The BHAG on the Water

It was the first Friday in January 2025, and I had just climbed out of the water after my first 3.8km open water swim event — the RIP View at Point Lonsdale. My arms were heavy and I had that particular glow that only comes from doing something your body wasn't entirely sure it could do. The course tracks the spit from Queenscliff to Point Lonsdale, and every time I turned to breathe on my left I caught a glimpse of the infamous RIP, the treacherous stretch of open water between Point Nepean and Point Lonsdale. It sits there like a warning, churning quietly, daring you to imagine what it would take to cross it.

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The RIP: Point Nepean to Pint Lonsdale

Still buzzing, I sent a message to my WhatsApp swim group sharing how the morning had gone. One of the group replied with a simple question: what's next? Flippantly, I answered, "How about a crossing of the RIP?" I say flippantly because I had only taken up swimming fifteen months earlier. Before that, I was someone who avoided the ocean rather than sought it out. I knew a crossing was a serious undertaking, one that needed to be timed with a slack tide, because the currents are strong and unforgiving, and you need real efficiency in the water to complete it before the tide turns against you. Then came the reply that changed everything. "How about a winter crossing, without a wetsuit?" And just like that, the aspiration stepped up a notch, into BHAG territory.

BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a term coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. A BHAG isn't a vague mission statement or a resolution scribbled on New Year's Day and forgotten by February. It's clear enough that no one needs it explained. It sits on a long enough horizon that it can't be achieved quickly or by accident. It's emotionally resonant, meaning it has to feel daring rather than merely strategic. And it's measurable, so there's no ambiguity about whether you've hit it or not. Collins and Porras were writing about companies, describing how visionary organisations used these goals to galvanise people and create forward momentum around something almost unreasonable. But the idea has travelled well beyond boardrooms into personal goal-setting and coaching, because a goal of that size forces a shift in identity, not just effort. You don't just do more of what you were already doing. You have to become someone slightly different to get there.

And so began our fifteen month journey toward a winter crossing of the RIP. I say our journey deliberately, because I wasn't doing this alone. I was training alongside The Ray's, a group of dads who meet most mornings at Elwood beach before the sun is properly up, regardless of what the forecast says.

As researchers Locke and Latham once observed, if a goal doesn't trigger strong feelings of determination, resolve and eagerness to begin, it probably needs rewriting. This one did neither. It scared me and pulled me forward in equal measure, and I've come to think that particular combination is a fairly reliable sign you're onto something worth pursuing.

As a resilience and performance coach, goal setting is something I return to constantly, both with my clients and in my own life. And the longer I do this work, the more convinced I am that a SMART goal on its own isn't enough. It tells you how to structure a goal, but not whether it's the right one. Too often we start setting goals without first zooming out to check them against our values and our bigger picture. Skip that step, and you can spend months, sometimes years, climbing a ladder only to discover it was leaning against the wrong wall.

Sustainable motivation comes from alignment, not willpower. It comes from knowing your "why" before you commit to the "what". For me, that meant returning to my own wellbeing vision, something I ask every client to write for themselves early in our work together. Mine speaks to creating a sense of calm and balance, prioritising self-care and managing stress and anxiety well enough that I have the energy, health and resources to meet whatever life asks of me. It's about knowing what's genuinely within my control and letting the rest go. It's about staying present at home and in my relationship, rather than half there while my mind runs somewhere else. It's about living closer to my values, walking the talk rather than just believing it. And it's about being a decent example for my family and community, particularly my son, who is watching far more closely than I sometimes realise. As William James put it, positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force. They draw us forward, energise us, and give us the courage to take on initiatives that would otherwise feel entirely unreasonable.

PERMA+V

For a wellbeing goal to actually have traction, though, I've found it needs to connect to something Martin Seligman calls flourishing. Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, built a framework known as PERMA in his 2011 book Flourishing, to describe wellbeing as more than the absence of illness. It's an attempt to capture what actually constitutes a life worth living. PERMA stands for Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

I've added a sixth element of my own: Vitality. The capacity to live, grow and develop. That exuberant physical and mental vigour that comes from an energetic, engaged life, the creative force behind real growth and change.

Open water swimming, it turns out, delivers on all six, which is probably why it took hold of me so completely. Climbing out of the bay on a winter morning leaves me feeling invigorated and alive in a way few other things do. Watching the sun rise over water I'm about to disappear into brings a genuine sense of joy and gratitude, the kind that's hard to manufacture anywhere else. Once I'm swimming, I drop into flow, tracking my stroke and my breath with curiosity rather than judgement, which has become something close to a daily meditation practice, minus the cushion. The Ray's give me the relationships and the quiet accountability that actually get me out of bed at 5.30am through the depths of winter, when every rational part of my brain is arguing for the doona instead. The whole practice aligns closely with my wellbeing vision, which gives it meaning beyond the swim itself, it lets me "swim" my talk rather than just talk it. Watching my stroke and efficiency improve over the months gives me a real sense of mastery and competence. And maintaining the routine keeps me strong, physically and mentally, prioritising my health and genuinely increasing my zest for living. That last one, vitality, might be the element I feel most acutely, particularly on the mornings I least want to get in.

But having a BHAG that aligns with your values is only the first step. The next is far less glamorous: turning intention into a plan that actually fits inside a real life, with its constraints of time, energy, competing priorities and current ability. It's one thing to declare you'll swim the RIP in winter. It's another thing entirely to build a plan around a full-time job, a family and a body that isn't twenty-five anymore. Fortunately, over the previous fifteen months I'd built a rhythm around swimming with The Ray's, and had already survived one winter without a wetsuit. By summer I could swim 4km in open water. What remained was building toward 3.8km in twelve degree water, in choppy, unpredictable conditions that don't always cooperate with a training plan.

