Wellbeing & Engagement

The Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement team at the Queensland Academy of Sport are essentially an athlete’s coach away from their sport.

They aim to bring the best version of the athlete to life through career education, personal development, and connection to community.

Every aspect of your life can influence your state of wellbeing.

Know your personal values!

Personal values can be shaped by all aspects of your life: training, school, work, family, friends and personal experiences. These can shape who we are, how we behave and how we judge what is important.

As an athlete, it can be really easy to come up with words that describe who you want to be, for example, fast, strong, an Olympian or Paralympian. However, this doesn’t describe who you are, which is much richer and more diverse.

To be the best version of yourself, it is important to find more about YOU and your ‘WHY’, not what you think your coach or teammate wants you to be.

So, what are your personal values?

My personal values are (try for at least 5):

________
________
________
________
________

Live your personal values

By identifying your values, you can begin to design a life that is in better alignment with yourself, but you might ask;

“How do I actually live my values in everyday life?”

Try these simple tips!

Below is a link to the AIS Athlete Wellbeing Modules! The Wellbeing Modules provide athletes with entry-level learning on a range of wellbeing & engagement topics that are important in high-performance sport. We highly recommend that you check them out!

Modules | Australian Institute of Sport (ais.gov.au)

Know your WHY

Knowing your ‘why’ is an important first step to any pursuit in life. It can help you find purpose with clarity, motivate you when the chips are down and put you on a rewarding trajectory to create a life you enjoy.

Once you know ‘why’ you do something, the question is, ‘how’ do you do it? Your ‘how’ is embedded within the systems and processes of your actions.

‘What’ you do is relatively easy to understand. It is usually a job title or a description of what you do when in pursuit of your ‘why.’

Why do you get out of bed early to go to training before school? Why do you compete? Many people talk about being an elite athlete but not many people talk about why they want to be an elite athlete.

Why you do something weaves a lot deeper and can help bring clarity and drive!

Your ‘how’ is embedded within the systems and processes of your actions. It’s about living your values and having discipline with them. For example, you might decide that being ‘open-minded’ is important to you. So how do you live this? Think about your sporting environment – are you open to taking on coach feedback and experiment with new suggestions? Can you look at a skill execution problem from a different angle?

You might explain how you do something different or unique to others to achieve your goals. How do you train, eat, or recover to ensure you are preparing yourself for competition whilst looking after yourself.

What do you do?

An athlete trains and competes in a chosen sport and/or discipline with the aim of winning.

Stop and reflect

Pretend this is a gold medal; Why, how and what lead you to obtaining this in the Brisbane 2032 Games? Start at the heart of the achievement and work your way out!

My Answer:

__________________________

Keep your answer somewhere safe so you can pull it out again in 2032! You might just be preparing for the Brisbane Olympics or Paralympics. How amazing would it be to read your ‘why’ from 10 years ago.

This concept has been drawn from the work of Simon Sinek.