Retirement part 5: EMOTION

Sport and startups are endeavours of emotional extremes - the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. But when you step away, how do you fill the emotional void?

Christie Jenkins

Feb 28, 2023

This is blog 5 of a 6 part series on retirement. You should read blogs 1-4 first.

The athletes and founders featured are:

Athletes:

Matt de Boer - AFL player (GWS), now Founder of Athletic Ventures
Cale Hooker - AFL player (Essendon), now Head of Talent and Partnerships at One Future Football
Luke Mathews - 800m and 1500m runner (Olympian), who is taking a pause from elite sport and working as a Valuation Consultant at EY
Me - Trampoline, CrossFit and Beach Volleyball athlete (Australian representative in all 3), and now an Investor at Blackbird Ventures

Founders:

Rod Hamilton - Co-founder of CultureAmp, who stepped down from the Chief Product Officer role and is taking some time to focus on family and decide what’s next
Vaughan Fergusson - Founder of Vend, who sold the company for $500M and is now the Inventor at the Institute of Awesome and deciding what’s next
Megan Bellish - Founder of Bellish, who shut down her company due to burn out, then worked as Head of Founders at Startmate and is now exploring options
Kate Glazebrook - Co-founder of Applied, who stepped down from the CEO role, and is now Head of Impact and Operating Principal at Blackbird Ventures

Extreme emotions

Sport and startups are both endeavours of extremes. Extreme commitment. Extreme goals. Extreme work ethic. Extreme emotions.

And those extreme emotions are addictive.

From the feeling of playing in the zone, where time slows down and you perform perfectly. To the deep bonds of friendship and trust formed with teammates and coaches. To the jubilation of victory against all odds.

As I retire, I worry whether I will be able to find those emotions in other areas of life. And if I can’t, will I ever feel fulfilled again?

This post is about emotion.

First comes grief

For every athlete and founder who retires, there comes a series of moments where it sinks in… that part of my life is over. And I can never get it back.

The best way to describe this emotion is grief. It’s loss. It takes time to process it and can’t be rushed.

‘If I'm honest some days, I get quite low. What if I've just sort of conditioned myself to have to have this crazy thing and without it I just don't feel right?’ ~ Vaughan

‘It's very natural to feel grief, like true grief.’ ~ Kate

‘When you’re in this vulnerable and burnt out stage, your resilience is gone. And then you have to go and do this super vulnerable thing and officially end it. It’s hard. Very hard… You can think you are ready for something new, and you’re not.’ ~ Megan

‘There are phases to any major transition, whether it's work or life outside work. The first bit is letting go. We have this tendency to move on to the next thing before we let go of the thing we’re moving on from. So for me, the first step is to pause, and be neutral for a while. And I don't think it’s meant to be easy to do that. It's not obvious until you are in it that it is actually hard to break the habit of jumping straight into something else.’ ~ Rod

Missing out on the highest of highs

I asked each person what they will miss the most in retirement. And the answers were simple - we will miss the emotional highs.

From the intensity of high pressure moments…

‘In the game, when you’re on, you feel powerful and everything is working out. That feels electric and is incredibly addictive’’ ~ Matt

‘I miss competition. The pressure of game day. The crowds. There’s nothing like it.’ ~ Cale

‘I miss being out on a limb and running hard at something I loved.’ ~ Megan

‘I was always someone that got really nervous and probably pushed on the side of having anxiety before races. But now that I look back, I think being nervous and having that pressure was more like a privilege. You walk out and you're in a stadium and you're like, holy shit, there's so many people here. You're nervous because you're about to run in the National Championships or the Commonwealth Games. Feeling that is a privilege.’ ~ Luke

…to the celebration of victory…

‘The best feeling in sport is the 30 minutes after you’ve won a game and you’re just reminiscing how good was that? How good were you and your team mates! You’re exhausted. You’re victorious. And the DOMS haven’t set in yet.’ ~ Matt

‘Working hard as a team to hit ambitious goals. Seeing how people from all across the business work together - like running some of our global customer events and seeing how much we’ve helped our customers. This was us at our best. I will definitely miss being part of those things.’ ~ Rod

‘When you run well and you have that jubilation and that excitement… I look back now and I think there's nothing that I'll ever do again in my life where I'll have that feeling of winning a national championship or winning a Commonwealth Games medal or winning a race. That feeling of euphoria is literally unmatched.’ ~ Luke

…to a sense of importance, or impact…

‘Being a founder gave me a sense of doing something bigger than me. I’m doing something that’s important. I’m doing something that could have a really big impact. It gave me a very clear reason to push that hard.’ ~ Megan

‘800k candidates have come through the Applied platform. We have a lot of feedback from candidates and from organizations about the impact every week of what we do. And that never gets old. Never.’ ~ Kate

…and being part of something bigger than ourselves

‘I would get the most satisfaction from the individual interactions with employees. Just individuals who are grateful for help and the realisation that you've actually impacted someone's career or their work… Feeling like you are contributing and having an impact outside of yourself.’ ~ Rod

