Flame Bearers: Championing Stories Of Women Olympians And Paralympians With Jamie Mittelman

I would say that I am an athlete myself. So it's not something that I lead with when I'm working with the Olympians or Paralympians because on that scale, I definitely am not an athlete by their standards at the same level. But I think growing up, sports had been a big part of my personal journey. I was a 3-sport athlete in high school. It was something I did in college for a little bit. I'm a certified yoga instructor. So I think having that personal context as something that I identify with and has strongly been a big part of my life is one of the reasons why I've been drawn to working with athletes themselves.

Yeah. Let's talk about sports for a second here. I mean, what is it that you love about sports? And has that changed over time? Is it the same love that you had when you were like 8 years old? Or is it different now?

It's changed. So I think growing up, it was a source of joy for me. It was how I built community. My family was very active. We were always outside kicking around a soccer ball, throwing around a baseball, going for runs in the woods, throwing on our skis, going down the mountain. But I think what I realized as I grew up is it's also— it transcends boundaries. You're able to bring people together as a unifier. There can be really tough stuff going on in the world. There could be massive political divisions, but you can sit down together and watch a baseball game and get along just fine. And I think that sport is something that our world really needs right now when there's a lot of division and hatred and things that people are really struggling with. I think it can hopefully bring people together.

Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting too, right? Because in sports, The goal is not to end in a tie.

No.

At least it's not that I've seen or grown up seeing. The goal is that there's a winner, a victor, and then there's somebody that is not the winner in that instance, whether it's an individual or it's a team. And that's even in the individual sports. Like, I swam in high school, and I swam in college, and then played some team sports. I played water polo. I played basketball and all that kind of stuff when I was younger. But there's a conflict, but it's on purpose. Like, it's a designed Opposition or conflict between two opposing intentions to win, and yet it's done in a really elegant way. Not always, right? In fact, jokingly, you could say if you go to a middle school soccer match or something, the worst behavior is on the sidelines among the parents, right? The kids are out there just wanting to like kick the shit out of the ball, get it in the net, win, lose, draw, like whatever. Have fun. So I want to get your sense of that. Like, what lessons do you think the world can learn today from sports and how hard-fought sports is? And yet, sure, people still hug at the end of a match or whatever it is, right? I mean—

Yeah, you get up and you shake hands. It's interesting. Sports are inherently set up where there is, there's the oppositional factor, but there's elements like teamwork. You have to, especially on team sports, Where you alone are not going to win a game. You have to— the success of your team is dependent on people working together. I think there's camaraderie in that. I think there's also sportsmanship. You know when someone on the other team is a cheater and you hold them accountable. And likewise, someone on your team is not playing fairly, you're going to call them out because it's bad for your whole team. There's also the very well often talked about themes of resilience. You strike out, you miss a penalty kick. Guess what? Tomorrow's going to be better. You have to dust yourself off and get right back into it, because some of the best comebacks in history are from athletes who had a down day, a down year, and came back stronger after that. So I think there's a ton of lessons that people can learn. And I think that's kind of more the direction that sports have taken for me recently. They started off as something just like those middle school soccer games. I was having fun. I was having a great time. But as I've gotten older, I've started to see the lessons that we can draw from them and the ways that they can build community.

Yeah. And you mentioned Olympics and Paralympics. Would you just— for people that may not know the distinction, the difference between those 2 things, would you share a little?

It's such a good and important call out. Also, something else that is frequently thrown in there is the Special Olympics. So the Olympics are what most people are commonly familiar with. They happen every 4 years between winter and summer. They rotate. So 4 years Summer Olympics, and then 2 years after it's Winter Olympics. And they are for able-bodied individuals. The Paralympics— para means next to, parallel to— are for people with physical disabilities. So people who are not able-bodied. And I absolutely love working with and championing the stories of these athletes. Because first of all, there's a severe lack of coverage in this space. You look at the sports media landscape, pretty much all of it goes to able-bodied athletes. This last Paralympics was the first time they were even shown on primetime television in the US. And if we're looking for role models of resiliency and just overall incredible athletes, these people are absolutely crazy. I have tried to play a lot of the para sports, and I get my butt kicked every single time.

