Becoming a Paralympian After Breathtaking Adversity and How to Trigger Post-Traumatic Growth | Flow Research Collective Radio

It was like my world's worst nightmare to imagine being paralyzed. And so I believe inspiration is when we see something in others that we don't think we could do ourselves, or we can't quite comprehend how we would do it. So a lot of people say to me, you're inspiring, and I kind of resist that and feel awkward about it. But actually, I've realized that it's, you know, if I 12 hours before my accident had seen what I've gone on to do, I would have been inspired because I thought I would rather be dead. So I think we just don't know the strength that we have within us to cope with incredible things. We're just conditioned to live a certain way with a certain body and certain cultural and social norms. And then when that all gets thrown up in the air, we don't realize the adaptable capacity that we all have to change to situations that we could never have imagined.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then Somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock.

And it was just so weird.

Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and welcome to Welcome to today's episode with Dr. Karen Dark. Karen is one of our very own coaches here at Flow Research Collective Radio. She's also a specialist in the psychology of high performance. She's a Paralympic gold medalist, a speaker, and an author. She holds a PhD in geology, but switched her focus from studying external metal gold to studying inner gold. She's also got an MA in development training and an MA in sports performance psychology and diplomas in hypnotherapy, motivational coaching, coaching and clinical and pastoral counseling. Now, Karen is just incredible. After suffering really intense adversity resulting in paralysis a long time ago, she has transformed herself and her life and her ability to impact the world, getting into this world of psychology and peak performance from an academic perspective, but also directly as an adventurer and as an athlete. And I'm going to let her tell you more about her story, but it's really fascinating and incredible. And in this episode, we talked about adversity, how to deal with it, how to use it to catalyze post-traumatic growth. We talked about Karen's journey with paralysis and what her first 3 months were like experientially. And we dove into the adventures she's done, which you're going to hear more about, which are really fascinating and incredible. So you're going to love this episode. Karen is a truly incredible person. And it's an honor that I'm able to say she's a member of the FRC team as one of our peak performance coaches. So enjoy today's episode. And with that, let's dive in. Karen, thank you so much for joining us on Flow Research Collective Radio. Really appreciate you taking the time. It's fun given that we've worked together to be able to drop in like this. So appreciate you joining us.

Thanks. I'm excited for our conversation. Let's see where we go.

Yeah, I wanted to start with an overview of your story. So there's a number of people who we've interviewed on Flow Research Collective Radio. Damien Barran is one who comes to mind, and Mark Pollack is another who comes to mind. And these are people, and I put you in this category, who have had just incredible personal journeys and as a result of that, incredible personal stories. When that is the case, I always like to start off by just getting an overarching narrative from you as to how you've gotten to this point. If I go to your website, which is karendark.com for anyone who's interested, you've got a great photo in 1991 where you had, looks like climbed Mont Blanc and Matterhorn. Then there's a photo of you on a bike in 2016 with the caption, the Wild Way, hand-biked through Chilean Patagonia. And so I would love for you to take folks through that journey from 1991 up to 2016 and present day.

Yeah. Well, how long have we got? There's a lot, there's a lot happened in that time, but I mean, I guess the fundamentals of my story would be that I was a really passionate climber, loved to be in the mountains. I've always been really excited about being in beautiful natural places, and particularly mountains. And so I developed this passion in my youth for going there and climbing and just being any way and any excuse to be in nature and in mountains, really. And then in '93, I think, it's so long ago I've forgotten, I think it was 1993, I fell from a sea cliff in Scotland. It was just a kind of very non-kind of day and non-kind of climb, nothing dramatic or scary or anything where you were really mentally thinking that anything was going to happen, but one of those days where your life changes in a few seconds. And I, I fell from the sea cliff and woke up 3 days later in a hospital in intensive care to discover that I was, I was paralyzed from the chest down. I'm very fortunate because I'd also broken my neck, so I was really close to having lost all function in my, in my arms and my hands, but 'Do you still have that?' So yeah, from that point onwards, life clearly changed radically, and there's a whole— the stories within stories there, you know. I don't know, we could maybe go there a little bit, but I think what began was very much a new chapter of my life. And in the beginning, I thought that meant that I would have to leave behind places and, and things that I loved to do, um, just because getting to them in a wheelchair seemed impossible. And then I suppose I just started on this journey of, of growth. And, you know, we talk about this in Flow Research Collective, but when we have a trauma, it's a huge opportunity for growth at the same time. And we start to ask much more existential questions about everything. And it really took me on this, on this professional journey that was very different. I was a geologist at the time when I broke my back. I was a gold geologist. And it seems like gold has become a massive part of my life. So I began studying gold in the Bolivian Andes pre-accident, and then carried on doing that for a while. And then eventually I moved into chasing gold medals and all the rest of it. But that transformation that we go through when something really difficult happens to us— you know, people often say to me, do you wish that you weren't paralyzed? And of course, in so many ways, I would love to walk and have all the bodily functions that come with being able-bodied. But at the same time, I also have to acknowledge and recognize how much it's given me and what an incredible new perspective of life it's given me that I would never have had otherwise. And that has enabled and opened up some incredible opportunities. There's no way I would have become a Paralympian if I hadn't broken my back, and I wouldn't have become a professional cyclist. And that led to years and years of, of adventure, a professional career in learning and development, coaching, mentoring, leadership development. And sport and adventure has just been an integral part of that all along the way. So even when I've been working full-time in jobs, I just constantly have to take chunks of time out and, and just reset my system by engaging with some kind of big project, usually in a beautiful wilderness place, usually with a very special group of people. And that kind of combination of adventure and challenge and nature and team and that really clear objective, I mean, it embodies a lot of the things we talk about in the Flow Research Collective that produce flow. So I suppose when I look at my life since becoming paralyzed, it's just become this kind of a pretty flow-intensive life. And many people say to me, 'Blimey, how many lives have you had?' Because sometimes I can't believe it either. I feel like I've lived 10 lives in, in one. So yeah, I haven't gone into any of the details of adventures there, but there's been everything from skiing across ice caps to Yeah, like one of the biggest ones that I never really share anywhere was 3 months sea kayaking from Vancouver to Juneau in Alaska, just living with the rhythms of nature, sleeping on the beaches, no wheelchair for 3 months, which at the beginning felt super scary. But all of the things that that creates around, you know, questions around dependency, independence, teamwork, um, contribution, just like so many interesting things it brings up. So I find that adventures are very much like a laboratory for stuff that happens in real life, and I love going into this intensive situation, experiencing some pretty intense, crazy stuff, but then bringing the learning back to the real world and then sharing that with other people as well through writing and speaking.

You wrote a book, Karen, in the— I think it was the mid-2000s— called If You Fall, It's a New Beginning. And on the COVID of that book, there's a quote which I'm assuming from you, which says, I'd always thought I'd rather be dead than paralyzed. And it sounds like that is no longer the case as far as how you—

Definitely not.

And so I'm curious, and I want to come back to a few different pieces that you mentioned there, but I'm curious how you have been able to handle the adversity so well and have, I would argue, an extreme case of post-traumatic growth, which is one of the fields in positive psychology that we look at a little bit within Flow Research Collective. So how did you use the adversity as such a propellant and change how you feel about paralysis so drastically from before the accident?

Yeah. So that quote's a real quote that I spoke those very words just 12 hours before I became paralyzed. So it's pretty bizarre. And I've noticed that the power of my language is— I think it's true for all of us— the power of our words, of our thoughts, of our language to actually impact reality is, is maybe greater than most of us credit. And I certainly experienced profound moments of that being one of them. So yeah, that was my belief. I couldn't imagine anything worse. I was a very physically oriented person still that didn't change, but it was like my world's worst nightmare to imagine being paralyzed. And so I believe inspiration is when we see something in others that we don't think we could do ourselves, or we can't quite comprehend how we would do it. So a lot of people say to me, you're inspiring, and I kind of resist that and feel awkward about it. But actually, I've realized that it's, you know, if I 12 hours before my accident had seen what I've gone on to do, I would have been inspired because I thought I would rather be dead. So I think we just don't know the strength that we have within us to cope with incredible things. We're just conditioned to live a certain way with a certain body and certain cultural and social norms. And then when that all gets thrown up in the air, we don't realize the adaptable capacity that we all have to change to situations that we could never have imagined. And I think the things that have really helped me, a mixture of things, you know, sometimes trauma on trauma helps. We become like more and more able to keep reframing things in different ways. And not long after I was paralyzed, just 3 months after, a really close friend who had spent quite a few summers climbing with went climbing for the first time. He'd not been since my accident. He decided to give it a break and wasn't sure if he wanted to climb anymore. He went climbing for the first time and he died that weekend. And I was still in the hospital, I was waiting for his visit, and the nurses came along to tell me the news. And clearly it was like another crisis for me personally, but much more for his family. But, um, it was one of those, like, incredibly hard things that made me completely reframe my own situation. It's like, well, I'm still here, and that was a huge motivator for me. It just made me suddenly switch my mind entirely to appreciating the fact I was still alive. And I think, you know, you speak to a lot of people who've had a near-death experience and are still alive, and suddenly they have a new zest for life and a new appreciation of what they have got instead of sometimes the tendency of being human to focus on what we don't have or what we're lacking. So I think it really taught me to reframe everything in the context of, of gratitude and of shifting my focus onto appreciating what I have, what I still can do. You know, in the beginning, I did focus a lot on everything that I'd lost, and really my mind was going constantly to what it wished it could do and places it wished it could be and things I wished I could do with friends, etc. And it's just a route to pain if we only focus on what we're missing and what we're lacking and what we can't do. And I guess I quickly realized that, and so everything has just since that day has become reframed. I think the other thing is that when you're in a wheelchair in a world that's not designed for wheels, every single day is full of the unexpected. It is the ultimate in uncertainty and adaptability to all kinds of situations. So Maybe I'm lucky that I've never been a kind of anxious person. I don't tend to worry about details. I'm fairly easygoing, but that kind of surprise and unexpected nature of every single moment of every single day almost means that that's also taught me to just constantly look for ways around things, solutions, just always to be open to possibilities and to talk to strangers and ask strangers. And it just kind of opens up this, I call it, an adventure mindset. It's like every day is a kind of going on an exploration. And when we live like that, it's an interesting way to live. And I think it opens up a lot more possibilities than if we're living in a much more structured, limited kind of way.

