Falling in Love With the Process

In this episode of In Deep with Olivia Smoliga, Olivia reflects on what it means to devote yourself fully to your craft — not just to the medal, the cut, the team, or the outcome, but to the long, layered process of becoming. She explores how athletes can easily slip into black-and-white thinking: if I don’t get this result, everything is ruined; if I achieve this one thing, then I’ll finally feel fulfilled. But that mindset keeps us stuck in scarcity, urgency, and transaction. The real shift happens when we learn to stay in the gray.

Olivia connects this idea to goal setting at In-Depth Swim Academy, where athletes learn to balance outcome goals with process goals that build confidence step by step. She talks about how obsessing over the end result can make swimmers forget the actual actions, patience, and experimentation required to get there. Whether it’s refining your stroke, adjusting your training, building better relationships, or learning how your body responds to stress and recovery, falling in love with the process means becoming curious about all of it.

The episode also dives into how transactional thinking can bleed into both sport and life — treating people, practices, and opportunities only as means to an end. Olivia challenges that approach by inviting athletes to expand their capacity to receive more: more connection, more creativity, more growth, more possibility. When you stop trying to force life into a neat black-and-white formula and instead stay open, disciplined, patient, and kind, you begin to mature not just as an athlete, but as a human being.

At its core, this episode is a reminder that greatness is not built by constantly asking, “How fast can I get there?” It’s built by learning to love the road itself — the reps, the feedback, the mistakes, the people, and the person you’re becoming along the way.

Listen to the episode below!