‘What I’ll miss most is the shared pursuit. Before I had this team goal. I never wanted to let my teammates down. I needed to be the best version of myself so I could help my team achieve. And now I’ve just lost that.’ ~ Matt

‘The other thing as well that I love about the World Champs and the Olympics is you're on a team with like 70 people - long jumpers, high jumpers, sprinters, distance runners, throwers. It's like that's a unique thing where you are living in a camp environment for 12 days and you can't really replicate that in any other area of life. It's hard to describe those feelings.’ ~ Luke

‘There is something really captivating about being in a team of people or working toward a goal that you genuinely really care about. You don't have to ask ‘why should I get up in the morning?’ It's so obvious why you would get up in the morning.’ ~ Kate

Of course there are emotional lows too. For athletes, injury, loss, getting cut from a team, slumps in performance. For founders, rejection from investors, firing staff, a scathing media article, or running out of money. But the extreme lows only make the highs feel higher.

Filling the void

‘If you can no longer feel those emotional highs from your sport or startup, are you getting those feelings somewhere else?’

When I asked this I was met with shrugs, blank stares, and people asking me for advice. We are all looking, but it seems like no one has really found a good answer.

‘I get some of that feeling from social basketball, but it’s not the same.’ ~ Cale Hooker

‘I’ve signed up to play AFL next year. Maybe kicking a match winning goal will give me some of the feeling that racing used to.’ ~ Luke

‘I never questioned my relevance at Applied. I mean I certainly questioned whether I had the right skills and whether I was learning fast enough and whether I was doing the best job I could possibly do. But I never questioned whether I was relevant.’ ~ Kate

‘I’m trying to find something where I can start learning new things and enjoy the pursuit and challenge of that. As athletes we are used to daily feedback, so finding something where you feel like you are growing with embedded feedback loops fulfils that craving.’ ~ Matt

‘When I was running Bellish I forgot to look after me. My body, my mental health, my most important relationships - all of that got pushed to the side. My most important priority this year is rebuilding all of that.’ ~ Megan

I knew filling the void would be tough, and the way I’ve thought about it so far is to not look for one thing that delivers every emotion that elite sport did - it’s probably impossible to find. Instead, I separated all of the emotions from sport, and I’m trying to patchwork them together across all different parts of my life.

The pressure of competition and having to perform in front of a crowd? The best substitute I’ve found is keynote speaking. You only get one shot with the audience, and your reputation is on the line.

The deep bonds I have with my coach? Some of that emotion is filled through relationships I’m building with my manager and new mentors.

The privilege of getting to inspire younger athletes? The mentoring and coaching I’m doing in my career in venture capital is a similar feeling.

The physical sensation of pushing through exhaustion to succeed in a tough training session? Well, there is no reason I can’t still do that in the gym.

Feeling like I am tangibly improving and learning new skills? I started taking circus and Brazilian Ju Jitsu lessons (and tried my hand at fencing, skiing, kite surfing and indoor skydiving too!) Each week I learn something new.

The sensation of being in the zone? Deep work - especially writing - induces the same mental state.

It is not one thing that helps fill the emotional void for me. It is many.

Finding emotional balance

None of the sports I played ever paid any money. Because of that, I’ve always had a work career alongside my athletic career. For context, I typically spent $30-40k a year on my sport (paying my coach, travel expenses, tournament entry, recovery treatments etc), and I made less than $5k a year in prize money and sponsorships.

One benefit of that was I felt more emotionally stable, or balanced. I had two careers to draw fulfilment from, and if I had a bad day in one, I could still feel good about the other. There is even research that shows athletes doing something meaningful off-field, had improved on-field performance.

‘I think that whatever you're pursuing - sport or career - you always have to have another interest. I don't think you can be a hundred percent consumed in what you're doing, you have to have a passion for something else. I had university and then work as an outlet from sport.’ ~ Luke

‘It's unhealthy for us to have just one source of fulfilment. You do want to vest some of yourself in something else to give yourself a sense of emotional robustness.’ ~ Kate

‘It’s a balance. All through high school, you study and you train. I went to uni and I studied and I trained and played. I got drafted and mum and day said ‘you’re still studying uni, you’re not dropping out.’ I always had this allocation of time that was for study and other things. I felt that moving forward in two different pursuits helped me.’ ~ Matt

Matt also started Athletic Ventures 2 years before he retired from AFL.

These days, I have a single career, and more of my emotional eggs are in one basket. Ironically, retirement has resulted in less emotional balance for me.

At the end of the day, most athletes and founders aren’t optimising for balance. Instead they are seeking excellence, or impact, or rapid progress. When we retire, we each get to make a decision on what we are optimising for. In some cases it’s balance…

‘I’m enjoying all the things I couldn’t do when I was playing. Going snowboarding, travelling… all the fun stuff.’ ~ Cale Hooker

…but for others balance doesn’t quite feel like the right answer. What each person recognises though, is it’s their choice.

