In my last post, I wrote about “The Weight of Gold” – the HBO documentary that focuses on the mental health challenges faced by elite athletes.

Mental health goes far beyond athletes, though, and I hope this documentary helped the general public relate.

In addition to myself and my colleagues telling our stories, I also see “The Weight of Gold” as an attempt at helping people recognize their own doubts, their own fears and weaknesses, and bring them to light. You are not alone in your self-doubts, in your criticisms, in your micro-trauma that is driving you in your life. You are not alone in that and that’s OK. You don’t have to live your life in a state of fear. You can live your life in a state of confidence and strength and with the ability to move with life.

A lot of your life comes down to how you respond or react in those realms of failure when your mind is just not in the right place.

As an athlete, I have felt times where I was deeply motivated out of fear and out of a fear of failure. At times I was also motivated by the fact that I loved my sport – I was obsessed and I wanted to do the work and I felt like I could be the best – but there were many times in my career where I was driven by fear and the fact that, psychologically, I didn’t want to deal with what was going on in my own brain. That was too hard to handle, and I wasn’t OK with it and I wasn’t comfortable with it.

It was so traumatic that I think it changed the way that I interacted with other athletes in the world of speedskating in the sense that I was closed off, I was quiet, I was not willing to share my true feelings and emotions. The poker game in sports is one that I became accustomed to playing very well. I had an invisible shield of armor that I wore, never allowing one in nor my true emotions out.

Looking back, I would have loved to have built greater and deeper relationships with all of those athletes. I wish I had been more open with my vulnerabilities and worn them on my chest because I think that at times maybe that would have been a strength. On the other side, I think to myself, is it though? Was the game of poker played a certain way because it’s poker? And sport has its own psychological warfare with it. In my sport, I would say it’s far more important to be strong and indestructible on the outside because when athletes saw that you had weakness, they often would prey on that. You became the prey versus the predator. So I think on the social level, absolutely, I wish I spent time getting to know my international and even domestic teammates better, in a way that wasn’t me always trying to analyze their weaknesses.

As athletes we train for four years, eight years, 12 years, 16 years of our lives for a moment where in that 40-second timeframe it is incredibly important to be absolutely perfect. The real joy is in that process, but we’ve been given these conditions by society where we use the metric of the podium as the only standing metric of having success or not, and it’s much deeper than that, obviously. The human experience and the human sporting experience is much bigger, but at the absolute extreme level, if you want to get extreme results, oftentimes it takes absolutely extreme beliefs and systems and training and psychology. We all prescribe to that in some capacity. Often, athletes use fear.

Competing in a neutral position both in sport and life is incredibly important, and while we use the levers of pain, fear and desire to win to our advantage it is critical we maintain a sense of neutrality while operating in the game of life. We are ever-changing beings and have the unique ability to use those discomforts and trauma to our advantage.

Never lose sight of the value and strength of vulnerability – the ability to wear your heart on your sleeve and become radically authentic in our expression. Strength comes from within and from perseverance of storm after storm. Your failures are molding you through a series of tests that examine the true insecurities, self doubts and fears. As I finish this blog, here is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune