RH Episode # 17 - Interview with Shawn Smith Athlete Manager
04/20/20 • 49 min
This week we have an interesting interview by Grant Giles with Shawn Smith, athlete manager and chief editor at Triathlon news website www.trizone.com.au.
In this podcast Shawn speaks openly about athlete management and shares the benefit of his experience.
We speak to the do's and dont's of building and maintaining athlete/sponsor relationships, and the importance of an effective coherent support team.
We also cover some ground from each stakeholders perspective, and the importance of gluing the whole thing together, so it becomes an add for all concerned, rather than a drain.
Shawn shares his advice for budding athletes and their support network, and we speak to the power of patience and resisting the temptation to bite off more than you can chew.
Many athletes rush the brass ring. There is often this propensity toward "making hay while the sun shines". We speak not only of the damage that this limited thinking can do to an athletic career, but also how that thinking and action can stunt your growth as an athlete. A stable financial career requires stability of mind and action, with a long haul overview being the path to longevity as an athlete.
Often the crush to make the bucks leads an athlete to a feast or famine mentality, that can mentally cloud an athletes path. This mindset often leads to rash decisions in the spur of the moment that make their development patterns messy and unsustainable.
Obviously an anxiety around the length of ones career leads to a perception of lack, however that perception is the same perception that rides an athletes back at races and makes it difficult for them to focus. Pressure wears many masks!
Shawn pulls the thing apart for you so you can get a bird's eye view into the blurry world of keeping everyone happy including yourself.
If you are an athlete, a coach, a supporter or part of an athletes family or support network, this one is aimed at you.
If you simply love the nature of sport, here is a view you don't often get to see from the sidelines.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/
This week we have an interesting interview by Grant Giles with Shawn Smith, athlete manager and chief editor at Triathlon news website www.trizone.com.au.
In this podcast Shawn speaks openly about athlete management and shares the benefit of his experience.
We speak to the do's and dont's of building and maintaining athlete/sponsor relationships, and the importance of an effective coherent support team.
We also cover some ground from each stakeholders perspective, and the importance of gluing the whole thing together, so it becomes an add for all concerned, rather than a drain.
Shawn shares his advice for budding athletes and their support network, and we speak to the power of patience and resisting the temptation to bite off more than you can chew.
Many athletes rush the brass ring. There is often this propensity toward "making hay while the sun shines". We speak not only of the damage that this limited thinking can do to an athletic career, but also how that thinking and action can stunt your growth as an athlete. A stable financial career requires stability of mind and action, with a long haul overview being the path to longevity as an athlete.
Often the crush to make the bucks leads an athlete to a feast or famine mentality, that can mentally cloud an athletes path. This mindset often leads to rash decisions in the spur of the moment that make their development patterns messy and unsustainable.
Obviously an anxiety around the length of ones career leads to a perception of lack, however that perception is the same perception that rides an athletes back at races and makes it difficult for them to focus. Pressure wears many masks!
Shawn pulls the thing apart for you so you can get a bird's eye view into the blurry world of keeping everyone happy including yourself.
If you are an athlete, a coach, a supporter or part of an athletes family or support network, this one is aimed at you.
If you simply love the nature of sport, here is a view you don't often get to see from the sidelines.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/
Previous Episode
RH Episode #16 - The Athletes Second Chance
Your second chance is being served to you on a plate. What are you going to do, survive or thrive?
Athletes often tend to miss the importance of moments that contain opportunity. Often in hindsight we identify moments that provided key opportunity’s that we missed, because we were too busy sitting in judgement and making ourselves victims of the situation.
This moment is calling for a key decision, perhaps one of the biggest in your athletic career, what are you going to do with this time? Make yourself a victim of the situation or find a hidden opportunity?
So this weeks podcast is devoted to using this time to develop a strength and a skill that has been hidden from your view in all the noise. The unlimited potential of your own internal focus provided to you courtesy of your own awareness.
The mind is a narrow corridor of your awareness, you have an opportunity to vastly expand its capacity for focus and clarity in a time where the world has vastly slowed down.
