I Won 11 World Titles Because They Said I Couldn't: Anna Hemmings MBE | E65

all of that stuff prevents us from being at our best we can only be truly great at what we do if we believe without doubt that my guest today is an 11 time european world champion in her field anna hemmings she has a remarkable story not only is she this incredible elite athlete not only did she get to the olympics twice but she's undergone some of the most incredible mind-bending adversity to get there she's now a coach she's now an entrepreneur she's now an incredible businesswoman and she has a remarkable story to tell you she's also a mother and a wife and all of these things and she's she's really incredibly self-analystical and self-aware and as her journey unfolded and as she rose to the top of her career she got news which all athletes must consider to be the worst news in the world i'm so excited for you to listen to this conversation you're going to get a tremendous amount of value and i'll be honest as a host you ask the questions but in this conversation i had more realizations than pretty much any conversation i've had with a guest before without further ado you can see i'm excited my name is stephen bartlett and this is the diver ceo i hope nobody is listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] kayaking it's um it's not this the type of sport that a child would typically dream of getting into so i guess my first question to you is you became a world champion in kayaking you reached the very sort of peak of your your your career in that sport how did you get into kayaking yeah you're absolutely right it wasn't something i was going mom mom please don't be kayaking um i did lots of different sports as a child and i loved sport my mum was always trying to get my brother and i partly because we enjoyed sport but sometimes just you know summer holidays going to a week of tennis camp do a week of basketball week of this and it was just something that we tried i loved being on the river you know the thames in the summer is gorgeous right you know it's pretty miserable right now um but in the summer it's lovely but also the club was competitive it was it was elm bridge canoe club and it was probably one of the best clubs in the country at the time so this is late 80s and and they were all about racing they were all about competing they were all about you know working your way up to the national championships getting on the great britain team going to the world championships making the olympics that was their mission it was to produce racing athletes and that played into my competitive nature really well so i think it was one i love the you know the nature of the sport but also i'd stumbled on a place where i could be competitive i could race i could um i had access to these brilliant coaches i mean as time went on i was there with at my club there were people who were going off to the olympic games who were going off to seoul um olympic games then four years later they going off to barcelona and so i was surrounded by people who were going to world championships achieving great things and making me realize that actually this is this is possible so i've got two questions there the first is what age were you at this point so well when i first stepped into the kayak that first summer i was just under nine years old and and i can't say that at that age i was going by first day in the kayak i'm going to go to olympics it wasn't that and it probably wasn't until the following summer that i actually really started to train and go regularly and really get into it so you you said there as well about you were surrounded by people that had these big ambitions that i'm guessing you probably never even considered and i think for i think that's such a valuable but also interesting lesson about like the company people keep generally because i can imagine that if you were in a different kayak school surrounded by different people that didn't have that level of aspiration you may be and this is a presumption you maybe wouldn't have believed that it was possible for you is that right um so i yes i agree um i also had discovered the olympics probably around that time and was inspired by the olympics and i do recall from that young age thinking just the olympics is just this amazing event so i think really early on i had a dream about the olympics um and i didn't know what sport that would be i you said you had a dream did you see yourself actually getting there in a sport someday yes really yeah i did i i did watch the olympics on television um i recall los angeles i definitely recall watching um seoul and really being into that so well you know by seoul i'm like 12 years old i guess um watching thinking i want to be an olympian i want to be in that event one day and then and then kayaking came along and and you're right it because of those people it didn't feel like because i guess probably when you're watching it on tv it's like oh this is this thing that other people do and it's far away and how do you ever yes we'd all love to be in the olympics moment not everyone but you know but how realistic is that and then i stumble upon this sport and this club and these young athletes are going turning up training they're just like normal people to me but if they can do it and these normal people who just work really hard can get there then why can't i i'm so fascinated by it and you probably saw me being very inquisitive because i'm in my head i'm trying to understand how um what the factors were that came together that took you to the olympics and like i think in all of our journeys we can um we can attribute some level of like coincidence and luck to various stages and i think one of the moments of like luck from what you've said is like being around the right people to some degree because um yeah i've just i think especially lately in my life i've really been able to look back and say you know what if i if i hung around with a different group of people if i didn't have you know mum that was like this or i didn't have those five friends um i probably wouldn't have uh believed that like that as you i find it really interesting you say the word normal people because i think we all view ourselves especially when we're younger it's like normal people and we think that norm when you look at the tv as you say like you don't think normal people can do that stuff on there and at some point someone like bridged the gap and was like oh by the way normal people do that and i think that's a moment that i had in my life which i found really interesting from what you've described there there's like the thing where the like the third wall shatters and you realize that all of your icons and like you know the people you love are also just like we're just like you yeah i think that's super um inspiring so we've talked a little bit about circumstance and like the the luck fortune part of it and being in the right place at the right time but also within everybody's journey there is a lot of intention there's a lot of like often discipline i imagine what what are the things about you that maybe the few defining things that maybe other people don't don't have i always have to be careful with this question because no one wants to blow their own trumpet but i'm like why you like why are you not someone else we've talked about circumstance but what are the things that you within your character got you there versus everyone else who might have quit or not tried as hard it wasn't as competitive or whatever that's difficult um i definitely worked hard um and lots of people work hard right and i worked really really hard and i think i think one thing that made me even more determined was that so as i mentioned already when people see a think of a kayaker they often think of someone quite tall yeah they often think of aurora right and and they're different sports but most people think roar and they think super tall big and and i am a little bit small um not typically the typical size for a kayaker so generally a little bit taller um broader shoulder i'm five six six um and i was i was told regularly too small um one of my coach actually um the club coach he was also the great britain team coach came up to me at a certain point um when i was really into the sport and said i just don't think you're ever going to be big enough or strong enough to ever be a great kayaker knowing that i was really wanting to be a great kayaker and but also knowing that i did some other sports and was kind of going maybe you should go and do those because i know you i just don't want you to um put all your heart into this and not succeed how did that feel devastating right this is the sport that i'm falling and fallen in love with um that i'm this is probably i'm about 12 years old so at this stage i am training quite regularly i've already been to the national championships i've got my sights set on being in the great britain junior team devastating but i think because of that i i just went well i'm just going to keep going i'm going to keep trying i don't care what you've said i don't care you know this is what i want to do um i'm going to give it a go and i love it and i think i'm doing okay at it right now and i'm just gonna keep trying what that did for me was made me made me work harder to prove that actually because i was told specifically you're not big enough you're not strong enough and yeah i can't change my height but i can become stronger and when i was at the peak of my career i was the strongest girl in the gym in the great britain team i've got to admit i saw the photos i was bench pressing 100 kilos yeah you were strong and so and i i was determined that no one's going to tell me i'm not strong enough because i i can't change how tall i am but i can change how strong i am why did it matter though why did it matter to be successful to you at this good question because a lot of i think about that moment where someone tells you you're going to fail whatever we've all had that moment i think every successful person's had that moment and people typically google one of two ways they'll either go forget this then you know chuck it in or whatever um or they'll have the adverse effect i almost don't know anybody that sits in the middle you either get really in you get some kind of insecurity which takes you either one way which either means that i'm going to triple down and become obsessive or i'm gonna avoid um avoid this at all costs and i tend i tend to think that