So championing their stories, I want to know, I want to learn more about that. I'm sure everybody's curious. What do you mean by that?

Sure.

How do you do that for those that don't know what you do?

Sure. So my company is called Flamebearers, and we are the world's first storytelling platform. So we tell the stories of women Olympians and Paralympians from around the world. And we do so in 3 ways. So video, podcast, and live events. In terms of why specifically that group, if you look at the sports media landscape as a whole, I mentioned that pretty much all of it goes to able-bodied individuals. Historically, all of it's gone to men too. Up until this past year, the most commonly cited statistic was 96% of sports media going to male athletes. The number is now down to 85%. So Women are getting 15% of the coverage, but that's still obviously a very small piece of the pie. So when you talk about sports coverage historically, that's kind of a misnomer. It's just pretty much male sports coverage. So we are trying to broaden who gets covered and how they are covered. So we tell the stories of women who are right now seeking to compete in the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, and we work with women. From all continents, all backgrounds, and we tell their stories in their words. I mentioned the quality issue, so it's not just the quantity, it's the quality of how women are portrayed. Oftentimes women are sexualized, they're focusing on their dating status, their marital status, their— the commentators don't have a lot of knowledge about the players and their backgrounds, the teams. So we're trying to change that.

Yeah. And I'm curious, is the— there's the obvious— what I would say today is obvious. I hope it's obvious that when you say that men have gotten more coverage, that people go, ah, yeah, well, I get it, because that's just been historically how things have gone in. Yeah. In a lot of areas. I'm also curious, is it based on the people who consume— are consuming that media, meaning Is it factual that more men watch or consume sports media than women do? Is that a factor at all? Is that not the case? Can you shed any light on that?

Yeah, historically, definitely. And it does largely depend on what the sport is. So there's going to be historically more men watch football than women, though that gap actually is a little narrower than some other sports. That said, what we are seeing is more women are playing sports themselves and they are being televised, that more women are actually tuning in.

Right. So it creates— it's a virtuous cycle, if you will, that when—

Exactly.

When young women and women of all ages get to see women in sports, they'll have a reason to tune in and watch. Whereas if that wasn't the case or hasn't been the case, then maybe not so much.

Exactly. That's exactly right.

Okay, good. That was helpful. I want to know what— and I asked you this before we even turned on the microphone— but what is super exciting to you in your business today? Like, what's something that's going on that you're just totally jazzed up about?

Sure. So number one, the fact that the Paris Olympics and Paralympics are coming up this summer. It's absolutely wild that it's already here because the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics feel like they were just here with the postponement from COVID We have 20 athletes lined up to be interviewed and an amazing co-host who is an Olympian, 2 2-time Olympian herself and a 4-time national champion in her sport. We're very excited about this because we have some of the biggest names in sport lined up on our roster. So I can't quite announce who our co-host is yet, but this is something that kind of I'm super jazzed about right now. I think what's also exciting about it is we're not focusing on sports reporting, so we're not going to be talking to you about This is the score of their recent competition. That may come up. But really what we focus on are the human elements of what makes these athletes tick. How do they get up in the morning when they don't know if the Olympics or the Paralympics were even going to happen during COVID What are the lessons we can all learn from and draw from to find our inner Olympian and Paralympian?

Yeah. And that's a good place. I want to go forward with the last thing you said. In my work, I spend a lot of time speaking about resiliency, both as a speaker, but also in training and facilitating behind the scenes in work that our company Workwell does with organizations to develop more resiliency. And a lot of times when people will say to me, oh, you know, it's— the resilience thing is really just— it's like about bouncing back. It's about grit. It's about perseverance. And I say, yeah, that's true. I mean, we've researched this topic for a number of years. So it's clearly an element. And a lot of people do have that as part of their definition. But from our work, what we found is that it's actually not the most important thing, this capacity to sort of bounce back or even this ability to sort of take life's punches and disappointments and still get back up again. Get that. Makes sense.