Self awareness in athletic terms can take you far beyond the limitations of mind and thought into the twilight zones of becoming one with what you do. You move from self judgment to self awareness.
Awareness is always present, it’s level of effectiveness depends on how much attention you are able to pay to what’s really happening in your experience, rather than what the mind is projecting onto your experience.
When we talk about mindset we pay very little attention to the fact that what we are really talking about is taking away the layers of mind based illusion that covers and clouds our awareness, a virtual removal of the rubbish to expose the real.
An effective “mindset” is in fact a lack thereof, a subtraction of the weight and the noise to allow the innate intelligence to flow into your direct experience. You can’t increase awareness with more thinking, the word mindset is an oxymoron.
So here’s the skinny, not just in terms of sport but also life.
Our identification with the mind is the root of the problem. We believe our thoughts before we believe our experience, it is utterly backwards!
We fail to realise that our eyes are like projectors onto this world. We need to raise our awareness of what we project, because we don’t realise that we are the creators of this reality. I don’t take this lightly, this is not a small opportunity for athletes, it is hands down the greatest. Nothing you can think about or do physically even gets close.
Don’t overlook the power of the awareness In the heart. Your heart is a muscle. With awareness you can learn how to harness its power, It’s not just a physical point in your body that pushes out blood. It’s the centre of who you are and when we are unaware we don’t see or feel its ability to overcome adversity and challenge.
The world is giving you a pause in your crazy world to find something new about yourself that could revolutionise the way you train and race.
Try and see now before it becomes hindsight, this is your chance to work the mental edge hard. If you can get through this, you can get through anything!
You’ll never get an opportunity like this again, you make a choice to endure it or thrive as a consequence of it. Seriously this time is giving you the quiet reflection needed to make substantial gains, don’t piss it away filling it with noise.
Gilesy.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/
Next Episode
RH Episode # 18 - Dr Paris Williams, The Human Metamorphosis
This week we have a discussion with Dr Paris Williams. We discuss the transition that took Paris from world champion hang gliding athlete, to the depths of an intense personal inner transformation and awakening that led him on a journey of exploration of the human condition.
Paris attained degrees in ecology and psychology, specializing in humanistic, existential, transpersonal, somatic and ecological approaches to understanding human nature and healing, becoming a registered Clinical Psychologist and Hakomi Teacher. His exploration led him to conduct research on extreme states, trauma recovery and deep personal transformation, as a result he published the widely acclaimed book, Rethinking Madness.
The podcast theme revolves around human metamorphosis, interwoven with a message of hope for those people who suffer and struggle with self definition and purpose. This is one for both the athletic and general community. It speaks to power of coming to understand the deeper existential truths of the self that impact our enjoyment of the outside world, our place in it, and our impacts on it.
Many of us get stuck in our struggles or find ourselves falling down in life, however what we can fail to realise is that the fall is often a stage in a metamorphosis. The first stage in an important process of transmutation that can move us directly into our own power.
Paris uses a metaphor of the chrysalis in the stage of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the chrysalis stage, the bulk of the caterpillar’s pudgy mass is recycled into the adult features that are meshing together inside the tough shell of the chrysalis. The interior is, at this stage, mostly a nutrient soup, feeding the embryonic imaginal discs as they complete their delayed development into butterfly.
In our lives we can go through a similar experience of inner transformation that will first expose us to our own darkness. It's very easy to get stuck in these first intense stages as we hold on for dear life, when often what is required is a letting go.
In this sense depression and anxiety can be seen as part of that chrysalis, two of the drivers that can alert us that something is not right. When we are in the depths of despair, it is often hard to see it as movement of hope and opportunity.
This podcast shines a light onto the darker areas of the process that illuminates a path of hope, not just for the benefit of humanity, but also for the planet we live on and the impacts we have on it when we are not fully awake in life.
Life is for living and living is for life!
Thank you Paris.
Links -
https://cncl.info/
www.rethinkingmadness.com
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/
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