people who this really really really intrinsically matters to for whatever reason are the ones that go the positive way and use it as motivation yeah definitely i'm i loved winning um why i love the i love the joy of i loved i i loved winning but i also loved improvement and i loved it getting better quite often i was told so they're in kayaking there's singles doubles fours k1 k2 k4 and i was always told you know not big enough not strong enough but also definitely not big enough or strong enough to be in a k4 definitely not big enough to be in any of the crew boats k2 k4 you need to be big and strong for those boats and i probably shouldn't say this but they they used to it felt to me defined big and strong as fat and if you were so i was skin and bones i was really skinny and so i didn't look strong but they thought someone who looked chunky had a big backside was strong okay and i'm like no that that just because they're big doesn't mean they're going to be faster than they're going to be more valuable in that boat than me so do you think you're like underestimated unfairly yeah i do and and that so winning world championships in a k2 getting to olympic games in a doubles was very satisfying for me um whenever i was able to prove that actually you don't have to be what you're describing as this kind of shape um that's not what makes someone fast and useful in a kayak in a double kayak or in a four so that used to annoy me i saw you talk about uh one of the things mentioned when i was doing a little bit of research on you is this idea of like healthy conflict in teams could you explain because i've never heard of the term i could imagine i could guess what it means but i'd love you to explain what healthy con conflict is in terms of teams and so in a team um it starts with trust if we don't have trust in a team then we can't have healthy conflict and healthy conflict is when we healthy debate so this is about being able to know that all of the people in the team have the same objective the same um we're all gonna got the same goal we're trying to achieve the same thing and you put forward an idea and you and and i i disagree with that idea but if we don't have trust in the team and you're the boss then i'm not going to put my hand up and say i disagree i don't think we should do it like that i think we should do it like this i think that this is the way we should go i think we need to go down this route we won't have that argument and an argument debate conflict whatever you want to call it if there's not enough trust in the team if you think that you're going to be shot down if you think you're not going to be listened to um and then the problem with that is that we then walk out of the room and you've probably been in meetings right where people all sit in the room and they all nod and go yeah brilliant yeah we're all going to do that and then they walk out of the room and they go you got another thing coming you think i'm going to do that and they do that because they haven't had their say they haven't been able to disagree and and back and forth with their ideas and have that debate even if your idea isn't gone with they at least want to feel like i've had my say and i've had my opportunity to put forward my thoughts and my opinion and my suggestion but actually at the end of the day this is the best idea for the team then fine let's go with that but at least i've had my opportunity to speak up and you talk about you know that sounds very sort of analogous to like relationships as well because i think you know like romantic relationships right people get a little bit peeved if they don't feel like they're being heard and had a chance to express themselves and also when they have that when they do express themselves quite often it's perceived as in the name of being right or winning versus in the name of like progress or solving the problem it's like me and you versus each other versus mean universe is the problem right yeah how do you build the trust foundation they're like what's the how do you get a team to trust each other and whatever because if that's the foundation of healthy conflict i'm like how do i you know what can i do to so one of the things that that you can do and this is why you know i work with teams and leaders and it's about vulnerability it's about being um able to be vulnerable with your people with your team um being able to admit weaknesses admit mistakes um it's about being able to say i i don't know the answer i don't know where we're going well i don't know what i don't you know i don't know how to deal with this or i you know just being able to be vulnerable and and that isn't always easy to do but when you start to do it it gives permission to people you know if you we do workshops where we're trying to build trust and people always say you know at the end we might ask them something like um share something about challenge from your childhood and when we when people go around and they share and we say what what made it difficult or hard to do and they say well it made it easier when someone else went first because once you've opened up and you've bared yourself a little bit then i feel oh well he's done it then it's okay and no one judged him and and no one knocked him and and it's like okay well i can do it too and knowing that no one's and when there is that trust then we know that actually i'm not going to be that's not going to be held against me whatever it is that i share it's not going to be hard against me in the future it's not going to be um used and i'm not going to be shot down for it you a lot of this is like about the psychology of how people think and operate and i know that you spent some time working with a psychologist or a sports psychologist when you were rising in your career um i find that super fascinating but i'd love to know what some of the key sort of lessons you learned about high performance or about i guess like self-regulation um from that that psychologist as it relates to becoming a world champion and you know yeah yeah um yeah so i did i worked with a sports psychologist for from the age of 16. oh really yeah so really young and and i think that um was part of and you talk about um you know you asked me earlier what is it that made me a little bit different or why did i succeed when others didn't and i think part of that was um have you heard of growth mindset yes yeah yeah so i think that my i didn't know about that then and neither did you know a lot of people but my mom um was pretty quite growth mindset and and i and instilled that quite a lot in me for example she you know this idea of just constant learning constantly wanting to learn and be better and recognizing that we can be better all the time we can improve um and looking outside for other areas of expertise learning from other sectors and all of that and she was the one that you know it wasn't like i was struggling with my mental strength and confidence or anything it was just what else do we need to do what who else can help us who else can what you know we don't have all the answers we want to learn we've got to learn from everyone and i always encourage clients in the business world you know who who can we constantly be learning from all the time what was the what are they like some of the key things yeah and also what i think what are they trying to do i i guess they're trying to make you the best athlete you can be but what are the things stopping you from being the best athlete you can be ourselves yeah exactly most of the time we are the ones that get in our own way how how do we get in our own way the doubts the the thing the thoughts that we think um the doubt that that seeds um the nerves overcoming us so so becoming so nervous that you become paralyzed almost um choking under pressure focusing on the wrong things not being confident in yourself um yeah so many things that we do fear doubt is a really interesting one there's fears doubt anxiety nerves lack of confidence all of that stuff prevents us from being at our best and that essentially is what was one of the one of the big parts of what a sports psychologist is helping you to do when an athlete when you line up and there's nine of you on the start line at the olympic games all of them all of those athletes were trained hard they're all in amazing shape they're all super fit they're all you know strong they're you know physically there's not a huge amount of difference between those nine you know i think about 100 meter sprint at the olympic games there's not a lot of difference between them what is it that makes one of them win on the day and not often it's often not the strongest fastest fittest who wins on the day it's the one who's the strongest up here and i really believe that that this is often what stops people from fulfilling their potential and that's why i love helping people with noun yeah yeah absolutely their mental game is what stops people from being the best they can be of all the things that we do in our minds you talked about fear doubt anxieties all these kinds of things fear and doubt like lack of self belief not believing that you can or all those things that's probably one of the most common sort of mental games that um holds us back or um limits us from our full potential um how does how does one go about overcoming their own limiting beliefs about themselves like they think okay well no i can't do that everybody thinks they can't do everything it seems these days like i don't know why maybe it's just because of what i do for a living but um i'm just surrounded by an audience of people that have real limiting beliefs and i wonder why but i also wonder how you help them overcome their limiting beliefs big question it's a huge question how do we overcome our limiting beliefs it's actually something that i work on a lot with when i'm coaching clients um identifying beliefs that uh so you know we would start probably with what are some of those limiting beliefs and start to unpick how are those beliefs where how are they serving i wouldn't be interested in necessarily where they've come from i would be interested in how are they serving us right now and how are they not serving us because sometimes there's we're believing them because they're serving us for a purpose they're helping us in some way but often more often than not those beliefs won't be serving us um so starting to unpick that um you know almost like what are the pros and cons of having this belief here um right now