A Champion’s Mindset: Power Skills We Can Learn from Olympians

The Olympic Games have returned to Paris after 100 years of traveling the world. Commonly believed to be the premier display of athletic prowess across 40 disciplines, many athletes re-evaluate their relationship with their sport as the four-year cycle restarts. Well-known names like LeBron James, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, and Andy Murray have said the 2024 Games is their last and many more have publicly expressed turning their focus to life after sport.

Imagine a world where Simone Biles is suddenly your marketing director. Maybe you see Dr. Katie Ledecky for your kid’s cold. What about all the Olympians or Olympic hopefuls who aren’t household names? How do high-performance athletes prepare for life after competitive sport and what unique skills do they bring to their careers?

Genevra “Gevvie” Stone, MD, OLY has been rowing for over 20 years. Her parents were U.S. Rowing National Team members, her mother a part of the crew that competed in the 1976 Montreal Games. Gevvie herself has competed at three, in 2012, 2016, and 2020 (held in 2021 due to the pandemic). She won a silver medal in the single scull at the 2016 Rio Games, an event where the boat is powered by just one person with two oars across 2000 meters, not a boat taken on by every rower due to the tremendous demand for perfect technique and self-motivation.

We sat down with Gevvie to discuss her career, transition to the emergency medicine field, and the skills workers can learn from Olympic-level athletes.

I took a lot of time to get through my medical training and the rowing I wanted to do. In consequence, I made the transition back and forth a number of times. Both elite rowing and medical school and residency require full focus and significant energy, and I found I couldn’t devote myself to both at once. I went to med school for two years, took two years off to row, graduated two years later, started residency, took two years (what ended up being three years off because of the pandemic) to row again, and transitioned to medicine full time after the Tokyo Olympics.

It’s something I became better at as I did it. Something that helped me was to keep up with both skillsets year-round. So, I was working out while doing medicine, and doing some research when rowing was the focus to stay engaged in medicine. Being a student-athlete in the way someone is in high school or college is a delicate balance.

I dislocated my knee repeatedly as a middle schooler. My mom says I walked into the orthopedic office and exclaimed, ‘that’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ When I learned more about medicine as a career, I found that the balance between interacting with people and helping people in addition to staying academically engaged was the perfect balance for me. In fact, the orthopedist I saw as a middle schooler became my mentor - I ended up meeting with him one day a week for four years in his clinic. 

I miss it. I think it is a huge part of who I am and who I’ve become. I’m still friends with a number of people who actively compete and I’m the athlete representative on the High Performance Committee. I stay involved as a supporter and fan and I’m still a part of the Master's casual level. (We did confirm she’s actually casual about it – none of that six-days-a-week “casual.”) 

A big challenge for me was avoiding comparing myself to others. It was easy to see my college teammates and my medical school classmates graduate and get married and have kids. I could certainly get bogged down by comparing where I was in my personal life and career to people. It took me a long time to realize life’s not a race.

Communication and teamwork are huge in any job you do. Whether taking care of multiple patients or going through stressful situations with a teammate, they're all very helpful in learning those communication skills.

Persistence. It’s easy to get weighed down by big tasks and obstacles. In order to achieve, it’s necessary to break it down into cycles: weeks, days, training sessions, down to individual strokes.

Being receptive of feedback. Often, in the workplace, people are hesitant to give feedback – especially if critical. When it came to sport, when we received both positive and negative feedback, you came to realize it was a coach seeing potential in you and helping to develop that potential rather than criticizing you as a person.

There are so many more skills: time management, accountability, holding yourself to a high standard.

Sport becomes your focus, but different than a job, it's something you’re doing without expecting or guarantee of a prize.There’s a benefit given the experience you have and what you learn from it. You’re not really paid to do what you want to do and there’s no guarantee you’ll make an Olympic team. All these hours are done because of the passion for it.

In applying for residency, Gevvie went through the process of showing her research, highlighting her academic pursuits, and illustrating her skills in interviews. While there were plenty of boxes to check for scholastic pursuits, there weren’t any to mention the sport that had shaped her. 

However, as she went through her residency and spoke with leadership, there was an anecdotal consensus that former athletes were more likely to succeed – to the point that those application forms may start having a box for college athletes to check.

While directly applicable skills like bedside manner or research are hard to build with sport, skills like time-management and communication can help lead to success in all kinds of fields.

So, what skills should workers look to their sports idols for? 

Gevvie points to skills often first established in high school athletics: commitment and accountability. Young athletes meet roadblocks that force them to set strict priorities and boundaries while being honest with themselves and their leadership or risk missing chances they’ve spent years of blood, sweat, and tears working toward.

Translating to the workforce, employees can show commitment in their attention to detail, their willingness to learn new skills, and their engagement with day-to-day tasks. Additionally, adopting a mindset of curiosity and constantly seeking learning opportunities is a recipe for success. Accountability goes hand in hand with humility, an important power skill for workers and leaders alike. 

It’s hard for athletes in the public eye to hide their mistakes. Taking a note out of the late great Kobe Bryant’s book, owning those slips, turning them into learning lessons, and working doubly hard to ensure they don’t happen again is a medal-winning mindset.