A powerful conversation with Tough Girl Challenges founder and Tough Girl Podcast host, Sarah Williams. As friends, we easily cover multiple topics across our conversations. These include how to meet fear head-on and deal with it; why Sarah is inspired by two specific female role models/mentors and the moments in her life that nearly broke her. Interestingly, she elaborates on how those darkest times taught her the most and benefitted her in ways she could never have imagined. There are references to many long-distance trails, in the UK and overseas, with the Appalachian Trail being lauded by Sarah as the most life-changing for her, personally. A female adventure epic.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  00:09

Well, hello, and welcome back to the HeadRightOut Podcast.  My name is Zoe Langley-Wathen and I am your host. This is a relatively new show, and I hope if you're here for the first time that you will consider hitting that follow button in your podcast app, because we need to get as many subscribers and followers as we possibly can to grow the show.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  00:34

I'm really excited today, because we're going to be talking to Sarah Williams, who is the founder of Tough Girl Challenges, and the host of the amazing Tough Girl Podcast. It's a really powerful episode, and although we're two friends, and we giggle a lot, and we have a little bit of a chatter here and there, we do go into some deeper stuff. Sarah gives some really strong messages of how to look at fear and how to reframe it. We discuss why so many women seem to be hesitant to adventure and where that fear might actually come from. Sarah talks about her passion for wanting to set up Tough Girl Challenges, and the podcast way back six, seven years ago now. I asked her about who her role models are and that was a really fascinating part of the conversation. So I hope you'll stick with us to listen.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  01:29

Today, here is a beautiful, beautiful day. It's September. It's the seventh of September, and we have just got the hottest weather at the moment and the tops of the trees are changing. There's hardly a breeze out there and the canal is still. We've had some dog barking issues. So I will say, you might hear birds tweeting and that probably isn't a problem. But if you get some interruptions partway through the recording, I apologise because there was a bit of a dog pack issue out on the towpath partway through the recording. So yes, without further ado, I'm going to head off into the introduction.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  02:16

Okay, well welcome everybody to another episode of the HeadRightOut Podcast. I am so excited today. I can't begin to tell you I have got a very good friend of mine, an inspirational lady and all round adventurer, challenge inspirer. She is an author. She's an award winner. I'm going to go through her bio in a minute but we have got Sarah Williams, the host of the Tough Girl Podcast and founder of Tough Girl Challenges here. So good morning, Sarah.

 

Sarah Williams  02:47

Good morning. How you doing?

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  02:48

I'm very well thank you. So I am going to introduce you, because I just felt all of the things that you have achieved over the last six or seven years just needs to be acknowledged and I don't want to miss anything out for certain.

 

Sarah Williams  03:02

I'm getting ready to be embarrassed and ready to cringe. It's a very British thing like oh my god, okay. I'm ready for it.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  03:08

You've got to soak this up and enjoy. So Tough Girl Challenges was started in 2014 as a way of motivating and inspiring women and girls. My mission is to increase the amount of female role models in the media with a focus on women who do adventures and undertake big physical challenges. I am the host of the two times award winning Tough Girl Podcast where I interview inspirational female explorers, adventurers, athletes and everyday women who have overcome great challenges. The podcast is listened to in 174 countries around the world and has passed 1.8 million downloads. Based on monthly downloads. The Tough Girl Podcast is in the top 15% of podcasts globally. I completed the Marathon des Sables in April 2016. That's six marathons in six days across the Sahara Desert. In 2017, I through hiked the Appalachian Trail solo and unsupported. That's 2190 miles in 100 days, which I also daily vlogged. In 2018 I cycled over 4000 kilometers from Vancouver, Canada via the Pacific Coast Highway to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. I have a master's in Women and Gender Studies from Lancaster University 2018 with my dissertation focusing on Women, Adventure and Fear. I'm a qualified yoga instructor and personal trainer (2019). In September 2019, I walked the Camino Portuguese - 675 kilometres from Lisbon, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and that was sponsored by challenge with Cicerone. I ended the year by walking the Lycian Way in Turkey. In 2020. I started in Australia walking the Overland Track in Tasmania. And now to celebrate the six-year anniversary of the Tough Girl Podcast I am undertaking six UK-based challenges: The Tough Girl Adventure Series, also sponsored by Cicerone. They include, and we're going to talk about these in a moment, the Anglesey Coastal Path, the South Downs Way, the Pilgrim's Way, the West Highland Way, climbing Ben Nevis and walking the Great Glen Way. Wow. You were smiling and we were like 'yay, yay'. This is such a wonderful, awesome list of achievements. I feel inspired. I have to say Sarah, all the way through, I've been following you since we met in 2014, or was it 2015, I don't know?

 

Sarah Williams  04:59

It was 2015 at the Women's Adventure Expo.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  04:59

Yeah. I've always found you to be somebody who inspires me. You're almost like a mentor from afar. Each time, I see you developing and growing, through these challenges and activities that you're doing. And your masters in Women and Gender Studies... that absolutely fascinated me. Because you are delving deeper into the area you're interested in. So, the area that you are interested in... tell us more... what is it?

 

Sarah Williams  04:59

I'm actually getting emotional, I'm going to start crying soon. It's like 'oh, my goodness'!

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  06:06

So yeah, where does Sarah Williams come from? What is it that you're interested in? Why? Why?

 

Sarah Williams  06:22

Oh, my God, the why the big question. I think I've always been fascinated by the motivation and the inspiration side of things in so that personal self development. So I was always sat with like Tony Robbins and reading the secret. And I used to apply it to my life when I worked in banking down in London. So that was like a big part of me. I think one of the things that I noticed when I was in banking was just a) like how male dominated it was, and obviously all the sexism and misogyny and everything else that was going on that maybe that I don't think I really understood when I was twenty-four or twenty-five, about what I was experiencing. And I think the other side of my personality was doing these quite extreme things to shock people like wanting to run marathons, or to doing these, like these Tough Mudder races, or you know, the obstacle course races and people being like, "oh, but you're so you're so girly, and you're so feminine, and you love the color pink, and yet you like running ridiculous distances and doing these crazy challenges".

 

Sarah Williams  07:18

 I realised in my early 30s, that I needed to make some changes in my life. And honestly, I'm more than happy to talk in more detail about that. But to cut the long story short, I ended up leaving my job in banking in 2013, didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I ended up going travelling, spending time in Australia, heading over to Kilimanjaro to go and climb Kilimanjaro, I spent some time in South America. And I think for the first time a long time, I really started asking myself these important questions. What is your WHY? How do you want to spend your life, like what do you want the next ten-twenty years to look like when you are on your death bed looking back over your life? And what do you want to have experienced? And I've never really thought about it so much. I'd always just been on this path and just following this journey on this route, like I was on a river, but I didn't know where I was going. I hadn't really thought it all through. And when I was over in South America, I finally got this time to think and reflect and to really dig deeply into these subjects. And for me that involved a