Mhmm.

There's a lot more to it. And when I describe what we find is more important, We often talk about sports as the example of that because in athletics— and I was a swimmer, so I was used to long hours in the pool. We would swim 2 hours before school. We would swim 2 hours after school and stuff like that. And that would go on for like 6 months at a time or 6 months leading up to this big meet. What I found when I got to college was that there were a lot of swimmers who'd been doing that since they were 3 and 4 years old, actually.

Mm-hmm.

That started super early at the YMCA and in AAU and then And I didn't get started until high school. I was late to that, to getting that sport. So by the time I was in college, I was still super enthusiastic about it, and my body wasn't really beat up. What I found then were a lot of athletes that were— they were burned out mentally on the sport for sure. Maybe it was too much chlorine, just breathe too much chlorine over the years or whatever it might be, right? And their bodies were also Really beaten up, and so just during the pandemic, I was swimming at a YMCA, a local YMCA where I live in California, and I saw somebody that was swimming next to me that was seemingly had fins on or maybe even like a motor, like an outboard motor, because this dude was so lightning fast, and I'm not a slow swimmer, but I'm not like back. To when I could swim super much faster. This guy, on my best day, he probably would've lapped me. So I get outta the pool and there's a guy, an older man that was standing next to the pool, and I struck up a conversation. It turns out that he's this guy's coach, this young man's coach, and not only his coach, but his dad. Wow. And so the swimmer is Michael Andrew. Michael Andrew was in the Olympics, won a couple of gold medals and a couple other medals. Yeah. And was expected to be in the current Olympics and do phenomenally well. So, and Michael is a very nice young man. Enjoyed meeting him and developing a relationship. Had him on the podcast, him and his dad, to talk about resilience from the standpoint of not burn— perpetuating burnout. Yeah. So you think about, like, performance in any area of your life. It's less about how you deplete yourself and more about the process of recovery. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that because you talk about resilience, and obviously, you see it live and up close with your athletes and these women that you work closely with.

Sure. I completely agree. It's really interesting that you voiced that. That's kind of my personal ethos. I think I briefly mentioned that I'm a certified yoga instructor. And that practice for me is all about grounding myself so then I can show up the best day in and day out for Not only the athletes, but the people in my personal life. And if I don't have that space to recharge and to refuel, I'm going to burn out and I will not be of any help to anyone. So that is very, very much the truth. One athlete that I've worked with, her name is Deja Young-Craddock. She is a Paralympic gold medalist. She's incredibly open about her battles with mental health and How her attempt to commit suicide. And one of the things she talks about was when she felt very off balance. And I think she has really talked about finding her voice and making sure that you do not get to a place where you feel so depleted and so alone that really bad things happen. And I think it really does start on a daily basis of having routines. Deja tells me every morning she gets up, she has to make her bed. Is if even if that's the only thing she does, that is a grounding practice for her where she's like, okay, that is refueling for me and that is grounding for me. So then I know that whatever happens, whatever comes at me in this crazy world, I'll be able to handle it because I made my bed.

Exactly. And it seems silly to say this, but it's a success already that you've done that, right? Especially if it maybe you'd prefer to not like Just get after your bed first thing at the beginning of the day, whatever. Right? So I'm fascinated by the examples, as you say, more recently, of giving people access to that— what I think is different information. It's a different philosophy of how you develop your best. So our, our stance on this is that you don't develop your best by working on your grit. And no offense to Angela Duckworth and her work and her TED Talk and all that good stuff. It's great. It's just to me, it's an older paradigm, and it's one that the pandemic, I think, revealed will not work long term.

Yeah.