Karen, was there ever a period of regret at having gone on that, you know, specific climb, or frustration or resentment or anger? And if so, was there a turning point from those sorts of emotions and perspectives into the mindset you have now, or was that a gradual progression?

This might sound weird, and I don't understand it either, but I have never felt anger or regret, or if only I'd done that, or if only I wouldn't have— never. It's really odd. I don't know why I've never experienced any of those things, but I haven't. I think the person I was climbing with, he initially was asking all those questions himself, like, 'If I'd done this differently, would it have happened? Should I have not done this or done that?' But I never felt any blame or regret towards anybody, nor myself. But what I think it did do, which has had a really profound impact on my life in a more negative way, is on a much deeper subconscious level, it impacted my ability to trust in my own decisions and to trust in myself. Because something I did in that— in— on that day led to that accident. And I know when I look back that there was a moment before it, probably about 5 minutes before I fell, when I had a choice just to back down and climb back down and let the person I was with lead the climb, because it was, it was really hard and it was beyond my ability probably. And so I know it was my ego that pushed me through. It was like this desire to, I can do it, I would just keep going. It was kind of ego-led decision-making. And so I suppose I'm quite, I'm really interested in the connection between mind and body and the fact that I've broken my spine, which kind of cuts off that connection between your head and your heart in a way, you know, in a kind of some kind of metaphorical way. I think it's made me doubt myself a lot as I've gone through life and not trust my decisions. So it's almost like my life journey from that point forward has been about building trust in myself in loads of different ways, in every way possible. And my life before that, I know most people can look at the challenges of their life and attribute them to something difficult that happened in childhood, or, but I had like a super stable childhood and I don't remember anything that as badly kind of impacted me from my childhood at all. In fact, the week before my accident, I remember thinking, blimey, my life has always been so blessed and fortunate. Um, how lucky am I? But then almost this anticipation that it can't go on like this. So yeah, something like that.

Interesting that you mentioned the ego piece in terms of going for that climb. We had an Australian big wave surfer called Mark Matthews on the podcast. He had a career-ending accident where he was surfing a massive wave that basically collapsed on top of him in 3 foot of water over a rock shelf. And, uh, he ended up almost losing his left leg and never being able to surf again. And he said that the reason that he believes that that accident happened was because of switching from what we call in sports psychology task orientation, where you're just focused on the task at hand, which is something that is conducive to being able to access flow in an activity, to ego orientation, which is where you are conscious of the perception that others have of you doing the task at hand. And he kind of claimed that that shift, that psychological shift was what caused him to, to have the accident. And so I'm curious if that's kind of something you've thought about, or if, or if it's even productive for you to think about it like that, or what your take is on, on task versus ego orientation.

Yeah, I've never thought about it in that context. Um, that doesn't resonate for me in that particular scenario. I think I was young and eager and just kind of wanting to explore but push my limits, and somehow you don't really think it's going to happen to you, you know. You don't really think about consequences really at stage, I don't think. So it was kind of like, oh, I can do it, just push on. And I'd fallen before, I'd taken lead falls before, and they were, they were fine. So it was, you know, it's just one of those days where the combination of circumstances, the route, the conditions. But I do remember that moment when I could have gone back down and I decided to push on even though I was finding it hard. But that's something which, like all of us, our strengths are also our weaknesses and our, our kind of shadow sides as well. So The fact that I do push on and I, I have this kind of, I don't know what it is. I just like, when I first started hand cycling, I could never not go to the end of a glen in Scotland, no matter how many miles it was to the end or how bad the weather was. It's like, I have to go to the end to see what's there, and then I'll turn around and come back. There's no way I'd get halfway up and then go, oh, that's enough, and go back. It's kind of like this part of me that constantly has to push to some kind of limit where I find something or discover something. And, uh, that bit's not really ever gone away. I think I've got a little bit more wise to it, so there are times when I have backed off now when I sense that I'm entering a zone that's too dangerous. But it's, it's a fine line to explore. I'm sure, I'm sure you know what I mean.