that i can't achieve this or that one of my limiting beliefs was that i'm not very good at sales um you know i was i had to i have to you know i run a training consultancy i have to you know find clients and um how you know so what's a more helpful belief um and starting to one pick what would be a better way of seeing this what are my strengths and what would be a new belief that would be serve me better i think at some point in your journey you probably not at one particular moment but gradually i imagine you started to build evidence within yourself that you could be a great kayaker and i imagine that was over a long period of time probably there wasn't one day where you woke up and thought [ __ ] i'm good right yeah exactly and i think um that is a big part of where we get our confidence from is like our past experiences yeah so whenever we do something we we start to build a bank of memories and when we're at the next situation that is similar we can choose to draw on the bank of negative experiences where we cocked it up or we can choose to draw on the bank of positive experiences where we succeeded and we did it really well and the trick is and you know if we if we and if we're not conscious about it chances are we might pick the experience of when we failed and then that's when we start to regurgitate all those thoughts and feelings of embarrassment and anxiety and nerves and and that doesn't help us and that's like that probably would then hinder performance absolutely it perpetuates the you know the doubt and the because you're reminding yourself of all remember last time when you did it you cocked it up and you messed up and you did it then you then [ __ ] it up because you're thinking and then you [ __ ] it up because and we think in images yeah and so when you think of something that you messed up you're seeing yourself doing it right you're imagining it in your mind right here and now and so the trick is to consciously recall the positive experience the past successes and if there's nothing in the bank exactly of that experience there's chances are there's something similar there's always something similar and you know so i would work with clients to identify what are all of the successes that you've had not just in that specific scenario but let's let's look at lots of different successes and then let's pick out what are the what are the attributes that allowed you to achieve those things because quite often someone will go oh well i achieved that but it was because the weather was good on that day or i achieved that because my team my team did it really it wasn't me so it's about starting to unpick actually what role did you play in that success and what are the attributes that allowed you your strengths your attributes that allowed you to achieve that and then we start to build up the bank of successes and the strengths and the attributes which we can transfer into any scenario how much do you think people and this is i don't know why i'm asking this question because it's not quantifiable but like to what extent do you p do you think people underestimate their potential generally oh massively like would you say like over 95 because i think i'd say over i think i'd say people realize what like typically the average person realizes about five percent of their potential and i only real only say this because again like you said i'm was very normal kid from very my parents bankrupt like we i dropped out i got kicked out of school poor grades everything but this one thing i had and i always say like the one thing i had was i genuinely believed that i was gonna be where i am today just for no without a ton of evidence just generally believed and in fact the one of the reasons why i believed it was but not because i had any bank of successes yet but i had a little bit but it was actually contrasting me to my peers when i was 14 and thinking i think that i have skills they don't and i think that if these are the people that become adults then i will have i will always have that advantage um so that was my way of like and so when i like cocked up my grades and gcse and when school starts with that narrative that okay well you got an e so you're gonna be in have an e life you're gonna be broke and unhappy like no you're wrong like um so i get my mother you were you were gathering evident you were looking at your strengths which is part of the puzzle right you may not have had the experiences and the evidence of the achievements and the certificates and all of that but you what's more valuable is what you had is the non-tangible stuff yeah because if we go through life only assessing our success on the tangible stuff yeah then our confidence our self-belief actually in their two different things will be quite fragile oh yeah i can i can see that because you're always assessing yourself against a trophy a trophy or society because you're compared to oh i got this award against all of these other people and and and i won this trophy and i went past this grade and i and it's always against somebody else and a society rather than looking at the intangible attributes that allowed you to achieve those successes because that's what isn't measurable against society and is transferable to other domains and this is the and you're completely right and i've never actually thought about it that way before because i've always tried to figure out why at 14 i was convinced that i would be successful and 18 i wrote my diary i'm going to have a range of sport before that i'm 25 i'm gonna be a millionaire from 25 achieved all of those things just knew i would but it was pure as you said it was purely based on and it's almost a strength audit or skills order versus other people that i knew and i thought oh those skills are really good skills and they'll take you far but school is about tangibles like and i'd say a grade is a tangible yeah so school says okay you got a an e so unfortunately like it creates the impression from all angles you're gonna be poor like and you're not going to be that successful but timmy over there who's got an a he's really going to kill it as a surgeon you know and and i think so how you make it out alive out of that system and still with your you know self-esteem and self-belief intact is remarkable what i and i think that what you had is is better than the certificate yeah yeah because yeah but but what it does is it allows you to go this is intrinsic in me no one can take it no one can take that away and my self-worth isn't based on a certificate and a trophy and an award how do you give people that well so you work on identifying those strengths what are those strengths we do this all the time we work with clients on what are those strengths and where's the evidence of those strengths and when they start to see the evidence of those strengths well you know so i'm i i'm working with a client and you know so one of your strengths is being an authentic leader um one of your strengths is building relationships where's the evidence of that look at all these people what do you do about weaknesses though so would you highlight their weaknesses i think it's important to highlight both i think it's more important to work on exploiting your strengths and i would um so we do a lot of diagnostics we use behavioral profiling and all of that kind of stuff and all of that will bring up both and i think it's important to really be aware of your areas of development but ultimately if i'm sat on the start line of the world championships and i'm focused on my weaknesses and all the things i need to avoid my confidence is fragile yeah chances of performing on best slim and so in that moment i absolutely need to have on the tips of my fingers what my strengths are and i need to know them and i need to be able to exploit them and i think the more you work on those the better what do you think about this idea of like labeling yourself in your line of work and the the broader labels we give ourselves even if it's just like bad salesmen you talked about that being one of your like previous little limiting beliefs or labels um i think they're not helpful and i think it's really important that we're aware of those labels that we're giving ourselves and the awareness is the first step right we can't change it if we don't notice it so we need to notice the the label in the first place and then it's a bit you know it's like it's a limiting belief really isn't it um and so is that label serving me is it helping me achieve my end goal it feels like it sometimes because it's making me fit in and it's giving me comfort so i see this a lot with people that will say i am a in my case i'm just gonna use my case i'm a social media ceo and i so i've been a social media ceo for 10 years it gives me some kind of like community to be part of it gives me a sense of identity but at the same time it stops me from being all that i can be and this is one thing i was going over in my book is like now i've left my company it's so tempting to just start another social media business but like there's so much more i can do and so what i'm asking this question cause i'm in the midst of really thinking about it is like how do i just resist my labels and be a [ __ ] dj i'm doing i'm doing this big theatrical show and working in biotech and um i don't know i just this idea of like liberating yourself from your own labels has been super relevant to me um i think that um it becomes your identity is a bigger part of the problem you know it's like when an athlete retires from sport it took me and it still takes me i catch myself saying you know i'm an athlete i'm not a business person and i go oh i um you know i don't have a background in business yeah i've been running a business for 11 years and i was a professional athlete for 15 years so it's almost this you know i have almost the same amount of experience in business as i do in in sport yeah i labeled myself for so long and i be that became my identity and your identity is ceo of a social media company and so that's who i am and it's hard to let go of that because it's part of who i am yeah and it's comfortable right and you know you know who that person is what the behavior of that person's like and and you're stepping into a new role that what does this new person look like how rewarding has that been for you to kind of i guess reinvent yourself from being an athlete to now being an entrepreneur and a business person was it worth it that's what i'm saying was it worth it to step out