And in many ways, it's one where you ignore yourself, you ignore your body, you ignore the signs and the feelings that you're having, because what overrides that is this concept of, I just gotta keep pushing through. And ultimately, yeah, in athletics, and that's why I draw on this, is that to do that doesn't lead to success often. It more often leads to failure. Simone Biles would probably be a great example of this, right?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I'd say failure or even injury. I think there's many examples when athletes push through it and they severely hurt themselves and then their careers are cut short and it is actually life-threatening. So I think in sport where the stakes are so high, you mentioned Simone, where it's actually life-threatening if she makes an error. I think the world of her that she took a step back and said, you know what? No, I need to take a break.

Yes, exactly. It was such tremendously— it was such great leadership.

Exactly.

It was obviously self-leadership. You know, she's taking care of herself. But she was also leading her team in the same way. By stepping back, she made room for others that stepped up.

Step in. Exactly.

Right? And then a week later, when she got back to herself, she was able to reenter the meet and win a silver on the beam. I mean, it's like, yeah.

Exactly. I thought she was very unfairly criticized.

She was— I was just going to say, she was criticized pretty hard for that decision. I mean, a lot of people, I think, came to her aid or to support her as well, for sure. But it was so classic, right? The way people reacted to that, that she's quitting. Absolutely. Being disloyal to her country. I mean, like, crazy, crazy stuff, right?

It is. And, yeah, and don't get me wrong. I think grit is, I think, a very valuable part of the equation. But I think if we're a car, if the infrastructure is not working, it doesn't matter what we put into it.

Yeah. And it's a great example, right? Because if you're a car and you just keep driving on empty, I'm just gonna ask you, how's that gonna work for you at some point?

Exactly.

You know?

Exactly. You're gonna run out of gas. You're done.

Yeah. You're on the side of the road, like, with a tin can or something. And I think people, in many ways, they take themselves for granted, and they don't actually do anything about it until they're broken down on the side of the road or they get pulled over. Like, they're going so fast, get pulled over. Woo. Because they're speeding. So, or they get in an accident. I mean, like, these are the things that don't have to be part of your life experience Necessarily. And with Michael Andrew, just to kind of close the loop there, why was he in the YMCA pool? And we have beautiful pool and all that, like Olympic-type pool. But why was he there? Why was his father there? Why was his father coaching him? Why wasn't he at, like, the Colorado Springs Olympic facility? Yeah. And it's because they have a very different philosophy than the Olympic trainers that I remember what this was like. You swim whatever it would be. 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 yards or meters in a day, and you swim for months at a time. And then when you get to the most important meets of the year, you slow down, you taper, and then they shave their body, and then you swim like lightning in the pool. Right? But it also— that, that process produces burnout mentally. In other ways, it produces injury, to your point earlier.

Sure.

A lot of the guys that I went to school with, They had scars on their shoulders and on their knees.

I'm sure.

Right? Because their bodies had just been depleted and depleted and depleted and depleted. And yet what Michael Andrew was doing with his dad was not getting to that point of extreme depletion. And he couldn't do that within the system, the Olympic system. And so he trained his son. And clearly, the results are that his son's pretty fast and is getting faster. And Like, and he's got longevity. Like, he can go on and on almost like the way Michael Phelps went on for a very, very long time. So—

I love it. I absolutely love it. It's interesting you mentioned that. I actually walked away from sports my junior year because of my mental health. I had pretty debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. And my— for me, sports growing up had always been my coping mechanism. But in college, It was a different environment. They actually became the trigger for me, and I decided it was not worth it. I knew I was not going to become a professional athlete. I realized that even though when I was a little girl that was my dream, but I realized that I was waking up every morning fearful and very anxious and pumped up about going to practice, which this is something that was previously a source of joy for me, and I it was not worth it. I had to walk away. So I completely understand. The need to put yourself first and to make sure that you are training in the best environment that actually supports you and lifts you up.

Right, which is how you create the best result. Right for your best performances.

Hundred percent.

It would seem so intuitive, and yet every time I get to have this conversation with, I mean, so many different organizations, like just last week a major U.S. bank and and. So much of the culture in organizations that we work with are driven by this drive, this drive, drive, drive, drive at all costs. They won't say drive at all costs, profit at all costs. They're smart enough these days that people don't kinda say those things out loud. But you just see what some of these leaders are doing themselves and how they live, and there's not a lot of permission to do it otherwise.

