Afraid of failure? Olympic gold medalist Olivia Smoliga can help
By Elise Devlin
It has been several months since the launch of Smoliga’s In Depth Swim Academy, and I wanted to talk to her about the why behind everything: Why, to her, do all roads lead to self-improvement? Why does she believe younger generations are the ones who can especially benefit from that idea? And why did completely reversing her mindset change everything?
Something you said recently: “In order to sustain a championship mentality, you’re going to fail and that’s a good thing.” Can you explain that?
Yeah, it took awhile for me to actually believe it and actually want to hear it and actually implement it. Because they’re almost opposite sides of the same coin.
We want to build champions. We want to win. You’re not going up behind the blocks like, “I want to fail today so that I can learn and grow!” That’s obviously not the first thought. But just being able to shift the perspective to be like, “OK, if you do make a mistake, you do actually get to learn from it and you do get to grow.”