of that label yeah totally and and we should all have multiple careers um and i think as time you know as we're living longer and longer we all will have multiple careers and i think we need to find the courage to step into new careers all the time and reinvent and and just recognize that there's so many skills that we can transfer from that other career label identity and bring into the next one and that's what will allow us to succeed into the next one and recognizing that we're never going to grow unless we step out of that comfort zone and yeah get a little bit scared of who this new person could be or would be or should be and we'll find out and that's the exciting thing is we're going to find out how do you for some people that's terrifying yeah the thought of like throwing themselves into that place of uncertainty that they have to travel through before they get to their new self how do you get someone to come willingly into uncertainty to leave that job or to you know take on that promotion or to pivot in their career when they're scared of the unknown or you know it's like well then i would think about what i would think about rather than what i'm afraid of i'm thinking about what i'm excited about and so rather than i'm afraid of what i'm going to leave behind or i'm afraid of what might happen i'm more about what could happen and when we focus on what we want and what we could have and you know it's a it's optimism isn't it it's about what's possible and what could i achieve you know and you asked me earlier about you know some of the things about sports psychology and visualization was one was a massive technique really that i learned from my sports psychologist and employed and still use all the time and i think when you can start to visualize what that new role person identity could be and when you bring it to life with all of your senses and see it really vividly then that's exciting and what what could i achieve and what could this look like and and the power of visualization is that your mind does when it's when you see it really vividly your mind doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined experience and a real life experience what's your process for visualization and now is it something that you do actively you set time aside and do it or is it just something that you naturally now do when you're pursuing a goal so a little bit of both as an athlete it was definitely something that i would sit down usually i'd be lying on my bed i would have done some relaxation because the more we clear our mind and relax the easier it is to visualize and to see really clearly and so i would it would be a conscious right i'm gonna spend the next 15 minutes or even two minutes or five minutes or whatever time i had visualizing my next race and seeing myself execute that race plan as perfectly as i can and in exactly the right way and i would visualize everything from um if it was the olympic discipline and we've got nine boats on a start line i'm seeing my i don't know which lane i'm gonna be in when it comes to race day so i'm seeing myself racing every lane i'm seeing myself with with the headwind with a tailwind with it raining i'm seeing myself [ __ ] up the start because that might happen but then i just going to recover from it and i'm going to see myself recover and i'm going to see myself win from behind i'm going to see myself win from the front i'm going to see imagine you know they'll start being delayed or it's a full start you know all these eventualities so that when it comes to the event i'm prepared and it can just all unfold and i'm not phased by anything that happens but but most importantly i've seen it happen the way i want it to happen and then i believe that it can happen and what visualization also does is when we when we're visualizing a goal for example it starts to activate the subconscious to generate creative ideas about how we can achieve our goal it's it's it's my i don't know how it works and why it works but it's mind-blowing and it does work and and it starts to um get your brain to perceive and recognize the different um resources that you need to achieve your goal it's like the law of attraction and it starts to activate that in your life and bring in the people the resources the environment the circumstances that you need to achieve your goal and so now what do i do i probably i do spend some time consciously going like i'm just going to spend two or three minutes visualizing my goal i'm seeing it happen i'm seeing it realize um but then other times i'm probably just you know driving in my car and subconsciously you know like daydreaming almost but i think the the conscious right i'm gonna visualize now is really powerful because then you start to really it starts to ingrain in the subconscious so the law of attraction stuff i think sometimes it can take people one of two ways because i do believe in visualization my visualizations over the years have been very like the daydreaming stuff but then also when i was like really really really broke and living in moscow in like a boarded up house i would frequently look at stuff that in the future i wanted so i'd look at these like mansion houses and whatever and that was me kind of just um setting my i don't know trying to peer into my future life the bit that i think sometimes gets lost when we talk about like the law of attraction it's almost akin to like when you set off in the morning you put your satin have him and you say this is where i want to go i want to go test go but then if you don't like put the key in and put your foot down you're just going to be sat in your garage and but there's something about knowing where you want to go and as you say like almost programming your brain to trick your brain to think to completely be convinced that you will get there that i then that from my experience then makes you take actions in that direction so like i'm sure you then you visualize yourself as a world champion but then you're like you go in the gym and you you train like a world champion because you that's where you that's your destination and the the the the opposite is also true like if you visualize yourself not being world champion what's the point you know you know um so my my real question here is about all of the actions and the discipline it takes especially as an athlete to get you from where you are to that visualized destination i'm really keen to hear about like the discipline the consistency because you're in a physical very very physical endurance race and you know it's like i think muhammad ali said like it's one in the gym it's one in training a lot of it and we all struggle with that we all struggle with like showing up on monday when it's raining so like what's the what's the key there so i think i think you're absolutely right you know when we visualize it it gives us the motivation to believe that it can happen yeah yeah and that's that's at the core of it because if we don't believe it can happen then what's the point and so yes we absolutely have to take action but we need the motivation to take action i can't say that you know 100 of the days that i was training i was oh yeah i can't wait to get out there go training it's pretty freezing outside it's like the middle of winter on the water and the river thames and it's like ice um yeah that wasn't appealing every day luckily the funding came in and we got to go travel and train in warmer climates in florida and wherever else um but yes there's this you know goal that's the world championships it's the olympic games it's you know those big dream goals that are highly motivating but on those day every single day i'd be lying if you you know if you could say that goal in four years time is what got me out of bed on that rainy freezing cold you know january morning but isn't that the answer then like it was just take like do today well yeah so it's but but also um i do a lot of work around intrinsic motivation and understanding what drives us and and we're all we all have different drivers and unsurprisingly one of my drivers is a sense of achievement and so my driver wasn't necessarily on that particular day oh i've got a train really hard because i want to win the world championships in two years time my driver was probably more that my coach has set targets every month that throughout the winter for you know for five months of the winter we would have targets every month in the gym there would be certain exercises in the gym that we've got to hit um we would do tests on we would do time trials on running in swimming and on the water um so as part of our cardiovascular training so and for me that was really um i loved hitting those targets basically that monthly right so if i do and i know that if i do this training today then i'm going to get better and i've got a test on the weekend and i want to hit that target i want to want to smash the target actually because yeah then there's a good chance i'm going to win the world championship it's not just hitting the targets i need to smash the targets and so that sense of achievement for me was a big driver for other people in my team it might have been and on actually on other days it might have been actually i want to get out and go train because i want to see my teammates because we have a laugh and there's banter and it's fun and i enjoy the connection and the sense of that being part of a team and the community and and all of that and so it's this the affiliation that's driving me on some days and but for others you know i can think of some of the girls in my team actually a sense of recognition was a big driver so needing that you know ah today you know you worked really hard you've you know you really put everything into that session you know hearing that from the coach or you know look how far you've come or look what you've you know the progress you've made or so everyone and so when a coach can tap into that knowing what is it that's going to get you out of bed today that's when we start to get the best out of people or the best out of ourselves and so you know when i work with with leaders it's about what motivates and drives me intrinsically not just the carrot and the paste pay slip and the promotion and you know and and all of that that's the external stuff which isn't very sustainable we need to know what drives us in as individuals but also what drives our team and tap into both of those and start to ask what what is it that am i getting that every day and if