I would say they're not saying it out loud, but their actions speak for them. So before I started Flamebearers, I got my MBA at Dartmouth, and I got a master's in policy from Harvard, and most of my classmates from both of those schools are in high-power consulting jobs or working for banks, tech, and their hours in general are crazy. And many of them are unhappy and many of them are constantly working around the clock, but it is what you're supposed to do and their bosses penalize them if they don't. So it's kind of this, it's, they don't verbalize it necessarily, but I think actions speak a little louder than words sometimes.

Yeah. It's really— and I was a lawyer for a couple of dozen years, so I, I know that industry is really driven by, by literally how many hours you put in.

Right.

And that you can bill for. So I wanna just ask you in, in wrapping things up here, the mental health side. So how much— Yeah. In your work, how often are you having conversations with athletes about how they create the best mental health environment for themselves that they can? And where do you hear that people are struggling in that arena these days?

Sure. So we have these conversations all the time. It is important to us to not go in with a narrative that we want to push, though. So the way we approach every conversation is we ask the athlete before we start the interview what it is that they want to focus on. We've had many athletes say mental health, this is my wheelhouse. We've also had athletes say, I'd prefer to not talk about it. So we kind of stay clear of it. And that's really important to us to not force them to have a conversation about something if they themselves don't want to have it. In terms of what's been working for them, a lot of it is actually about surrounding themselves with the right people and tuning out the voices that hurt them. So we spoke with Alexa Moreno, who is this absolutely incredible Mexican gymnast. She came in 4th place in Tokyo on the vault. And she grew up being cyberbullied. Now, this is an athlete who is literally one of the best gymnasts in the world. And people would make fun of her because they say she has an untraditional gymnast body. And she told me that for her mental health, she had to literally build kind of this community of voices that she would listen to, and then just ignore the trolls. Especially when you're a professional athlete, everyone thinks that they have a right to weigh in on your life. They're going to criticize you for the things you mess up on, and they're going to tell you still when you did something good, how you still could have done better. And you know what? They think they could do it better than you. So for her, it was all about kind of creating her own little hype squad that she would check in with every day and say, this uplift me. How can I feel good? And then ignoring the haters. Sue Bird actually said something similar in terms of she does care what people say, but only the people who matter to her.

Right.

And to ignore the haters because some people's opinions are really valuable. The people you love, the people you trust, the people who have good values. She said, don't ignore them, but just ignore the people who aren't speaking your language and who pull you down.

It's so interesting again that we're connected on some level, and yet the way that people utilize their connections to others is Often in that sort of a passive-aggressive manner or that sort of critic, the critic that's never in the arena or isn't in the arena, but they're a critic of those who are. It's pretty prevalent. So I'm not even upset about it because it's just the norm today, right? If you're watching a video, like some video that's got a lot of views or something, and if you track the comments that are happening, I like to do that is just check out what's happening in the chat while, while that's going on. And it's just shocking what people will write in the chat during some of these really great conversations and whatnot. And it's like, wow.

Sure.

Like, what are you listening to? You listening to the same interview that I'm listening to? It's just like—

Absolutely wild. Absolutely wild. I also— another tip that I had, Michelle Akers, she's FIFA Player of the Century. I consider her the GOAT in the women's soccer world. We co-hosted a whole season this past summer in honor of the Women's World Cup. She is grounded by being outside. She works on a horse rescue, and her thing is, let me be outside with the horses, and that is what grounds her. So I think for every individual, you kind of know what speaks to you. I'm happiest outside running in the woods. Put me in the mountains and I am on it. If I am thrown into New York City again— I lived there for 5 years— I'm gonna kind of lose my mind. But put me up in the mountains and I'm grounded. And I'll be really on it.