Hey there, just gonna interrupt. If you are a a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me I don't know how to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. I'm going to ask you one more question, Karen, about the accident, and then we'll shift on to some other topics here. I'm curious about what your experience was for the 3 months after the accident and what the process of sort of adapting to the new normal looked like. One of the things we talk about at Flow Research Collective is the concept of hedonic adaptation, which is often a negative thing when good things happen to us because we tend to take them for granted. And that's often referred to as the hedonic treadmill where we need more and more and more to maintain a baseline level of happiness or wellbeing. But hedonic adaptation can be a very powerful and good thing in cases of adversity. You see this with prisoners, for example, adapting to life in prison behind bars and actually returning to close to a baseline level of wellbeing pretty quickly. You see this with accidents, you see this grief and the loss of loved ones. It's kind of a core part of human resiliency. And so I'm curious what those 3 months looked like or felt like after the accident and when you started to just feel, this is just how it is now and kind of came back to a normal baseline or close to normal baseline. And it seems like now you're I know you've gone beyond that baseline, which is just incredible, but I'm curious what that looked like. Yeah.

I mean, the first 3 months I was literally laid in a bed looking at polystyrene ceiling tiles with metal bolts in my head and a metal halo around my head and not moving. So those 3 months were, there wasn't any opportunity for any kind of hedonistic adaptation or anything else like that. It was literally, you're grounded, you're in bed, you're staring at a ceiling. You know, it was wall staring, and your body's healing. So actually, you lack— when your body needs the energy to heal, you don't have the cognitive ability to really think about much, to even really go there with processing much. So my memory of those 3 months, I don't recall anxious thinking. I don't recall a lot other than just being in this absolutely empty healing space of staring at a ceiling. I didn't read any books. I tried to listen to a few audiobooks. I couldn't— I mean, I couldn't sit upright to read a book. The whole world was upside down. So my way of seeing the world was looking up at ceiling tiles where there was a mirror angled above my head, so you could see people and things moving around you, but it was all upside down. So I don't know what to say about that time. It was very unusual. Everything is topsy-turvy, literally. Your view of the world is upside down. But I was— it was an unusual time because I was in a hospital ward where I think I'm glad I was in hospital then than now, because now people have private rooms and it's all very clinical. When I was in hospital, it was an open mixed ward and there was all sorts of shenanigans going on all the time. So there was a lot to laugh at, there was a lot to feel grateful for. I had people around me who had had much less dramatic accidents but couldn't breathe anymore. They depended on a ventilator and couldn't breathe anymore. So you're seeing like all extremes of challenge and all extremes of humanity and all extremes of care, like from the staff working there to the patients to the— you're really going through a huge trauma with other people on all kinds of different levels. And so you feel— I remember feeling really grateful for the fact that I still had what I had. As well as really traumatized for all that I'd lost, as well as laughing a lot at the craziness that was going on around. And yeah, just a very deep, intense experience that when I look back at, weirdly, my memory of it is that I had an absolutely fantastic time, which sounds bizarre because it clearly was a really difficult time, but it was also a really amazing time. So yeah, I don't think it really speaks to your question or your— the process you're talking about there, but it's, uh, I think it's like being in a holding After that though was different. There was a really profound moment when I started getting out of bed and asked for my bed to be wheeled outside the hospital. And this was unusual, clearly no one really asks for that, but my bed got wheeled out of the ward down a ramp and I remember just lying there all afternoon staring at the clouds in the sky and trees. And I just said, can I stay out here for the night? Like, I wanted to sleep to the stars outside. And in the end I was out till about 1 in the morning. But that contact with nature was absolutely profound for me. It's the first time I'd seen a leaf for 3 months and sky, and the colours were so intense. And I remember just, yeah, it was just incredible experience that actually after that afternoon I kind of felt alive again, and it gave me some kind of energy to when I started getting up, really go back and chase after things. And then began a bit of a treadmill of searching and seeking. When I finally left the hospital, I tried every activity you could imagine from gliding to flying to canoeing to you name it. It was just seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking something.

Is there a period post-accident that comes to mind as the most challenging?

Yeah. So I would say, and this is interesting because I know there's the piece of research done about someone winning the lottery and somebody who becomes paralyzed, and that the kind of baseline happiness returned to about the same level as pre-accident or lottery winning after 1 year, which I was surprised to hear. Because actually, for me, I'd say the most difficult time was about a year afterwards. Because in the beginning, it's so shocking for everybody. People rally around. You've got lots of people supporting you, and it's all new. You're discovering everything new. And then after, after that first year, I moved back to Scotland, and I was living in an apartment on my own. I went back to my studies, and it's like normality has set in, and the reality sets in, and that was the most difficult time. Then you realize this isn't going away. The novelty's worn off. The reality is starting to arrive, and actually people think you're okay now because it's been a year, and actually suddenly you're feeling maybe not so okay.