‘This might not be healthy, but I catch myself thinking life is pretty short. You've only got a finite number of days and if you're not maximising every day and contributing a large chunk of your time on the earth to do something that's extraordinary, then maybe you're missing an opportunity. And the reason why I wonder if that's healthy is there are also people who just love being in the moment and they seem pretty happy too. Maybe the answer is both. It's not attaching all of your self worth in the aspirational pursuit of doing extraordinary things. It's having that balance of ‘I can do both’. I can stop and enjoy life and smell the roses as my mom used to say, but also know that when I need to I can go and do, by other people's measures, extraordinary things.’ ~ Vaughan

Friendship and belonging

‘I’ve slept with your wife. And she gives great hugs too.’

My two friends laugh, and look lovingly at each other. They got married last year, and now have a daughter together.

I did sleep with her. Usually squashed together on a spare mattress a friend was willing to let us stay on as we travelled the country on a budget that barely had room for peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. And I hugged her – sweaty, passionate hugs filled with adrenaline and joy.

She was my first beach volleyball partner, and over a decade ago she’d been my partner for my first National Tour season.

Extreme emotional ups and down – rarely found outside of sport or startups – means you form deep partnership bonds. The best friendships are built from shared striving, shared suffering, and sharing spare mattresses!

But when you retire, what happens to those relationships? After a few months I found myself wondering ‘Am I still friends with the people I used to play with? Without sport, do we have enough in common to sustain our friendship?’ I’m not the only one.

What I learnt from listening to others speak about this challenge was it takes proactive work to stay connected. You don’t have the structure of scheduled training or a shared office to maintain your friendship. But for the people who really matter, it’s worth the effort.

‘The founder friends I have… I miss them a little bit because I’m not in the trenches, but I also think founders get that being a founder means that sometimes you are working on something and sometimes you aren’t. But I’ve definitely taken a step back.’ ~ Megan

‘I kind of miss the community of the early Vend team. When we were just 10 to 30 people and we were very much in the zero phase. We hadn't even reached one yet. We were just trying to make it work and that was super fun. It was really challenging but also fun and rewarding. So I've been kind of reconnecting with some of the really early team.’ ~ Vaughan

‘There are some teammates that I’ll always speak with. I’m invested to see how they go. And some of them are now part of Athletic Ventures so we’ll stay connected. AV is the club you never have to leave or retire from.’ ~ Matt

‘I'd be naive to think that my friendships in running haven’t weakened a bit. I see people less and a friendship or a relationship is exactly like training - the more you put into it, the more you're going to get out of it. But at the same time, I definitely don't feel a disconnect because one, I'd like to think that I did enough in my career to have respect from people. And two, I am still a massive athletics fan. Even though I haven't raced in a while, I don't really miss a race… watching it or going to the race. Even if I never run or race again, I will never not enjoy the sport of athletics and I'll never not enjoy Australians running well at the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games or my friends running well at a Nationals. I don't feel disconnected because I still am connected to the sport.’ ~ Luke

‘Part of the challenge that I'm feeling stepping out of the role is one of belonging. The thing I loved most about Culture Amp was the people I worked with. It's like, ‘what is the thing you belong to now?’ I've always really loved that feeling of being part of a team and working with the team. And at the moment I'm in an ambiguous space. I'm still part of the team, but I'm not really in the trenches with them.’ ~ Rod

A few weeks ago I went to see a World Tour Beach Volleyball event held in Australia. It was hard to sit in the stands and watch rather than compete. I felt like I was an outsider looking in, whereas always before I’d been an insider.

And yet the best part was seeing all the athletes, the coaches, and even the umpires that I’d made friends with from around the world. Those bonds are still there. And they made me feel like I still belonged.

Final thoughts on emotion

We are privileged as athletes and founders to experience extreme emotions. The intense pressure, rarely found in the regular world, pushes our feelings right to the edge of the human experience. We live those extremes - both low and high - for so long that it becomes our normal.

‘There were definitely times, like for example, at the Olympics, where I probably didn't appreciate how big of a thing that was because I ran terribly. There were times when I didn't appreciate it and then there were times where I took it all in and thought, ‘yeah, this is pretty amazing experience what I’m doing.’ ~ Luke

Our brains become hardwired to crave those feelings. And when we retire, each of us is left searching for those feelings in other parts of our life. Each of us is wondering, ‘will I ever feel the same highs again?’

I hope the answer is yes. But I’m still looking. I admire the people who are walking the path to finding fulfilment without needing such emotional extremes, and I hope to continue learning from them.

‘You should practise everyday this little bit of gratefulness or appreciation for everything that you have. You don't need to be climbing a mountain in order to feel successful or self-worth. I have family, I've got friends, I've got health, I've got all these other things. But I think I always come back and say ‘yes, but..’’ ~ Vaughan

‘I partly want to force myself not to fill the void to see what comes from it. I've craved that sense of belonging. I've craved that sense of team. I've craved being part of a group like that. I don’t know what I'm like if I don't have that and part of the transition is ‘hey Rod, let that go for a while and see what comes with it’. It's not a comfortable thing to do… It feels a little rudderless. But it's also liberating as well. It's freeing.’ ~ Rod