This week’s episode is a conversation with Leadership and Mental Performance Consultant Chrissy Holm.  Chrissy’s career in athletics has been a unique one.  Despite being heavily recruited to play basketball at the collegiate level, she went to the University of Michigan and became an NCAA champion and Gold Medalist in the Under-23 World Championships in…wait for it…rowing, a sport she had never competed in before matriculating at Michigan.  She went on get a graduate degree in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Brunel University in London, where she competed in…wait for it…netball, a sport we had never heard of prior to this interview, before returning to the U.S. to coach rowing at the University of Minnesota.

We talked to Chrissy about her path as an athlete and coach, the pivot points that directed and saved her career, and the role that compassionate coaching, mindfulness, and yoga principles played in her development as an athlete and a professional.

More on Chrissy can be found here.

“As coaches, I think we should go back to the oldest model, which boils down to relationships.  If you think about it, you’re getting two to three hours a day with your athletes.  What’s going to carry with them for the remaining twenty two hours of their day?  Is it the instruction you gave them?  Is it you yelling at them?  It’s the relationship.  That’s what really carries over.  Where we need to go in terms of coaching styles—people think it’s this new way, but it’s really the oldest way.  Human beings are hardwired to connect with one another.”

– Chrissy Holm