i'm not how can i get that from work what is it that i need to get and also really interesting you know if you're a leader of a business and you're working with a team are my drivers influencing how i operate with others in my team you know so if my driver is a sense of achievement but your driver is to make a meaningful contribution and i'm pushing you guys no we need to we need to we need to win this and we need to get the next pitch and and you're like no i just want to really help these people i'm pushing my driver onto you and that's not working for you so it's really important to be aware of what my driver is and know that it's not the same as yours chances are yeah that's a good that's a really good point and i think i've probably as someone that probably values a sense of achievement and forward motion and progress above all else at times when i'm trying to motivate people especially like friends i'm trying to sell them on the value of achievement when they're probably just not asked about a particular thing i don't need to win yeah i just want to doesn't matter to me i i want to fill ownership of this piece of work yeah actually that's what's really important to me and how do you find out what someone's driver driver drivers or motivations or intrinsic motivations are is there is there a system or like a test or yeah so i the work um there's some brilliant work from um a chat called dean spitzer and he talks about super motivation and this idea that there isn't you know we there's intrinsic and there's extra extrinsic motivation so what we use a diagnostic actually when i work with clients and it will identify it forces you to to pick because you know we all want you know maybe some recognition or some achievement or to feel like we're making a contribution or to be with people all of this but it really forces you to identify what really is your big driver um so yeah so i use that but i mean i think when you talk to people you can start to you know the more you get to know someone and you ask them questions and you see the way they operate and and you see them light up when they get certain feedback or when they're doing certain pieces of work so we can start to get a feel for that just when we get to know people i you when you know i asked you there about the that like discipline and consistency and what gets you up every day on like a rainy tuesday or whatever and it was interesting that um you kind of like shortened your horizon or your skirt like people i think people typically think they they want to get to the top of the mountain so they think okay um let's make a plan to get to the top of the mountain but you were so focused on these like short-term shorter goals which meant that i guess your progress sort of almost like invisibly compounds um to get you to the top of the mountain so instead of like we want to get to staircase number a thousand we're like let's get 10 let's do 10 stairs today and then 10 stairs tomorrow and 10 starts and 10 sets and by the time you know it you're at the top of the mountain right yeah well literally i i am four years ago i climbed um mount tubcall of course you did as you do and um i we went with there was probably 10 of us in the group one of them one of the girls that was on the group was a friend of mine and she had i don't know why she joined the group but she had a fear of heights oh god um and we're climbing a mountain and it was fine for the first day and a half because it's just like a windy road the morning of the summit it's literally we're going up we feel like we're going up a steep mountain and you're and there's boulders and and she literally cannot she's so scared of heights and i can't do i can't do it and eventually i was like julia you just need to focus she what her biggest fear actually was also getting down okay um looking down and thinking how i might get but how the heck am i going to get back down because that looks really scary and it's slippery and there's there's screen so the ground is loose and i'm like don't even think about that right now all you need to do is take one step at a time one meter at a time that's all i want you to focus on and one meter and one meter and one and we'll figure out the rest and you might not even get to the top who knows you might you might not we might start but just do one meter at a time and then we'll figure out the down bit and we'll take it one step at a time on the way down because that's all we can do right in that moment is take one step at a time and it's the same whether it's a goal to achieve you know x turnover in a business or this many sales or whatever the business is or whatever walk of life yes we need to know the end goal but actually we just need to focus on the process because the summit looks scary but one meter doesn't look scary exactly and if you just do one meter at a time and also you know or whether it's the fear or oh my god it's so far away we've got another four hours to go it might be you know whatever it is well actually let's just do the next five minutes and let's see if that is feasible because it probably is right can i do one yeah can you take this next step yeah i can definitely take that next step okay can you take the next one can i take the next one and that feels really feasible you mentioned earlier getting at the very beginning of this conversation getting news i think when you were about 24 25 that you had an illness called chronic fatigue syndrome i'm now going to be incredibly naive and narrow-minded when i when you read chronic fatigue syndrome you think tiredness that's what you think right but um but i know it's a lot more crippling than that and i know that it's a lot more devastating that especially for an athlete um talk me through finding out you had this this this disorder but also what it meant for your career and how it changed things heal this week tons of you hundreds of you have tagged me on instagram and on linkedin and on facebook as well with your heel pictures some of you are trying heal for the first time and it's so wonderful to see because as you know i'm a very big advocate for not only because they sponsor this podcast but because i've used fuel for the last three and a half years to to make myself nutritionally complete at times when my career put a lot of pressure on me to to speak on stage or to travel to do business so i'm a huge advocate of fuel um for you guys watching this podcast on youtube you'll remember last week that i said i was gonna take off my top um and show you the results that i've seen for you what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do two things the first thing is i'm gonna show you my before and after from march until about september time right so here's my before and after and also i mentioned in a previous episode that i've got a friend who's been a hueligan for the last i think about the last two years as well um he was a friend that really struggled with food um and had a what one would class as an eating disorder and he went from being a little bit chunky to having six pack abs i'm also going to take his top off so you guys can see that if you're looking at your diet and seeing that you're a little bit nutritionally deficient in any way and you do want to give it a try let me know how you get on dm me on instagram tag me on instagram so i can share the photo but let me know how you get on i'm gonna tell you a secret for the past five years while building social change into a 700 person global social media powerhouse i've been using a service that i've never really mentioned some of you might know that service it's called fiverr f-i-v-e-r-r it's my little secret if i've ever had a project where i've needed affordable skilled freelancers to help me whether it's building a social media application that made my company three million pounds or just a video i needed editing or help making a logo or making a website i've used fiverr now that my secret's out the bag here's what i'm gonna do for you if there's a freelance service you need or a project you need help with a logo a website a voiceover a video you need made anything at all go to fiverr.com ceo i'll put the link in the description that's fiverr.com ceo message me the service you want from the website and every single week i'll personally send you the credit to your fiverr account so that you can get that project done thank you to fiverr for the sponsorship and for supporting entrepreneurs and freelancers around the world i'm looking forward to all of your messages talk me through finding out you had this this this disorder but also what it meant for your career and how it changed things so yeah i like you say was 25 26 when i was uh diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and yes it's more than just fatigue um it's not just i'm tired today it's being devoid of energy exhausted almost on a permanent basis it also for me included muscle pain to the point where the my muscles were sorry muscle ache to the point where it was painful to the point where i couldn't stand in the shower and hold my hands up here to wash my hair for more than 10 seconds because it was too painful um some people have symptoms i didn't get this so much but sort of you know like can't concentrate can't focus brain fog um some people are actually bedridden um some people are actually in a wheelchair um luckily i wasn't as bad as that but i was bad to the point where yeah i couldn't i i couldn't be in my kayak paddling for more than 10 minutes at a very light gentle walk type pace having gone from winning world championships for two and a half hours at a very high pace to can't get my hands to hold my hands up here i i was literally two months earlier able to rattle off 100 press-ups in one go and then can't hold my hands up here for more than 10 seconds so that's the that's the physical element and that's only the physical element but the mental and emotional battle was just as challenging because you can't you can't see it so it's not you know i i was got frustrated to the point where i actually wished that my skin was covered in spots so that people could see that there was something wrong with me and could understand that i was going through something that i was in pain that i was you know unwell but i looked fine so i got diagnosed with the honest in 2003 beginning of the season it was like april and then so following year is coming up to the olympics 2004 some training for the olympics or wanting to be training so six months later it was