Around the edges of work and home, the routine settled into a rhythm: two 45-minute swims midweek, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 6.15am, a longer swim of an hour or more on Saturday, and an optional recovery swim on Sunday depending on how my body and energy were tracking. None of it was complicated or particularly clever. It simply had to be consistent. I needed to build my longer swim out toward ninety minutes, somewhere around 3.5 to 4km, while keeping a solid two-pole swim ticking over midweek. The real secret to acclimatising to the cold isn't some clever trick, it's not stopping. Keep the body in the water through winter, without a wetsuit, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, it adapts.

Alongside the swimming itself, I built in the things that support a body carrying that kind of load. A three hour stroke analysis session gave me concrete ways to improve my efficiency in the water. A simple thirty minute strength routine, twice a week, kept me resilient without adding more time pressure to already full days, and was flexible enough to accommodate the odd overuse pattern or niggle that inevitably shows up when you're swimming this much. Regular mobility work and self-myofascial release with a foam roller became part of the weekly rhythm too. And I kept up fortnightly myotherapy and physiotherapy, including dry needling, to stay ahead of anything before it became a genuine problem rather than a minor irritation.

I also kept up my regular sensing through movement lessons, grounded in the Feldenkrais Method, which quietly did more for my stroke than almost anything else on the list. Exploring rotation and length on the floor, in slow, small, deliberate movements, taught my nervous system how those same qualities show up in the glide, catch and rotate phase of a stroke. It's a strange thing to say, but some of my biggest improvements in the water happened lying almost still on a mat, doing micro movements with focused attention . Ease on land became ease in the water.

The physical preparation was really only half the challenge. The other half, and arguably the harder one, was learning how to stay equanimous across four kilometres of cold, moving water, alone with my thoughts in the swell.

Climbing Mt Rosea Grampians National Park

I've always been drawn to the relationship between body, mind and stress, an interest that first took hold through rock climbing and mountaineering years earlier. Climbing is an exquisite dance with the fight-and-flight response. Fear of falling is one of the earliest anxiety patterns we develop as infants, and for most of us it never fully leaves, it's wired in at a level well below conscious thought. What changes with exposure is our capacity to manage that response rather than be run by it. On the rock, I learned to stay grounded in the present while still visualising the next few moves ahead, holding faith in the process even when fear was loud and immediate. It wasn't that the fear disappeared. It was learning to keep moving anyway. Learning to regulate breath under pressure turned out to matter just as much in the water as it ever did on a cliff face, decades later.

This is where the nervous system work really pays off. Attending to breath and sensation helps the prefrontal cortex take charge over the amygdala and the limbic system, gradually rewiring the body to be more resilient under pressure rather than more reactive. Every swim through cold, swell or current became another rep in that training, exposure that built genuine tolerance rather than mere endurance. The cyclical rhythm of glide, kick and breath became its own centring practice, a way of staying anchored in process rather than outcome. These are skills of self-regulation, and they matter well beyond the water. They're what allow us to take considered action when faced with adversity, rather than simply react to it.

It's worth remembering, through all of this, that it's the journey that matters, not just the finish line. If we're always fixed on some future event, we lose the present experience entirely, which rather defeats the purpose of setting out in the first place. Goal pursuit gives structure and meaning to our lives, but only when it sits inside a larger vision, connected to PERMA+V rather than floating free of it. Coaches call this the progress principle: it's the "pursuit" of goals that counts, not just their achievement. As we work toward something meaningful, we tend to feel genuine positive emotion simply from tracking that we're moving in a valued direction. Once we achieve the goal, there's often a positive emotion too, but it tends to be brief by comparison, gone almost as soon as it arrives. While we strive, we're often happier than we realise. Once we arrive, we can sometimes feel a strange kind of letdown, wondering what exactly we were chasing all along.

Looking back, my BHAG RIP crossing didn't just make me a more confident swimmer, though it certainly did that. It kept me showing up when the weather turned and every excuse in the book presented itself at 5.30am. It connected me more deeply with a group of dads from my son's school, more than small talk at the school gate ever could. We experienced a genuinely shared journey together, stunning sunrises, still mornings and turbulent ones, an occasional dolphin sighting that made the whole thing feel briefly magical, and the particular exhilaration of walking out of freezing water on a winter's morning feeling entirely, unmistakably alive.

As Shakespeare wrote, "Things won are done... Joy's soul lies in the doing."

Ray's Training Day Images

I would like to thank Grant Siedle from Rip swim for running such a professional and safe event. The RIP is a notorious stretch of water with extreme currents and other hazards. The rock shelf drops from 3m to over 100m, creating unusual water behaviour, especially as the tides shift. On the day each swim group was supported with a Kayak. Also, two assisting jet skis, a speed boat and the large charter vessel that took all participants to the starting position at Point Nepean. Without this safety crew the swim would not have been possible.

I want to acknowledge KD our groups fastest and strongest swimmer for "holding the defensive line". His selfless swim assuring a successful crossing for all of our group. And finally a shout out to the Ray's community, inspiring me to enter the water at 6.15am rain, hail or shine.

Before the 2026 RIP winter swim, less than 100 individuals had made the crossing without a wetsuit. We joined that select group.

Event Day Images

Thanks to the Ray's community for shared experience and imagery .J