Yeah. I mean, I'm happiest in the water for the most part, like, in the ocean even more so than in a pool. But more lately, I took up a sport I hadn't played since high school, and that was tennis. And it's been so enjoyable to get— really get back into being serious at tennis. And I'm just getting so much joy on the tennis court these days, which is just freaking amazing.

That's incredible.

And that's such a mental game. And I should say in golf too. Like, these are— I'm choosing the games that are helping me to take my mental— not just my mental health, but my mental faculties to another level. Because those are games where what's going on between your ears is so important. It really is. Like, sometimes in swimming or in surfing or something, I could just really be zoned out. And in that state of zoned-outness, I can just perform. My body will do what it knows how to do or whatever. Mm-hmm. But in those other games, it's just the mind is with you all the time.

100%. A lot of other athletes that I've talked to talk about the power of meditation and silencing their mind and/or tuning into only parts of their mind. So when they have the negative voices come up, we're kind of giving yourself self-talk of why you're here, what your intention is, but tuning out the voices that are not serving you in that moment.

Yeah. Meditation is, I think, for a lot of people, it's not easy. It hasn't been easy in some respects for me in the past, but I've gotten more settled into that these days as well. I'd say for anybody that's like me that's listening to this, that maybe you haven't been successful, whatever that means, at meditating in the past, there's a really fun book on this that you could read called 10% Happier. Dan Harris, I think, is the— I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Dan Harris was the Author of that book. And it's a book in many ways about meditation. But if you just don't take it that seriously and you give yourself these opportunities just to create some stillness in your mind or just sit quietly, whether your thoughts are not gonna go away anyhow, they're kinda like clouds. They're just sort of always passing through, etcetera. But if you're not paying too much attention to every cloud and focusing and obsessing on a cloud, It kind of helps the process along. And then there's something, as you said, that's just super— yeah, it's just there's some really wonderful things inside and on the other side of meditating, which is—

It's true. It's interesting. I hated it when I started it. I was kind of the antithesis of a person who would meditate. I mentioned I have OCD. I was super high-strung growing up, very intense. Straight A's, like the annoying kid who had to be on everything, honestly. And I think what I realized is that meditation doesn't have to be the image that is most people think of, the person chanting, sitting in a silent room with their eyes closed. I have meditative runs. I have meditative walks. I have meditative conversations that are very reflective. For me, meditation is just where I kind of go inwards and give myself the space to heal, to recover, to process.

Yeah. And gratitude, a, a simple practice, like you say, walking and thinking about what you're grateful for is a form of meditation. Yoga is a moving meditation in many ways.

Exactly. Right?

So there's a lot of ways to sort of be in, in that meditation. Jamie, my last question to you just has to do with your own personal resilience. And I think you've answered a lot of this already, but At the place that you're at in your life now, how do you develop or how do you maintain your resiliency? And, like you said, the world we're all living in, all of us, this is a shared experience now, is one that is beyond any complicated environment I've ever lived in. And I've been around 5 decades at this point, and I can't remember a time that was more complex and more filled with things that are Really tough to reconcile. We could say a lot of other things about it, but this is a really difficult time, I think, that we're all going through.