People actually talk about a similar effect with grief also, where there's this sort of perverse kind of novelty or shock at the beginning that blunts a little bit of the challenge. And then also you have the social connection element where people are in the outside world and in the community kind of acknowledging the magnitude of what's happened. And then normality sets in, as you said, and things can be more challenging. So that's really interesting to hear. Karen, you've spoken to all sorts of big companies and at all sorts of big events, companies like Adidas and Braun and all sorts of different companies. There's some great photos of you online speaking on amazing stages. What is it that you attempt to get across to the audience when you are speaking?

It usually depends what's relevant and what, what an organization wants or is looking for. The things that I typically get asked to speak about are mindset, overcoming challenge, adapting to change, the typical kind of topics which are so pertinent in the business world. And I don't think, I don't think I've got anything radically new to share, but I think there's a, there's a lot of power in, in personal story. And I think my stories, particularly from adventure and wilderness and a high-performance sport, there's a lot of of things in there which are very pertinent to everyday life that we can transfer across. So I tend to share stories from these experiences and environments. Um, 14 years in high-performance sport has been quite a journey and lots of learning within that to share. I never have a script. I, I make it up every time in a way that's different. And to be honest, I have to do that because if I was just doing the same and doing the same thing every day, I'd be absolutely bored. And if I was bored, I'm sure I'm sure anyone listening would be. So yeah, that's interesting. But recently, actually, I think since, since COVID I did have this realization that the mindset that I need when I go on an adventure or exploring very much felt like the mindset that is helpful in a pandemic. It's just like always expecting the unexpected, looking after each other well, caring for yourself well, caring for each other well. Being very attentive to thought control and managing your thoughts, changing your thoughts, reframing situations, all these kinds of things. And that's become a bit of a theme over the last year or so, is just this kind of adventure mindset approach.

It's really interesting. I like that you, uh, change it up every time. I want to touch a little bit on your academic background. You've gotten an amazing number of honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen, Leeds, Cumbria, Sheffield, Aberthe, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is really incredible. You've also studied hypnotherapy and motivational coaching. And I'm curious from your study of hypnotherapy and motivational coaching and high performance coaching, Jenny, you've got an MA in, what were the biggest shifts in your understanding of human beings and human behavior and achievement from the work you did within those degrees and diplomas?

Oh, that's a big question. I suppose I'm just a lifelong learner. I can't stop. I just love to keep applying new learning. But what I like doing is I'm really, I suppose, the experiential learning piece. So I'm always trying to apply what I'm learning in my own life and marry the two things up, because when we live it or we teach it or we experience it, it's so much more real for us, isn't it? So I think I think in that process, one of the most profound learnings I've had between the study and my own practical process is the power of— I mean, it sounds basic and trite, but the power of our mind and our ability to change it. Like, I think, you know, when I was younger, I just thought I was my thoughts. You become subject to them. Your thoughts create the emotions. You are your emotions. I never really understood how much we can completely take charge of our thoughts and our emotions and therefore completely change our reality. I mean, that's just touching it at the most basic level. But I suppose one of the places I most deeply experienced that was when I was invited to go and climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. So it's a kilometer-high overhanging rock face that's, I guess, became most famous through Alex Honnold. Exactly. Free solo. And the first time I, when I saw it, I just looked up at this rock face and thought, this is crazy. Like, what am I doing? I was petrified. I was scared. It seemed ridiculous. All my thoughts became dominated by the fact I'd nearly died in a climbing accident and how risky it was. What on earth was I doing there? I'm not a proponent of lying, but I told my mum and dad I was going on a beach holiday to California because I didn't want them to worry. And to be honest, I thought I was going on a beach holiday. I didn't really think we would climb it. But in that process of climbing El Capitan, and we failed the first time, we came back down, we nearly left, and then, and then back again. It was a massive live experiment in changing our thoughts in the very moment to take control. So being up on that rock face shaking and crying and thinking about how I was going to die is clearly no state to be in when you really could if you don't get yourself together. So it was a place where I had to apply everything I'd learned in my studies— hypnosis, breathing, visualization, thought control, reframing, task orientation, really focusing on exactly what I need to do in each moment and bringing my focus very, very narrow into all the little details of what I needed to concentrate on. So all these techniques that that we talk about, but they were brought together in the most intense way I could have ever imagined. And in the end, in a super special and very profound experience of climbing El Capitan. And again, it's slightly digressing, but when I got back and told my mum and dad what I'd actually done, they were gobsmacked, not because of what I'd done, but because they could remember that when I was 10 years old, as a family, we'd been to Yosemite National Park. And apparently as a 10-year-old, I'd looked up at the rock face and said I was gonna climb it one day. And I had no recollection of ever thinking it or saying it. So it was another reminder of the power of words and intention.

My God, that's amazing.

