Eva’s Story

5 Lessons I have learnt about mental resilience and mental health from rowing

I started rowing at 20 years old just as I started my second year of university. I was approached by my current coach at the university sports fair and asked if I wanted to try and get on to the World Class Start programme. This programme aims to get people with no prior rowing experience onto the GB Team and competing at the Olympics. This blog post is about not the physical gains I have achieved in the last two and a half years, but the mental lessons I have learnt.

I have always been a sporty person, playing for multiple sports teams at school and university, but I had never trained or competed at a high level in sports. So, having someone approach me and ask if I wanted to go to the Olympics was a huge step! At first, I was doubtful but an important conversation with my mum taught me that when I have doubts about doing something out of my comfort zone, the best thing to do is just go for it! Give it a go without putting expectations on myself. If it doesn’t work out that’s fine and I can move on knowing I won’t have regrets for not trying… but if it does work out, think of how amazing the whole experience will be!

So, LESSON #1: Embrace new experiences that put you out of your comfort zone, but don’t put pressure on yourself, enjoy the experience!

Two and a half years on I have caught the rowing bug and fallen in love with being a high achieving athlete. Being able to push myself physically and mentally every day at training is great and I get to meet so many amazing people. Of course, the time hasn’t been without ups and downs. Despite my lesson #1, I do naturally have very high expectations of what I want to achieve and when. Although I know that going to the Olympics is a very long-term goal, it is easy to beat myself up if I have a bad day at training. This can seem like a silly notion - what’s the point in being so disappointed from one bad day or even one bad session? I have plenty of time to develop and improve but sometimes I just want it to be the case NOW.

So, here is where I have learnt my LESSON #2: Patience.

This is my coach’s favourite reminder for me: be patient and trust the process. What we are trying to achieve is huge. I picked up a sport from scratch with not much high-level sporting experience and I am aiming the go to the Olympics. It is going to take time and it is going to be one heck of a journey. With experiences like these it’s important to take a pause sometimes, look at what you have achieved so far, and be patient.

I am also a very competitive person and the fact of the matter is that in sport you can’t win every time. You are going to be knocked back but you must dust yourself off and go for it again. I believe that mentally this can be tough. Sometimes you put all the hard work into your training and when you finally get to compete and test yourself, you come up short. This is where my next lesson learnt comes in:

LESSON #3: Resilience

I have come to love the expression “You Win, or You Learn”. A lot of the time you won’t win (notice how I haven’t written the word “lose”). However, when this happens you will learn so much more in the long run and become so much more resilient than if you won at everything you did. This isn’t to say that, mentally, not winning can’t be heart breaking, and you just want the euphoria of absolutely acing whatever it is your doing. I have learnt to let myself feel those difficult emotions but afterwards it is even more important not to dwell but to think about what you have learnt from the experience.

My fourth lesson is how I came to learn about my inner critic voice. We all have that inner critic that will put us down and stop us from achieving our full potential. I call my inner critic “The Comparison Queen” because I tend to compare myself to others and put down my own capabilities and believe that I am not enough to be worth comparing to others.

LESSON #4: My “Comparison Queen”.

The good news is that I have learnt to identify the thoughts of the Comparison Queen and am getting better at not letting them affect me if they pop up in my training or in competition. I love the quote of the Two Fighting Wolves. The bad wolf is your inner critic and represents anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, etc. And there is the good wolf that represents joy, peace, hope, faith, etc. Do you know which wolf will win? The one you feed. It’s not easy but learning not to feed my Comparison Queen has been an important lesson.

Overall, that’s a lot to learn and work your way through, right? And a lot of the time I mentally let my thoughts and emotions build up inside to the point where I can feel miserable for days.

Most important lesson I have learnt is: LESSON #5 Talk about how you are feeling!

Be open to the people closest to you. Talk about your emotions and thoughts. 100% this is the best way I have found to make sense of all my thoughts if things become too overwhelming and I believe that this is the most important lesson to learn for mental health generally. Through all of these lessons I have become mentally stronger (and therefore able to push myself more physically too!).