Yeah, I think so too. So I've not been around for 5 decades, but I'm 15 years behind you, so I won't ever catch up, but I'm working on it. What's kind of not funny, but a little ironic, I started Flamebearers as, I think in hindsight, a bit of a personal rescue mission, and I didn't realize it at the time. I had just lost my dad to brain cancer and within pretty much a year almost lost my mom to an aortic dissection. And I realized that I wanted to champion others who were sources of light and hope for the community. And I didn't realize that doing so would make me feel better and would help me. That was never my intent, but that's how it worked out. did end up personally helping me very much. And in hindsight, founding Flamebearers was probably the best thing I could have done for my mental health, to be honest. What I'm doing today, it's a lot of kind of what a lot of the athletes have done. And I feel very fortunate in the sense that I feel like my working zone is kind of a little petri dish where I have the opportunity to kind of hear what people do and then pick and choose for my own life and say, oh, I think that will work for me. That will not work for me. So kind of my 4 biggest things are definitely surrounding myself on a daily basis with loved ones. So those could be friends and family. They could be people who are just positive sources of in my life and trying to minimize, to be honest, my interaction with people who are takers. They are people we all know, the people in our lives who are drains on us. And I try to minimize proactively my engagement with those people. The second one is when I am having a tough day, because you know what? It's not a matter of if they're going to come. It's a matter of when they come. I have a whole menu of things that I like to do that fill me up and that help restore me. So I'm like, is this an ice pint of ice cream day? Is this a call your friend, call your mom, cry? Is this a bubble bath day? Is this a nope, sit on the couch and drink a glass of wine and watch a really crappy reality show? But you know what? I enjoy it. I have a whole list of things that I like to do that I know make me feel better. So I like to do that. The third one for me is exercise. That always instantly makes me feel better. It can be really hard to get off the couch, really hard to drag myself out. But I think it's maybe it's just a 10-minute walk. Get out, feel the sunshine, but it instantly makes me feel better. And the fourth is you actually mentioned it. It's a practice of gratitude. I have a gratitude journal. So when I'm feeling really down in the dumps, it's kinda like Deja. I like to focus on one thing, one thing that I did well that day, and I write it down in my little journal. And then I can go back and say, wow, yesterday, I felt like I was a failure, but I actually did these things that were pretty darn cool.

Yeah. Just so appreciate the fact that you gave us a list of those kind of things and that you tied it to maybe the day that's not going well. Because I certainly believe that our resilience is something we create before we need it so that we're working on it proactively for sure. But I think the hardest thing is when people do have a sideways day that turns into a sideways week or whatever it might be.

Yeah.

That it can really push them many steps back. So

100%, I agree.

What's going on with you in those moments, right?

Yeah. The way I kind of think about it is it's a muscle that I like to have trained before I need to use it. So I will have the things ready to go because when it comes, I'm not going to be able to think. When people are grumpy, when people are sad, when people are down, you don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything. Just make it super easy for yourself.

Indeed. Yeah. So I wanna tell our audience, as always, that to find out more about the work that Jamie is doing in the world, you just have to go to our show notes, and there's gonna be links in there to click to find out and to tune in, listen to your shows. I think there's a lot more in this conversation too that I'm thinking maybe we can schedule a part 2 or something like that. I've so enjoyed having this talk with you, Jamie. And we'd love to get comments and questions. So, of course, if you've got a question for Jamie or for myself, you can go to adamarkel.com/podcast, leave your comment question there. And as I have said in the past, it will not be any bot or AI that's gonna answer it. We will answer those questions ourselves. And if there's somebody that, you know, colleague, friend, family member that would benefit from hearing some of what Jamie shared with all of us today, I think there's some tremendous insights. Feel free to share this episode. It is super helpful to us when you do that anyway, because it just, again, affects the algorithm and how it is that these things are more proliferated. And when something's positive, I think that's what we wanna proliferate. We wanna spread that. So we appreciate your help with that. And for now anyway, Jamie, I wanna just say thank you for your time today. Thank you for everything that you shared, and mostly thank you for the work that you're doing in the world.

Thank you for having me, Adam. I've really appreciated this conversation.