But I don't know if I really answered your question there, but really I think, you know, how we can influence our mind and also how we can program our subconscious mind towards results that we want is incredible what we can do. So the power of visualization, of focus, of hypnosis and mentally taking ourselves through processes and emotionally connecting to them. That's how I won a gold medal. It was not ever about physical prowess, I would say.

You mentioned reframing, hypnosis, visualization. What are some of the ways that you use those 3 mental skills within your adventures for endurance or other reasons?

Well, probably the place I've applied the most was in my sport career. For example, what I would do is make myself a hypnotic recording to work on things that I was anxious about or that I felt weaker about. And before a big major championships or an Olympic Games, I would mentally ride the course along with a hypnotic recording that had me riding it. So because I made it for myself, I could design and address all the kind of things I knew were in my subconscious about worrying about getting off the start line and, um, being left behind or not having a sprint at the end. And I'd really just program in these images through the hypnotic recording. And then I'd play it to myself on waking in the morning or just before falling asleep. And our brainwaves are at that most slower state and dropping into theta or gamma. And we're able to just sort of change How we're hearing things and experiencing things. And so I guess I just really practiced programming my mind, um, visualizing, writing all the details. So for example, for a world championships or an Olympics, I would have watched a video of the course beforehand. I'd know every single corner, every single pothole, probably. I would mentally know exactly when I was going to change gear, what gear I would be in, where I would position my body, how I would lean. Like every minute kind of detail of what I would be doing with my body, with my gears, with my mind was going into these recordings. So when it came to actually racing, it's like, you've already raced it a hundred times before you're on automatic. So there's nothing coming up as a surprise. I would even work to kind of write scenarios that you wouldn't be able to predict. So what will you do if someone rides past you in a time trial? That means that somebody's caught you up, so you're not going to win anymore. and the natural instinct might be to feel disheartened, to suddenly go, oh, I've blown it, I'm not, I'm not going to medal anymore, and to go into a kind of negative thought pattern. And this actually really worked for me in the London Paralympic Games because I programmed in my mind that if someone rode past me, I would just dig in harder and ride after them, and maybe I could still get a silver medal. And that's exactly what happened, that the American rider rode past me and I ended up just chasing after her. And if I hadn't done that bit of programming, I think I would have I would've probably thought I was doing really badly, probably wouldn't have got any medal, but because I programmed it, suddenly I was chasing and I ended up getting a silver medal. So just writing the outcome into your mind, like really going into the detail and just making everything automatic.

It's interesting. I actually just wanna underscore what you mentioned around essentially preparation. It's a good old-fashioned, fairly simple peak performance tool, but I think a lot of people tend to underdo preparation. And look for more sophisticated, complex tactics or tools, but literally just preparing properly for whatever it is that you're going to be performing within is a really important box to check first. And for a lot of people within business and work, often they are looking for tactics for public speaking or for communication or negotiation. And just good old-fashioned preparation can go an incredibly long way. So I love hearing about your preparation process.

It's a great saying, isn't it? Prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance. But I think it's true.

It's great.

Um, but then I think there's another tweak there about expect the unexpected. So as much as we can plan for anything and prepare for anything, in coaching, we— you've probably heard of the expression the doorknob moment, where you just spent an hour or so with someone, and as they're leaving, they just suddenly turn and tell you something you're like, oh, if we'd known that. But there's always that little thing that can happen that we don't expect. But I think when you've prepared to expect the unexpected and almost gone through all the possible scenarios that could happen in your mind— so I kind of believe in the power of negative thinking in a way. It's really helpful to have thought through all the pitfalls and all the worries and the negatives. And one of the things I've done for many of the expeditions I've been on where I'm really scared of so many things that could go wrong particularly all the vulnerabilities I have because of being paralyzed. I write down a list of all the things I'm worried about, and then instead of ignoring them, I work through them. And for each one, I just go, okay, what's one thing I could do about this to make me feel a little bit better? Because if we feel a little bit better, the likelihood is that we'll actually carry it off a lot better as well. So crazy examples, but when— before skiing across Greenland, I was worried about polar bears me being the thing they would come and eat. So I heard they didn't like loud noises, so I bought a rape alarm and had that in my pocket. I had a special little kind of toilet thing made so that it even had snow feet, but it meant I wasn't going to get a hypothermic frostbitten bottom hovering in an ice cap for an hour going to the toilet. Like, all kinds of little details like this. But I think working through the worries and the fears is a really helpful process as well.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail, as they say. I love that point. I actually want to take a quick detour here for a second and then we'll come back to some more recent past adventures and upcoming adventures. You have a PhD in geology, Karen. I'm curious if you could fill people in on how that came about and if there are transferable skills or learnings or mindsets that you cultivated during that PhD in geology that have been useful and applied elsewhere since then?

