What's Next? Navigating The Post-Sport Life

By Melinda Harrison

As an athlete who is “all-in,” every day you hold yourself accountable to a goal that started with a dream. By the time you are labeled an elite athlete, the pattern of your days becomes routinized, almost automated. You plan your life around a practice schedule, nutrition needs, strength and conditioning requirements, ongoing physiotherapy, early season competitions, and end-of-season performance.

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You might complain of tired muscles, the challenge of self-imposed expectations, intense pressure to perform, and gut-wrenching moments of failure. But each day, when your alarm goes off, you get up and embrace the routine even when it may feel like a grind. In many ways you are pulled along by a system set up to make you the best.

And then, all of a sudden, that system can disappear.

Many things can end an athletic career: a sudden injury, an illness, a lack of financial resources, an aging body, failure, graduating from college, being traded or fired, or just reaching the peak of your capabilities. Each of these circumstances can present unique challenges for the elite athlete. All of them are cause for pause because life as you have known it (often from a very young age) has changed fundamentally.

Change is challenging if you are not prepared for it, and may be magnified by feelings of loss in different ways. The first step to working through change is creating awareness around how it is affecting you. For the athlete, change can happen on three levels:

• Your Body: As an elite athlete, you have molded and shaped your body through intense training and care. Constant self-regulation is required to nurture your high-performance machine. That includes workout routines, proper nutrition, sleep, and the recovery time necessary for performance. As you shift away from this regulated life, you may feel a sense of freedom. Depending on the age you started in sports, this newfound freedom from the focused care of keeping your body at a high level of functioning may be a staggering change. And that change may affect how you start to feel about yourself and your body day-to-day.

• Your Emotions: Equally important is an awareness of the change that is occurring in your head and heart: what you are saying to yourself and how you are feeling about yourself. You may experience negative thoughts and limiting beliefs about your future. It is natural to think that you may never find the passion in another activity that you felt for your sport. Depending on how you exit your sport, there may be regrets and second guessing about how you could have improved results. You may also feel some emotion around feeling incompetent because you’ve not yet built new expertise. Doubt can creep in and create a negative swirl of self-judgment. In your athletic life, you developed an immense amount of grit as you managed the emotional rollercoaster of high-performance life. Because you have always found a way to cope and succeed, you may believe that you can push through and figure it out. Still, there is a dark side to this strength because it means you may end up ignoring your feelings. If you are experiencing this, reach out to an appropriate doctor, psychologist, therapist, or a coach for help. Working with someone can help you manage your emotions as well as speed up the process of your post-sport transition during the complicated process of change.

• Your World: Overnight your world may have transformed. Previously, your day-to-day interaction with coaches, teammates, competitors, doctors, physios, nutritionists, and trainers were a given. But on a deeper level, you lived to perform and accepted the corresponding expectations and pressures from, and comparisons to, others. Many athletes are used to being compared to others through hours of conversation about who is faster, more agile, stronger, and who is on or off the team. The powerful influence of constant comparison is only bolstered when repeated by friends, family, teammates, the press, and social media. But when this world of routine, performance, and ongoing comparison to others evaporates, you are no longer living in the spotlight. You may feel unsure as you say good-bye to the world that you have known.

As the door closes on your former life, some of these changes may apply to you but only you will know to what depth. And the door does not often close in a ceremonious way. Few athletes get a press conference to announce their retirement. This includes the high school basketball player who does not get the chance to play in college, the runner who had great promise but injury prevented them from future opportunity, or the volleyball player who trained another four years only to miss qualifying for the Olympic team.

So when the time arrives for you to focus on your future, here are a few suggestions that will help you navigate change into the next chapter of your life:

1. Honor your physical body: Create a new routine of self-regulation around sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Exercise is not “training” and that takes time to get accustomed to. As you move forward, the hours that you previously committed to training will now need to be compressed into your new schedule. Find a physical activity that will allow you to feel positive about completing it. The relationship between an active physical body and mental well-being is a topic of much research in the last few years and evidence* shows how much exercise can contribute to physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

2. Put words to what you are feeling: If you are struggling with the feeling that you are no longer accomplishing anything, take thirty minutes and write down what you did accomplish. This can shift your perspective to seeing what you are capable of. Once you understand that, you can start to deal with those emotions that unsettle you. Recognize that time is on your side; you did not become great in your sport overnight. Likewise, this next part of your life will also require patience and should be viewed as a journey.

3. Embrace something new every day no matter how small: It might be making a new friend, reading a book, making a meal, going on a job interview, or traveling somewhere just for fun. Write down these activities in a journal. Over a year you will have found 365 things that you have embraced. Expansion takes time. You will experience failure, but you have already dealt with failure in the past and you can deal with it in the future.

4. Give back to someone who can use your help: You had so much support and help over the years. There are many people who are not nearly as fortunate as you have been. You can make a difference in someone else’s life through volunteering or helping someone in need with a simple act of kindness such as holding the door open for someone or writing a thank-you note.

One final word of advice: you are a champion. Know that you have done it before so you can do it again. Your future will be built around a new team. Start creating that now.

Melinda Harrison, PCC, OLY, author of Personal Next: What We Can Learn from Elite Athletes Navigating Career Transition, is a former Olympic swimmer, is a professional certified ICF PCC Level Executive Coach with extensive experience on goal discovery and pathways to attainment. Having personally navigated from Olympian (Los Angeles 1984) to businesswoman and from volunteer to community leader, she is devoted to helping individuals move from one level of success to the next.

* Choi KW, Chen C, Stein MB, et al., “Assessment of Bidirectional Relationships Between Physical Activity and Depression Among Adults: A 2-Sample Mendelian Randomization Study.” JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(4):399–408. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.4175