed because you missed out on anything.
Brett: And if you can layer on to that – this is the advanced course – putting some structure around the ideal order, then you can say, “oh let’s do this thing next because it’s both a high priority item and it’s next closest to us geographically,” then it saves you from jumping all the way across a park like Banff – which is a pretty big park – or Glacier, like we talked about last week – another large park. So, that’s kind of the next step that you would want to do to it. But really focusing on saying/recognizing that self-awareness: “I want to see this what are other high-priority items from my group? And what are those high priority items that are shared amongst all of us? Because if that’s shared amongst all of us collectively, that should be a high priority. And if it’s a low priority among all of you, great, that makes it super easy. Also, something that we didn’t do as much on that trip, but could have totally done was say, “Your group is made up of people who have this thing as a priority (seeing Peyto Lake), or my group has the priority of (hiking to the Tea House). Let’s go do that and let’s split up so that we can get our high-priority things and meet up at a certain time. That requires some preparation beforehand. But it also just takes some communication and coordination once you’re in the thick of it.
Alicia: And we could do an entire episode (maybe we should do an entire episode) on group dynamics and navigating travels or vacations with a group. But I want to break this down a little more specifically. So I want to talk through our processes of identifying priorities and kind of break apart. So I know for me, in order to really understand my priorities I start with a ton of research – I look up whatever I can about a certain area. Now, this is an ironic thing because I feel like part of my downfall on this particular trip was that I didn’t do that. I didn’t research enough, so I didn’t know what the options even were. So I couldn’t identify my priorities because I didn’t have enough information. But when I’ve researched enough and identified, “I want to do these three things. These are the only things I really need to get out of this trip.” And then I’ve found a way to make sure those things happen in conjunction with the group that I’m in, then it is a success. But you have to start with all of that research. You have to start with collecting – “what are the top ten things to do in this area?” according to five or six different kinds of travelers who’ve gone there.
Brett: The next portion is going to be self-awareness. Just because, and this might be new to you, just because someone says, “Oh you have to go do (whatever)” doesn’t mean that you will enjoy that. You have to be self-aware enough to say, “I enjoy hiking. I enjoy being on the water, or relaxing, or exerting myself. And so having that self-awareness to look at your research through the lens of self-awareness will help the start make shape the things that are going to rise to the top, the things that are going to be something that is fulfilling to you. That if that’s all you get as you said earlier, it’s still enjoyable.
Alicia: Right. And that you can have those conversations and then say, “I’m game for these other things that maybe aren’t my thing, but here’s the thing that I would really like to do.” Because otherwise, often it’s retroactively that you go, “Man, that just didn’t satisfy. Or I didn’t enjoy that as much as I thought. Because I assumed that we would spend time on the water, and then we didn’t, and so now I’m disappointed. Now I feel let down because that didn’t meet my expectations.”
Something that I think we can go deeper into another time as well, but I feel like really hits the spot here is – and I come at it because it helps me understand my values and my priorities – is that there are two kinds of people generally. There are people who do certain activities because of who is going. And there are people who do certain activities because of what is taking place. I know I have to balance both of those, but I’m a lot more inclined to decide whether or not to do something based on who will be participating. I feel like you have traditionally been more about what. You’re a lot more comfortable going with any random group of friends, but you want to do a certain thing. And if what they’re doing doesn’t appeal, is that?
Brett: Yeah, I’m more of a what. And it’s because I figure I’ll be able to get along or that the what will be worth it. I did a study abroad, maybe not the best example because I didn’t know anyone else who was going into the program. You did a study abroad and similarly didn’t know anyone. But it was “I want to do that program. I’m not basing it or waiting on a friend to go through. I want to do the program. I’ll do that.” Versus I’ll just do anything that involves people that I enjoy doing it with.
Alicia: Yeah, so if you’re struggling to identify your value system, is that might be a good starting point of: do I decide based on who? Or do I decide based on what? And then you can break it down a little more beyond that. But I found that’s usually a good starting point for me. “Why am I excited about this trip? Or why am I maybe not excited about this option? And how can I make it more exciting? Or how can I reframe it so I don’t miss out on this opportunity? But missing out on opportunities can be good.
Brett: Now the confluence of all the lessons we learned on this trip was: when we researched, prioritized, and planned for having breakfast on Moraine Lake. We woke up early, we knew that we wanted to see the sunrise. We knew that we wanted to have breakfast. We knew that we wanted to go as a group and that it was a priority for everyone. And we said, “Let’s wake up early. Let’s get comes consensus on what that looks like. Let’s travel there.” And then we were there for what we thought was going to be sunrise, but it was a little overcast, which was out of our control. But we still had a great experience because we did all we could and we were somewhere where we wanted to be, and we have the experience that we wanted to have. And then anything else we were able to fit in after that was awesome, but was extraneous or was extra (those are the same words). Everything else was great and enjoyable, but at least we got what we wanted to. And not getting everything, we still experienced joy in it. So, oft-quoted FOMO is the “fear of missing out”. JOMO, on the other hand, is the “joy of missing out” and saying, “I recognize that there are other things that we could be running around to go see. But I enjoy the things that I’ve prioritized. And I’m going to get the quality in there that I want.
Alicia: And I think that was my favorite moment. We didn’t poll the group, but we spent quite a while just sitting there, on the shores of the lake, and skipping rocks or trying to skip rocks, waiting for breakfast to warm up and everything. And we just enjoyed that space. And we enjoyed that moment. And I think about our trip to mass and that was the most magical moment. Not because we were seeing anything beyond the ordinary per se, but because we let ourselves just sink into the moment, and breathe it in, and live in that space so thoroughly.
Brett: So when people say, “Here are things you have to do,” when you read those articles of “Must see,” take it with a grain of salt. Recognize what you value, what you would prioritize, and make your own list. That will maybe involve reading some of those lists, but don’t just go to those places because someone else said they’re important. Recognize what’s important for you.
Alicia: And you will find joy in all of it. Thanks so much for tuning in this week, guys. We’ve enjoyed reflecting on this trip and learning through our experiences. And hopefully, you are as well. If you know anybody who could benefit from this, feel free to pass it along.
Brett: Like and subscribe, and stay healthy in this pandemic.
Alicia: And after.
Brett: And as my wife says, “Priorities are important. Priorities are fun. Who needs priorities? Everyone.”
Alicia: Thanks for that, Megan.
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Not to play the FOMO card, but you won’t want to miss the next episode.