Pivot With Purpose — How To Navigate Life Transitions | Apolo Ohno

Apolo Ohno (0:00)

If you need to make a hard pivot, lean into the pain to create more urgency around the momentum that you must create. And that is the foundationally important factor, which is the hard work.

You do that consistently. You lean into that. You use it. You recalibrate. You try it again.

Michael Gervais (0:17)

Okay.

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And for this week's conversation, I'm very excited to welcome back to the podcast, the one and only Apollo Ohno, a 2019 inductee into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame. Apollo still holds the title for the most decorated American at the Winter Olympics with eight medals as a short track speed skater. So after hanging up his skates in 2010, Apollo found himself struggling with purpose and confused about how he was going to navigate his transition from sport.

Transitions are real for all of us. And as we all know, a lot has gone down in the last four years, where we have all had to navigate some real shifts, and there's been a ton of uncertainty. So Apollo was first on the podcast back in 2019, and it's a privilege to have him back on the studio to hear how he's taken his mastery of the hard pivot in speed skating and applied it to life. His best-selling book, aptly titled Hard Pivot, Embrace Change, Find Purpose, Show Up Fully, details this journey while offering up five golden principles for practical and psychological steps toward success. When it comes to reinvention and resilience and vulnerability, Apollo has walked the walk, and I can't wait to share his insights around navigating transitions, the constant pursuit of new goals, and how managing energy and attitude are integral to high performance. So with that, let's dive right into this week's conversation with a Finding Mastery favorite, Apollo Ohno. Apollo, it's great to have you back on. It's great to see you.

Apolo Ohno (2:15)

Yeah, it's good to see you, man.

Michael Gervais (2:15)

You look great. You sound great.

Life is pretty good for you, it feels like.

Apolo Ohno (2:19)

Life is good. I'm healthy. So that's like the number one thing.

Michael Gervais (2:23)

Okay, so congrats on hard pivot, like the book and all the thinking that went into creating that. And so congrats on that. I'm stoked to talk about your lessons there.

And I thought maybe what we would do is zoom right into one of your first transitions. You've had many, but one transition that grabbed me. And I want to read a quote to you. This was after your final games, your final Olympics.

You said you were, quote, confused, vulnerable, and adrift without purpose, and that you didn't know what was next, but you knew that you wanted to change.

Can you bring me into that experience and that phase of your life?

Apolo Ohno (3:05)

Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably very similar to every Olympic athletes' experience when they retire, or they decide to retire, or they're forced to retire. I mean, it was just hyper competitive, wanted the simplicity of saying, well, I was really good at one thing. I want to be the best at the next thing. But there's no roadmap or experience or understanding of what those skill sets and attributes would be.

And so I always call them the guardrails, right? The guardrails that you have that kind of kept you aligned in that focus. It was like the training program, the coaches, the teammates, the family, like the head nods of approval of affirmation that you're doing something that is good and you're good at it and therefore this is your purpose.

That was pretty like center and clear for me for 15 years.

Michael Gervais (3:49)

That's a really cool wrinkle that you just added, which is the other people giving you head nods and affirmation like you're on the right track.

Apolo Ohno (3:56)

Oh yeah, that was a huge part of it.

Michael Gervais (3:58)

And so how much of you was looking outside to see if you were okay?

Apolo Ohno (4:02)

Like if I was on the right track?

Michael Gervais (4:05)

Yeah, or just that you're okay because what you just described is like, feels like those guard rails would help you stay the course and there's a calibration experience there that would be awesome.

Left in an unsophisticated way, that is problematic, which is like I'm looking outside to see if I'm okay, to see if I'm on the right track, to see if I'm training the right way, to see if da-da-da-da. So that type of externalizing a sense of who you are and how you're doing life is dangerous. How did you parse that just that one part?