only six months later that they actually diagnosed it because it takes six months for them to eliminate everything else and go oh this is fatigue that's been going on for more than six months therefore you have chronic fatigue syndrome and i re i went off to florida um and the sports team doctor was saying right you need to do this graded return to exercise they think they originally and they still thought it was overtraining that's the immediate assumption right athletes tired muscle ache must be over trained um so they diagnose you they um offered me this program of right gently build up your return to sport um so you start with 10 minutes at a heart rate of 115 i can't remember and then 15 minutes at 115 and then 20 minutes and 30 minutes and when you can get to 40 minutes then we can go up to 120 heart rate and so on and so on and so i went out like my training group and my coach were all in florida so i went out to florida to train and and i just couldn't get past 20 minutes um and so i went out to i went to see a doctor in florida and the doctor he ran some blood tests and basically like i still looked like an athlete i'm still pretty muscly i'm fair i'm lean i'm in florida i've got a tan and he basically looked at me and said well we've run all the blood tests there's nothing coming up nothing there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with you you look really fit and well i think you're fine and so that just this frustration of i can't see it and therefore there must be nothing wrong you know it's just mental health right you know people who are suffering with depression or anxiety or whatever it is we can't see it and so we don't know it and we don't understand it and so the mental and emotional battle was really challenging and um even people in my sport not understanding what's wrong with anna oh she she can't cope with it anymore or she's too lazy to train or whatever they're saying all these things and and that's hard um how did it make you feel so in the beginning um frustrated devastated confused um sad lonely so many different things and frustrated because also we didn't really know what it was and the doctors are saying it's overtraining and actually when i reflect on the previous two years i'd had episodes of fatigue which i now know were episodes of that same illness but that only lasted for two weeks or three weeks or six weeks and i would stop training or i'd really cut back on training and then i'd be able to come back and i'd be fine again and and so i only know that it was i knew in my heart when i went to see the team doctor that one day and i remember it that it wasn't over training because for six months i had been doing less training than everyone else in my group i can't be overtrained i'm doing less than everyone else because we were so conscious of this uh ana's over training that i wasn't i wasn't it was just was not over training and the doctor is like oh you've over trained jesus and that i just and then that was it i didn't train again for 18 months um and i did i did i after working with the sport the team doctor i went to other doctors i tried conventional medicine i tried alternative therapies and and nothing was working and that was the the hardest part as well was that one you can't really tell me what's wrong with me and two you can't tell me how to deal with this and and then you know i went to see one doctor and he said basically there's no cure there's no treatment and you're don't don't don't think you're ever going to get back in a kayak you never you might get back in a kite but you're never going to race at that highest level you won't race again so that was that was a pretty big moment um he said that to you yeah and how is that to him yeah just like this is this is my you know this is my identity this is who i am this is my life this is this is my career i still have ambitions left to fulfill and i don't i don't want something like this to end my career i want to end it on my terms when i choose that i'm done and so yeah that summer watching the olympic games on the telly and athens um it was devastating and but i guess i always believed that i would find a way i was like there has to be a solution to this there has to be a way out um and i i guess that i'm a very optimistic person and a very much a possibility possibilitarian i call it that i don't know if that's a word but believing that it's it's possible yeah that there is a way out there has to be a way out and and i guess i didn't know whether there was but i just had to i had to believe that there was i had to believe that i would get out of this and then i would find a way back and that i would get back to training and racing one day otherwise what what what did i have and not that my life would be over if i couldn't paddle but just that's what that belief i think is what kept me going um in that in that time and and eventually to cut a long story short i did find a treatment for the illness and i did recover and i didn't get back um but it wasn't an easy journey do they before we got into what the treatment was in your recovery do they know what's happening to you like physiologically when you have um that disorder have they do they know what what's causing you um [Music] the problem is is that there are many different schools of thought okay and it depends who you talk to and it depends which doctor um and what clinical or study or what study you read or which one do you believe i believe based on the treatment that i did um which was a treatment called reverse therapy and this was founded by a chap called dr john eaton and back quite it was it was only just um it was quite a new therapy when i did it back in 2005 for um and essentially the symptoms are like alarm bells going off in your body so these symptoms the pain the fatigue the exhaustion that can't focus any of the symptoms that you're experiencing are alarm bells and your body's way of telling you that there are things going on in your life that your body doesn't like whether that be pressures stresses relationships environment emotions all sorts of things that are triggering these symptoms and these alarm bells and basically if you don't listen to the alarm bells they'll get louder and louder and louder to the point where eventually they just go right done you're just not going to move now you're not going to until you listen up how how how loud do i need to get before you're going to listen and for me it was to the point where i couldn't train when i can't train i'm going to listen up because now it's really bad and now i need to pay attention and so um i i'm i'm not particularly articulate explaining what the physiologic what's going on physiologically but that's that's my interpretation of what how the symptoms arrive and how you deal and and then what i did so that the the treatment that i did is about identifying what are those triggers what are those things that um that your body and mind are saying i don't like what were they and so for me um non-expression of emotion is one of the most common triggers and that certainly was the case for me to the point where i didn't open up to anyone really i have really close friends i have family i have a sister i'm really close to and of course i you know shared it with them but i cried on my own for sure but i never cried in front of anyone else i didn't really express how bad it was in fact to the point where people would ask and you know how are you doing yeah i'm fine i'm fine and i would just block it out to them all the time and that was just making it worse and actually when i started to one of the biggest and most powerful steps that i took was opening up to people to the people closest to me sharing what i was experiencing with them allowing them to see my struggle and my vulnerability and let them help me that's that was a big turning point for me um was being able to just express that emotion and share and open up because par what i was doing was i was isolating myself by not sharing it and that was perpetuating it um and these emotions are worry or pressure that you're experiencing because of the sport or what were these emotions that you were suppressing or well so when not when i was competing or you know before with the in the beginning the emotions were different but in the middle of the illness like not just not sharing it with people not expressing how hard i'm finding this how um tough this is that how sad i am how frustrated i am how just i can't cope anymore kind of emotions those emotions i wasn't even expressing in the middle of the illness you're being tough yeah i'm being poker face anna who has learnt to do this because that's what you do in sport right isn't that isn't that almost like there's a bit of a paradox there that the thing that made you successful was also the thing that kind of undid you to some degree it sounds like well so that composure and resilience yeah so when you're on the competitive arena of sport and you turn up on race day poker face on game face i'm tough whether i've missed the last two weeks because of an injury or for whatever reason you're never going to know that because i'm i'm here today and i'm i'm on fire and you know i'm ready to race um and that's brilliant on the race arena but outside of that not helpful not helpful in so many ways in terms of building relationships in terms of building trust you know we talk about trust earlier um you can't build trust and relationships unless you open up unless you express vulnerability so true i think that's one of the reasons i struggle with my relationships my romantic relationships is because i bring the tough guy thing into my into like my personal life sometimes and um it doesn't ever help and i think the the progress i've made actually in my personal relationships as you've said has been by like admitting more that i'm wrong and like saying how i feel and being like i you know what i mean and that's but that's not conducive with the whole like resilient tough guy business thing that i have to do i don't i don't think they're mutually exclusive it doesn't feel like they are but you're right like they're definitely not mutually exclusive but um they're two different people trying to achieve two different objectives in business there's a sense of like you know you've got to really like stand up for yourself you've got to be ruthless to some degree in some situations especially when you're dealing with teams and there's [ __ ] landing on your desk every day and you're