Oh wow, that's a good question. I was actually doing some writing the other day. So my PhD was all about something called supergene enrichment of minerals in the Bolivian Andes. The study was all about— so northern Chile has the biggest open copper mine in the world. It's called Chuquicamata. Well, it was the biggest. It might not be anymore. Because the copper has been deposited at the water table, but the reason it's— there's so much there is that, you know, water has percolated down through the rock for years beforehand and leached all of the copper out and then deposited it at the water table. So you get these massively big enriched areas of minerals, and it just— I suppose it just made me think when I was writing the other day about that kind of as a metaphor for life. It's almost like the more that we go through life and the more that we have these experiences and we're kind of percolated through these experiences of life. I think in many ways, if we can keep taking the learning from it, we end up with this very, very rich kind of, uh, matrix of, of something within us that's— that life has given us. Um, the opposite view would be that you end up with just a pile of, of rubble that's just— you've just damaged and broken because of all the experiences of life. But I think There's some geological metaphors that I'm sure I could make. I like to think about supergene enrichment as a good metaphor for life and the processes we go through.

I love that. That's fascinating. I almost find amusing the breadth of different things you've done and are skilled within. I love the way there's a PhD in geology just in there in the mix with everything else. It's fantastic. So Karen, what are some of the more recent adventures that maybe are worth mentioning that have been been, you know, exhilarating? And what are, what are some upcoming ones that you're particularly excited about?

You know, my adventure life in many ways had to go on hold when I was a high-level athlete because you just can't take the time out of your— there's only one time of year, and it would be maybe after the World Championships, or September, October, when you could maybe take a bit of time out and have a little adventure. Many of them have been curtailed, and I've realized how much I missed that. So there have been years in that autumn season when I've gone off on an adventure, and it was always very much frowned upon that I wasn't fully committed to my career. But they've ended up over the last sort of decade or so becoming really cycling-oriented adventures. So I have an absolute passion for the Himalayas, not just for the landscape but the, the Buddhist culture and all the experience when I've been to Himalayan regions. So that's a place that I just haven't been able to stay away from. So So yeah, some recent adventures have involved cycling through various parts of the Himalayas, across Tibet, and down into Nepal. More recently, following the Ganges from source, its source high in the Himalayas, right down to its sacred heart in Varanasi. But yeah, I won the 79th medal for this. I'll just kind of bring in this link to gold that I've got. I've never known anything about numerology, but prior to the Paralympic Games in Rio, there became this joke about me and the number 79 with the team. It just, it began with me asking for drinks extra hot and a barista saying, you need to ask for them at 79 degrees. And then of course I was just this complete diva for asking for my drinks at 79. And then in Rio, I won the 79th medal for Britain. And I was like, I didn't know that, but I saw it on this little video of the first 100 medals for Britain. And there I was on the start ramp with this massive number 79. I was like, oh, that's really weird that that's been a thing all summer. And I'd forgotten that 79 is the atomic number of gold. I should have remembered that as a gold PhD, but, and of course I won the gold medal. So I suddenly got really interested in 79 and climbers all talk about climbing the Seven Summits. And I suddenly thought, well, I can't do that, but I, you know, I'd love to start doing some adventures again and decided I would do 7 continents and 9 rides. So that's been something that's been going on since then. Since 2016. And those rides have all taken place with other people, often who've never done anything like that before. So people who've sometimes never ridden a bike, never camped, don't have any confidence in their body or their physical ability. Some of them have been friends, some of them have been strangers, but they've all just been these, like, just these incredible experiences riding across continents, following rivers and oceans. And yeah, a mixture of writing and making radio programs about it, but really great experiences. And I think a reminder of many things to do with positive emotions that each of those journeys has given me a reminder from gratitude to experiences of love. Like India was just this incredible 5 weeks of riding in this sense of connection with people. Like we were just, people had never seen white skin where we were riding and we were just I was just constantly being showered with love and gifts and just interest. And the group I was with, it was a couple of friends that they ended up getting, deciding to get married during the journey. So the whole journey became about love and it was just really incredible. So yeah, that led to me inventing this project called Quest 79, which is like really asking people to decide to commit to something for themselves that they might not normally do. Just the idea of when we step out of our comfort zone and not too much that we're anxious or scared, you know, the kind of positive stress instead of the negative overwhelm stress, then we can go on this journey of discovery for ourselves. And that usually helps us find some what I call inner gold, but something inside of us that we've perhaps lost or forgotten through the process of life that's maybe broken us a little bit instead of percolated in a positive way. So lots of people have been doing doing some cool things. Some— oh, I've been so inspired by some of the stories and things people have done. And many of them have been sport-related, but not all of them. But, you know, there's a 10-year-old boy decided to climb 79 peaks in 79 weeks. He didn't even like mountain climbing, and by the end of it, he'd raised a ton of money for a children's charity in Africa and got all the people in his community climbing mountains, his family. One guy decided to run his first marathon, but only after 79 people had donated for there was a family member that needed blood transfusions. Someone else decided to write 79 random love letters to strangers and then leave them, plant them, and watch people finding them and see what happens. Just some just really cool stories. So we've now got a card pack. You may have heard of the game Top Trumps, it's a pretty popular card game in the UK at least. So we've got a Quest 79 Top Trumps card pack that shares some of these stories of things people have been doing. So that's a bit of what's been going on in the last few years anyway.