Yeah. I so enjoyed that conversation. Jamie Middleman, she's amazing. She's doing amazing work. And her Flamebearers platform is really making it possible for women and girls all over the globe to experience role models, resilient role models in the form of other women athletes, both Olympians and Paralympians. We got to talk about those things today. We got to talk about some things, some areas that I didn't expect we were going to go into. So it was— I love that aspect of the podcast. Because the questions are not canned. I would say they're not planned either. I mean, we have some sense always of where we want to take things, but what's beautiful is that it's organic. It unfolds on its own, and we follow the breadcrumbs. I love it from the standpoint of I'm looking to have an interesting conversation, and that's what I always tell my guests before we get going. You know, if we're going to have an interesting conversation ourselves, then by extension, other people will as well. And hopefully you felt the same way. Talking about lessons from athletes, I never get dull of that topic. But I can sometimes feel like so many of the same things have been said again and again in that arena. I feel like we covered things differently today, covered new ground, and where it is that we did cover topics that are maybe not new and novel, I think we spoke about them using our own life experiences as well as those that around us that we've had the opportunity. to learn from. And that is super interesting because that means that that learning keeps evolving and knowledge that we have, I mean, it's just sort of a personal philosophy, but head knowledge is not that important in a lot of ways. I don't think it's that useful. Let's put it that way. Meaning that we read things and we consume things and we're constantly consuming content these days by the jugful. And I don't know that we might feel smarter. It might feel good also to just kind of be taking in information from all corners. But usefulness, I think, is really what I find more important than anything else. And information that you don't, that you don't put to, into application, information that you don't get to experience firsthand doesn't become useful. It doesn't teach. It doesn't provide lessons that are lasting and lessons that you can share with other people. So I just love the fact that we were able to talk about those useful The things that we've learned that have made changes in our perspectives because we've applied them and gotten feedback. And sometimes, again, feedback is not always a win. Sometimes it's actually a loss, but a loss where we learn from. We talked about today being able to be victorious without there being any victims, being able to win without there being someone that pays the price for that. And yet at the same time, the goal is to win. In business, the goal is to win, and the goal in sports is to win. And yet in sports, why often what we see is that people are able to shake hands and be cordial and courteous, decent to one another, even though they've fought it out on the field of play and have battled it out even on the field of play. And yet in business, often what we see is that there are people that want to win, that want to be the victor, And there are many victims often in those situations because people are used and abused in the workplace all the time and not thought of with high regard. And those things can be endemic. They can be cultural. They can be really costly to an organization. In fact, they're always costly to an organization. And some organizations just pay more dearly for that erroneous philosophy. And when we think about resilience, when I often am brought in to talk about these topics as a keynote speaker or, or in our organizational after work through our company Workwell, we talk about resilience as not being about grit, as not being about how we grind it out. That is an aspect, of course, of resiliency that has to do with perseverance and tenacity and all that good stuff, and grit being a part of that for sure. But the key ingredient today when we think about what produces long-lasting capacity, long-lasting performance, and higher-level performance. It is not grit. It is recovery. It is understanding that when we are depleted, we will not be at our best, that an athlete that is depleted will not perform at their best. But an athlete that is properly trained and recovered from even the hardest of their training sessions will play and perform At higher levels than those that are tired mentally, emotionally, physically speaking. And so we got to cover that ground today, talk about a number of things that I think were super helpful, whether you're an athlete, whether you just admire athletes, whether you love to learn from athletes, or whether you're in business and you're thinking about the business athletes that are around you, the ones that you lead, the ones that you are led by, et cetera. So I hope you love the episode, that you will share it with friends, family, colleagues, et cetera. Please do that. Feel free to leave me a comment at any point in time. adamarkel.com/podcast. We'd love it if you'd leave a 5-star review as well. I know it's a selfish ask. I don't mind making the ask actually, because hopefully what you'd want is to see this podcast in front of more people, that more people would, would have access to it, would consume it, would be able to benefit from it. And the only way that that can really happen is through the algorithm and How we can help ourselves that way is simply by having these great reviews and by having people share it with others. So if you're willing to, to do that, we can't thank you enough for being a part of the community and for being willing to share with others and help us to just rise, create that rising tide for all of us. Thank you so much for that. And of course, as always, feel free right now in this moment to see just where are you the strongest? Where is your resilient level? Today, you can go to rankmyresilience.com, rankmyresilience.com, and you will get a score in three minutes or less. And it will tell you in those four zones just how you're doing in this moment. It's a snapshot in time, as well as what you could be doing to raise those numbers so that you can feel even better, more frequently even, and perform at your very best. So with that, I want again just. Wish you all a beautiful rest of your day, your evening, wherever I'm finding you now. And thank you so much for being a part of this wonderful community.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for To learn more about building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.