getting horrible horrible news and you have to put on a brave face for your team because you just found out that your whole server's been hacked and they've basically half of them have lost their jobs or the pandemic has just struck and then going like i know what you're saying do you think of certain moments i think i'm thinking one particular moment which i always talk about in this podcast where on the way to work i got this news that we've been hacked and i've got i got 100 or 200 people sat in the office in front of me that are now looking through the window and thinking what's going on and my my need to be composed and optimistic at a time when i probably was panicking a little bit inside i think got us through i think if i'd walked out there and been like listen guys i am [ __ ] it here it might have but in my personal life it's very important to have that intimacy and vulnerability i think there's um a balance actually and i think in business you are if you are able to be a little bit vulnerable and i'm not saying vulnerable to the point where you look really weak but vulnerable to the point where you're honest and you might go do you know what shit's happened and actually i'm a little bit scared but we're going to find a way and i don't know how we're going to figure this out right now and and it's not great and but you know it's about having confidence in who i am and what we do and confident in the people around us and my team and you lot and all of us that we're going to figure this out yeah so there's a balance there between i'm human and yes i'm scared like you because this is [ __ ] and this is a bad situation that we didn't want to happen and let's admit that let's put that on the table and be honest about it because people we build trust with people when we're honest then we show a little bit of vulnerability and humanity and that's how we build relationships because otherwise we're just putting up this tough guy front all the time who doesn't have any feelings right and you can't relate to that can resonate can't connect yeah how do we connect with people whereas actually oh you're just a human being who's scared too and i'm scared and therefore it's okay to be scared but actually i'm scared but we're going to find a way so it's confidence and we're going to figure this out because we we are good at what we do you know our definition when we do our resilient leader workshops is a resilient leader's confidence and has confidence in who they are and what they do and understands their areas of strength and their areas of development and finds a way to bounce back and create opportunities and so if i'm confident in who i am and what i do yeah i can admit that i don't know what to do right now but i know that i have the skills and the resources within me and my people that we're going to figure this out i don't know what that way forward is yet but i know that we're going to find a way what if okay so what if you um and this is me playing devil's advocate what if you don't know that you're gonna find a way so say you're scared you don't think you're gonna find a way and you think it's all over say you've got i don't know 500 employees out there the wait waiting for you in the middle of the pandemic to make us make a statement to the team do you walk out and lie if you within yourself genuinely as the ceo of a company don't you think it's over um because of i don't know the pandemic has just happened and the business has evaporated when you walk out in front of your team surely you've got to just lie to their faces to some degree like you've got i think that you have to believe we always no matter what the situation is we can only be truly great at what we do if we believe without doubt that the future is bright yeah some leaders don't naturally you think of you know just some people don't so by like probably probabilistically there's going to be some leaders that when the pandemic struck thought we are finished and that as we said earlier about like the self-fulfilling mindset will actually probably take them out of business and i just i don't know just because i don't think i've ever been comfortable in my career to tell my team that i'm scared i've i don't think i've ever actually been scared because i am i kind of resist in moments where i probably should be scared i'm so focused on solutions that fear or joy all these other feelings don't really seem to be relevant or useful to me but i don't think i could bring myself to tell the team i was ever scared when i was at social media maybe you don't need to say i'm scared but it might be that you know what yeah this is [ __ ] yeah yeah yeah i could do that and and actually right now i don't i don't know how we're gonna get out of this but i do have confidence in my ability and all of us together as a team that we're gonna find a way the leaders have to lie sometimes i don't i don't i think we need to be honest i think that we need to be transparent and the more we can be transparent and we can be honest in what we do the better relationships we build the better connections the more trust we have in a team and we figure it out together i agree yeah so going back to your i want to know so what exactly did you do in terms of you know um daily to overcome your disorder was it was there you addressed you know you started expressing yourself more was there anything you you had to take or was there you know so there was no medicine there was no pill there was no massage treatment there was nothing like that it purely is a recognition that the mind and the body are connected and therefore i needed to figure out what these triggers are one of so to give you a bit of context so um i leading up to the sydney 2000 olympic games i left the coach that i was working with that had got me to become a world champion but i now wanted to go and race at the olympic games and he was very much a marathon coach and and encouraged me to go find someone who really specializes in sprint racing so i ended up for three years having a coach who was based in another country and i would go and train with them sometimes and then i would come back to the uk and i would train on my own and he would send me the training program we'd speak on the phone he'd email it to me i'd do the training and i would basically train a lot of most days i would turn up to the training do the training and i was motivated enough to be able to push myself really hard to i had no problem with training on my own in the sense that i you know some people can't push themselves hard and i haven't got the motivation to turn up and do that but the problem with that was that i and i didn't realize this at the time i was isolating myself and i think i um so i i wasn't engaged there was my club i was at my club but i would turn up to my club and they'd all go off and train separately and i train on my own and then i'd often turn up at times when they weren't there i wouldn't engage with the british team really much and i was just ice more and more isolating myself and then getting frustrated because i didn't have a coach she was by my side and i thought that all i needed to do was train hard i thought and the reason i stuck with this coach was because he was a great coach and i thought the training program was brilliant and i thought all i need to do is follow a great training program and work really hard and i thought that was enough and actually i didn't i'm not a robot and i needed i needed human connection and i needed emotional support and i needed a place to vent and i needed to be able to show frustration and when the training was hard or when i was exhausted and i had no one to even talk to on the riverside bank you know i'm talking to the ducks you know it's like i had no outlet for my emotions i had no and i didn't even speak up and tell my coach that i was frustrated that he sent me the program only two minutes before i needed to be at the training you know i was going to train and because there's this five hour time difference and and i just was probably quite unhappy but didn't realize because i was so focused on the goal and the end goal and got to train hard and this is what it takes that i was so not in tune with what was going on emotionally and i was at my best when i was training in a group environment with a coach by my side every day supporting me other i'm an extrovert i get my energy from other people and there i was spending my days alone doing this really intense training program on my own that is not conducive to a really good mental and emotional health and so it was really clear that that was not yeah that wasn't sustainable and that was why i had these periods of oh yeah three weeks falling apart and i'd have to stop and um and then when i'd get back to an environment that was i was happy and it was all good and i would train hard and i'd be amazing and i have full of energy and and i and i had my best year and then i would change and the environment change and so my environment and the people around me and my emotional happiness was some of the things that i needed to get a grip on um it's so fascinating that people really underestimate the value of human connection but also the environment we're operating in like hugely i've had a conversation with a friend and he'll be listening to this podcast because he's never ever missed one um he's he was working at my old company's um social chain for many years and he's he's gone freelance and he was talking a little bit about feeling a bit burnt out he came to my house he's saying feel a bit burnt out i'm lacking motivation in the mornings and things like that and when i was a freelancer before i started the company and had 700 people around me all day i just couldn't find the motivation to like go to my laptop and send the emails but the minute i was in that environment where we had this kind of like shared goal and i had feedback and community my motivation was higher than anyone's in the world but i don't think people appreciate enough the the importance of the environment and the community that you're operating in and i think there's a certain thing which people don't talk about which i've talked about this podcast couple of weeks ago which was this idea of like freelance depression and even like you're seeing it with the world now from working remotely having to get up and like now you're realizing what your job actually is because before it could have been like seeing susanna and hearing about her weekend and engaging