That's amazing. I love hearing that the 79 theme is really cool there. To bring us home here, kind of, I wanna ask you about flow, which is really the through line through all of Flow Research Collective Radio. How has flow shown up within your academic career, your athletic career, and your adventure career? And what are some of the things that you do yourself to increase your, your access to flow and the degree to which you benefit from it?

Well, it's been a really interesting journey for me with flow, especially since I started working for the Flow Research Collective in the last year or so. I think flow has always been a big part of my life. Like, obviously when we're engaging in activities which bring us a lot of flow, be that riding my bike or skiing across an ice cap, kayaking, whatever it is, there's profound moments where I've really experienced it. And the gold medal in Rio was a really interesting experience of flow for me. I just got completely— it's like time was completely distorted, time and space. And I've had various experiences in my racing career where that feels to have been true. Weird experiences where it's— I've almost felt like I'm already at the end even though I'm at the start. I can't describe it, it's just really bizarre, almost like an existential strange experience. But then the time that's passed between then starting the race and finishing was kind of timeless. It's like it, it was kind of infinite, but at the same time it was seconds. Just these weird experiences of some very deep, deep, deep experience. And then clearly down to the much more practical level of flow on a daily basis. And I hadn't realized, I suppose, until I started working for the Flow Research Collective and and learning more about the theory behind flow. I obviously knew about it, but I hadn't really deliberately intentionally worked with the idea of the flow cycle or how to really create flow in, in my life. I think what I've realized is that I'd accidentally been doing it for quite a long time, but what I've become more conscious of since working for FRC and knowing the theory is when it gets broken I really notice it missing. So when something falls down and my flow disappears, it's like my quality of life is completely way lower. It's like something major has gone off skew. So now it feels like I'm much more able to put pieces back in place to get it back on track. So I think having the tools and the theory really helps you be able to create it more. And for me, it's really a— it really comes down on a day-to-day basis about clarity of what I'm doing and what I'm aiming to achieve. So I really know every day, if I'm clear on what I'm aiming for, the day goes well. If I'm not clear and don't stick to it, or I'm ill and something throws me off, then it all kind of falls down and becomes this kind of stressful, chaotic continuum that's just not satisfying to experience. So yeah, constantly experimenting like everybody with all the tools, but clarity of goals, chunking the day up, having tons of breaks. Like, for me, I know that Being— breaking up the work with fresh air and movement is just so important. But I think also a big part of it for me and staying in flow is being brave enough to push against expectations and norms of others. So sometimes I feel like if I have a Zoom call, I have to be in the house, like I have to be at my desk. And I've just started to push back against some of those norms a lot more to help my days work for me, those kind of positive nos. And I realize that when we do that, So I turn up, but I might be on my bike sat in a forest and people suddenly see you somewhere where you're kind of not supposed to be, but it somehow feels like it helps them as well. And everyone cheers up a bit and then it gives other people permission to play around and do things differently. So I'm not sure if that answers your question. It does.

That's a, it's a great answer, Karen. And thanks, thanks so much for your time today. To close us out here, uh, would love for you to share where people can learn more. And if you have any other final closing thoughts, feel free to share those too.

Well, final thoughts. I guess I just, I'm so interested in how we can just keep opening up more possibility. And one of the things that I've really worked on a lot in the last year, which is just fascinating for me, is again, that bending of time, how we can have something that we maybe feel like procrastinating with, or it's just feeling a bit overwhelming, or it feels like it's going to be a big job. And we need a big chunk of time for it. And then if you just play those games and go, okay, I am giving this 45 minutes and that's it, I'm gonna go for it. That's my time. I'm gonna get it done in that time. It's like mind-blowing to me how much we actually can get done in a really focused period when we just have that clarity, set that goal, give ourselves a time and just go after it. And it's super exciting to realize that we can just kind of, I have sometimes have this image of like the kind of martial artist just cutting through everything, and it's incredible how that can work when we get that. So I'm not great at all my social media. I don't tend to go on it much or look at it much, but I do have an Instagram which is @handbikedarke, D-A-R-K-E. I have a website, karendarke.com, again with an E on the end. Don't tend to update it too much. Occasionally might put blogs there, but yeah, there's stuff out and about there when I, when I get get time and put it on my to-do list and get the focus to go there.

Nice. Great. Well, thanks so much, Karen. I appreciate it. This is amazing and really great pleasure for me as well to be able to drop in with you a little bit more. So thank you so much for your time.

Likewise. Thanks, Ryan.

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