Find Your Feet Podcast Find Your Feet

My mother, Julia Hutchinson, has not just been 'Mum', but my friend, role model and most avid supporter... through every mad idea I have embarked on. I can still remember her grasping hold of my infant-sized hand as I toddled up the gravel road next to her, blonde piggy tails bobbing. 'Hanny, please never grow up.' This is my first memory of my mother and it must have left a lasting impression on me for I don't think I have ever truly grown up!

Mum has always been unbelievably strong and fit, both mentally and physically. However, it is what she has achieved in the last 12 years that I find so inspiring. After my parents parted ways, my mother moved to a small 'treehouse' at Fern Tree on the slopes of Mt Wellington and it was from here that Mum became even more adventurous. To everyone's amazement, she taught herself to mountain bike, pursued trail running, ran a marathon in Ledhak, cycled toured through China, Iran and Europe, participated in 6 Find Your Feet trail running tours, and all the while worked as an emergency medical practitioner. She has renovated two houses, made a plethora of quilts and has just brought herself a baby grand piano as an 'investment' in her retirement... whenever that begins! Each and every day she lives two days in one - beginning the day with adventures & exercise, and concluding the day with work until 10 or 11pm at the hospital. Competitive with herself and driven to realise her full potential, I know where a lot of my innate mojo comes from.

Mum is not a public speaker and does not strive for the lime-light. So, this conversation is a rare glimpse into her world. It is about raising a Type A achiever and the young athlete, assisting children to pursue their truth, adjusting personal expectations as we age, overcoming adversity, the risk of modern sedentary lifestyles & how to approach our big goals, especially as adults.

Some of the topics covered in this podcast:
- My mother's experience as a young swimmer
- Raising a wilder, competitive child – me!
- Parenting to allow our children to find & live their truth
- Maintaining fitness, health, wellness & goals as we age
- The scary rise of the sedentary lifestyle
- Embarking on new pursuits
- Love, parenting and remaining true to oneself

My new memoir can be downloaded from: http://www.hannyallston.com.au/findingmyfeet.html

My father, Simon Allston, has been a pillar of strength, support and wisdom to me for the last 34-years of my life. Raised in England and a child of the British boarding school movement, my father moved to Australia for Law School. It was here, on Aussie soils that he found his greener fingers… and my mother. A proclaimed farmer on his marriage certificate, my mother and father moved to Tasmania to establish a greener life and family – including me!

Mum and Dad raised my brother, James Allston, and I on a small organic hobby farm to the south of Hobart. Here they encouraged us to explore ‘The Valley’ and that I did, causing varying degrees of chaos with my impish spirit. Meanwhile, my father dug in the alluvial soils morning, night and weekends, and in between, he practiced law, first privately and later in the Government sector. Here he worked on many complex environmental cases, both for the Government but also charities such as the Wilderness Society. For the remaining years of his working career, he was the Tasmanian Ombudsman.

As you will hear on the podcast, my father is a deep, compassionate thinker. We are oh-so-alike and yet oh-so-different. Where I played wildly and pursued competitive sport, I had lovingly thought of my father as a yoga-loving, green-fingered hippy! Is it Karma for these judgmental thoughts that I now find myself loving nature, plants, yoga, meditation and deep thinking!?

My father is a life-long learner and forever, at his heart, a farmer. He now lives on Bruny Island in southern Tasmania where is he aiming to bring 70-acres of run-down land back to full health. His garden grows, his mind explores new learnings, and he is always ready to hold space for James and I as we, too, continue to grow.

This is a rich conversation and I hope that you fall in love with it as much as I did during the recording process.