with the office dogs and this and the sense of community you've kind of conflated them with your tasks at work and now it's just your tasks now you're waking up and on a computer looking at your to-do list and so i think freelance depression and it's almost what you've described there is this like inner lack of fulfillment because you've lost what was a huge part of what made this pleasurable enjoyable but also your so i guess your support network yeah um and that's why you know we talked earlier about motivation and what gets you off in the morning and actually going in to hear about susan's weekend or you know to see your friends and the connection and the buzz from the atmosphere and and that might be what gets you to work not the tasks that i've got to do but actually the people i'm going to hang out with and that environment and we need to understand what is that environment that we thrive in and i think people are realizing that over the last 12 months you know and especially the extroverts have found this really hard and if you live on your own and you're still and you're not able to go into work you're a speaker you speak around the world and stuff and you you love speaking but the minute it becomes just speaking to a laptop over zoom to 100 people you realize that maybe it wasn't just the speaking that i enjoyed right yeah yeah yeah exactly i don't just enjoy hearing my own voice yeah i enjoy telling my story over and over again i i love the connection that i get and the feedback and the you know i can't even hear people laugh at my jokes that i think they're supposed to be funny i don't even know if they landed or not um and you know when you meet the people afterwards and you go and engage with them and how are you going to apply this and what are you going to put into action and and all of that stuff that's that's that's the energy that i get when i go and do my work and that's that's missing right now um and you're getting it a bit but not in the same way and so and i remember actually one of the very first things i did with my sports psychologist he got me to do i think it was like a myers-briggs type assessment identifying what kind of personality type i was and i was a stable extrovert and and i don't know what he ever really did with that information but looking back now that's such useful information so for someone if someone had known that and they could see that i was training every day on my own without support without people to feed off that's where i get my energy of course i was losing energy and tired i wasn't getting your body was sending you a message i'm like i need people to get energy and i'm not surrounded by people that's just one example of one of the triggers but you know so it was about finding out what do i need to thrive it's fascinating uh we had johanna hari who wrote the book called lost connections on this podcast his book is behind me one of my favorite books of all time he's coming back his whole his whole um book is about the real the nine real reasons for anxiety and depression and to kind of conclude it in in a very sort of narrow way he talks about these feelings we get of loneliness and lack of motivation and anxiety and depression when you look at all the studies and he was someone that was depressed and given the pills and you know they said oh you're broken chemical imbalance when you look at the studies it's it's almost indisputable that much of it these days is because of social factors and our lack of human connection they've got examples where they've given a guy in uruguay goat who was depressed and because he's got now that connection with an animal he's his depression his symptoms of depression almost evaporated but the lives we live in 2021 between four white walls if we want food we press an app if we want you know to see our parents it's through a piece of glass and living alone in these industrialized cities it's actually completely against our innate human programming and he says one of the things he says which i've written in my book as well is about how these feelings are our calling to get back to being more human it's like your body calling like loneliness is this calling like get back to your tribe you know what i mean and then and i and it sounds like [ __ ] because it's like well my loneliness isn't the thing but what you've just described there is quite literally something that's happened in your mind having a real substantial almost devastating and crippling impact on your body and health the thought that your mind can disable your body is um terrifying on one hand but also kind of like a really powerful important you know but if you think about many illnesses ailments from [Music] getting a you know crafting people will get a headache when they're stressed people will get a migraine when at the end of a stressful period people will get sick sick you know so there are so many illnesses that can be considered as emotional but manifest physically yeah it's crazy so it's not the first example yeah and and you know like your loneliness is my calling to get back it's an alarm bell right you're feeling really lonely and it's a warning sign to you it's a message to say you need to do something differently in this example get back to your tribe and in the same way that my body the alarm bells were i'm going to make you so tired that you can't train so then you're going to listen and you're going to figure out what it is that you need to do differently to get back to training in a really healthy way and when i returned back to training i was able to change lots of things about my environment about the people i was with about the pressures i put myself under you know all of these things that i'd figured out and then i trained harder than i had before because i was in a really healthy environment and place and i was listening to my body and my mind they call it mind body and i was able to tune into that and go every time i was anywhere near just not feeling quite right i'd go what what's my my body telling me right now what is it that's going on that it doesn't like what do i need to be aware of and then i could thrive after that it's a big shift in conventional thinking because whenever someone exhibits physical illness people say oh what tablet does this person need you know what's the chemical and and that's why you'll get lots of different if you research cfs there's so many different schools of thought oh it's a post-viral fatigue it's you know there's lots of um yeah i guess um physiological explanations for it and maybe and there's probably lots of you know clinical research behind that suggests that it is i don't know but my experience was that something else and that's all i can go by really and you came back to the sport competing again i'm guessing yeah so i returned two years later and won the world championships and european championships in 2005 and then went on to win two more times after that and compete in beijing three years later it's incredible so now all of that's you know that part of your career has um ended very very successfully and you've you know you reached the real i mean you were the world champion multiple times looking forward at your your your the career since then and into the future what matters to you and what's getting you out of bed now and what's making you um excited for yeah life um i love helping others now helping others sharing learning from my experiences in sport and taking those lessons and bringing them to other people mostly in the business world and developing people you know i had you know spent a lifetime with coaches who were developing me um or the athletes and the team and it's the same thing it's about developing people you know in bus in sport it was about getting results through people developing those people to get results in sport and now i'm using that to get results for people in business by developing people and and i get a real kick out of you know if i'm coaching someone and coaching a director or a leader whoever it is i was coaching this morning and seeing them have that aha moment about a limiting belief um you know getting the new dream job um engaging with the team being a more confident leader whatever it is i love it when i see that change and that transformation in other people helping them to change habits to change behaviors to excel to get the best out of themselves that's what really that's what motivates me now is is helping others to fulfill their potential well listen it's been um an incredibly interesting diverse conversation one that's made me um have a couple of my own personal epiphanies so i thank you so much for coming today and sharing your story um where do people find you if they want to get in touch with you where's the best way to reach out so annahemings.com my training consultancy call is called beyond the barriers so be on the barrels.uk i'm on linkedin um we'll find you they'll finally turn on we can find a remote yeah but i thank you so much your story is i mean it's it's incredibly like multi-faceted with twists and turns and um you exhibit you know so many of the qualities that i think are typical with the most successful people i've ever seen these topics of like resilience dealing with pressure and like the understanding of oneself and your mental state and i mean you've got these incredible twists and turns with with your illness um so i mean it's just just so incredibly inspiring and when they when they suggested that you would join me in this podcast i thought it was you were just like the perfect guest for these reasons um and you've you know you've you've blown me away in many occasions and it made me feel quite emotional as well so i just wanted to say um thank you for coming and um i i hope that we can stay in touch and um yeah just to thank you more than anything thank you for inviting me on the podcast it's been a pleasure thank you i've just got one small favor to ask you if you're listening to this podcast on youtube or apple or on spotify do me a huge favor hit the subscribe or follow button it helps this podcast tremendously and in order to reciprocate what i'm going to do every single podcast episode is i'm going to pick one subscriber and i'm going to send you a message on instagram or facebook or on youtube wherever you are and i'm going to say how can i return the favor and you can tell me what favor i can do for you so this is a favor for a favor hit subscribe follow or subscribe if you're on apple podcast thank you [Music]