I asked Drew if he would let me interview him when I heard him talk about being out of his comfort zone a lot, and he said it with joy!

Drew has many examples, but I will share today what he told me about his role as the Executive General Manager of High Performance at Cricket Australia.

Being approached for a role is not a new experience for Drew – winning Olympic gold medals makes you fairly high profile – but this one surprised him “I was called by one of our former athlete management representatives,  he rang me out of the blue and asked ‘What are you doing right now?’ And I said ‘I’m walking around the athletic field watching my son do cross country training’. And he clarified ‘what are you doing workwise”. The answer was rowing and coaching.

“He then asked would you consider another sport? And I said, ‘what sport’ and he goes ‘Cricket’.

“I didn’t know anything about the sport at all!”

Drew had no experience in cricket, none as a performance manager and had lost his job as head coach of the national rowing team just 12 months earlier.

But what he did have was a lifetime of being bold and giving things a go.

Drew credits his dad and his coaches with that approach to life “what I’ve been encouraged always do is stick your hand up have a crack at something, it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to make mistakes.”

Drew is also okay with not knowing and being open about that. “What I’ve worked out is it’s okay to show that you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not across it. But asking questions and that sort of stuff is what makes me feel more comfortable.”

He took on the role – trusting that the CEO, and athlete manager knew him well enough to be know if he was the right fit – and hope they would not judge his lack of cricket specific knowledge.

An unusual sense of optimism is one of Drew’s personality traits that enables him to take risks. But he also has a lot of self-awareness. Drew knows that he is more comfortable failing in front of strangers than people he knows “To go to a surf beach as a kid, where you don’t know anyone, but there are others surfing I felt relatively okay with giving that a go. But if I came to my local surf beach where I knew everyone on the water, I found my apprehension would go through the roof. And sometimes I would talk myself out of going in the water.

“What I’m suggesting here is we have to get to know ourselves first. Work out the things that either trigger us positively or negatively about a situation.”

Drew is also aware of his motivations – committing to at least one other person is a great way for Drew to not ignore his alarm in the morning!

When it comes to things like public speaking, Drew uses tactics learned as a rower to ground himself. “It didn’t make the nerves any better. But what I generally found was it meant that my mind was less active. And so the thoughts or self talk slowed down.

“The interesting thing about self talk is when your self doubts and your self talk really get magnified, and almost to the point where it’s sort of stopping you and debilitating. When I was rowing if you put your hand in the water, it’s amazing. If you just feel the viscosity, you feel a temperature and all that stuff. It’s like your mind can’t be anywhere else apart from feeling that and so it slows everything down. It just gets you away from the past, present, future dynamic, and also the positive, negative dynamic. It gets you into ‘it’s just water and just the temperature and it’s just the feeling’. It’s the same thing with breathing. I think breathing helps us in that way a lot. And so I find whenever I’ve got to lead a meeting, or do a presentation of any sort just taking a few deep breaths and centring yourself into you what really matters most now. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the anxiety or concern go away, but they go away enough to give you insight.”

Drew’s advice to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable is to start small. Try something new. That small change, being uncomfortable, gives you a new perspective and can be the catalyst for bigger changes. Maybe even a gold medal or three?

Thank you so much Drew!

A bit about Drew:

A life of passion for family, sport and adventures. Working in high performance is a gift and since transitioning as an athlete into my work life it’s been a privilege to engage with great people working to achieving great outcomes.