Some of the topics covered in this podcast:
• My father’s love-affair with gardening
• Raising a wilder, competitive child – me!
• A caution note about success
• The need for us to live locally and conscientiously
• The science of soil and how repairing soils can assist the reversal of climate change
• Living on an island in Tasmania
• Love, parenting and remaining true to oneself

Visit the show notes at: http://www.hannyallston.com.au/simon-allston.html

The conversation today is a ‘Hanny solo conversation’ about the stress response, and what I am doing to combat this as best I can. It is also an introduction to my new book which will hopefully arrive into our online Find Your Feet store, as well as all major eBook distributors, such as Amazon & Kindle, in the first few weeks of May. In this podcast episode, I share with you just a couple of small snippets from the book, some teasers if you like, and I hope that you enjoy them.

​Topics covered in this podcast:
- ​Excerpts from my new book which is to be released soon.
- The importance of Dreaming Wilder during this time of uncertainty.
- The impact of today’s stressful environment on our reproductive hormones.
- Why stress impacts our female and male hormones.
- The new routines I am experimenting with and which are helping to mitigate the stress response, including the addition of yoga.
- How I am focusing on separating work, ‘training’ and my home environments, so as to avoid conflict and anchoring work & training at home.
- How to avoid anchoring to hard training on the days when you really need to be able to focus on recovery.
- How to consider ourselves like a micro-business, using this time for self-innovation and maximizing our own agility.

Patricia Bowmer’s mission in life is to, ‘help us to live life fully, passionately and purposefully’. When I first discovered Patricia and her purpose in life I just knew that I had to have her on the podcast. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have now spent just over 2-hours in her company, bouncing our approaches to self-growth and personal development off one another. A psychologist and life coach, personal trainer, instructor of powerful group exercise classes, author, past radio presenter and an avid enthusiast of trail running and adventure racing, I knew I was in for a treat.

Topics covered in this podcast:
​- Patricia’s journey and how this has led to her outlook on life
- The heroes journey
- Archetypes and values, and how you discover yours
- Avoiding the trap of adding values into your life ‘because you should’
- Gaining rapport with your unconscious mind
- The mind-body and body-mind connection
- Stress
- Raising a family
- Juggling parenthood with personal careers and a desire to play wilder
- Patricia’s writing and her books

My conversation with Helen today focuses on the upstream practices of global partnerships and organisational responsibility for the growing trend of climate change and power necessities of our world. Dr. Helen Locher has won multiple awards and most recently, the Women with Hydro Vision Award, at the International HydroVision conference, USA. Working for over 25 years in the Hydropower Industry and in her words, her main focus is on how she can solve environmental problems in an industry that undoubtedly has a stigma for creating environmental impacts. Some topics covered in this podcast are:
- How can hydro be used sustainably to meet the growing power needs of our world?
- Social licensing of businesses
- How businesses can ‘step-up’
- The four types of thinking Helen uses

Heart Meditation. We don’t really talk about things like this in our western culture. More and more of us are accepting the notion of meditation and mindfulness. However, in these practices, we are using the mind to calm the mind. That’s really hard. Ivan Zwart is the founder and facilitator of Happy Ground Wellbeing and author of ‘Finding Happy Ground’.

I read Ivan’s book and knew I needed it in Find Your Feet and have him on the Podcast. If you are seeking fulfilment and have never dropped out of your mind and into your heart, this podcast will simply offer the personal differences that practices have made in Ivan’s life and the lives of those he teaches.

Prior to creating Happy Ground Wellbeing in 2013, Ivan started out as a social scientist and gained over twenty years’ experience as a trainer, facilitator, researcher.

While Ivan’s professional career had been very successful, since 1998 he continually battled with his mental health due to personal circumstances in his life. In order to improve his wellbeing and make better decisions in life, Ivan visited counsellors and psychologists, read a large number of self-help and psychology books, and learnt to meditate. But one of the most profound changes to his life happened in 2010, when he first learnt about heart meditation. Practicing heart meditation changed his life and now he passionately shares his knowledge and understanding through speaking, programs and his book.

​Thank you so much Ivan for sharing your story and journey with us. I hope our conversation is just as valuable to you, the listener, as I found it to be.

“Our brain and our heart are connected essentially. When our heart is open and feeling peaceful and light, then our mind naturally becomes more still”