Ep.010 Athlete Story Podcast

Athlete Transition. How To Present Yourself Without Your Sports Gear Ft Pam Baker & Katherine Johnson

Athlete Transition – How do you present yourself?

When you’re quitting sports and you’re trying to find your new way there’s this bit of doubt of, “Who am I actually? I’m the athlete but I’m also a lot of other things.” Everybody is used to seeing you as the athlete. You will have all these doubts coming in on, “How do I even present myself as the non-athlete?”

How do you come across as the personal you really are – authentically and confidently? Those are legitimate questions for anybody. But in particular when you are in a transition. In this episode we will talk  with Pam Baker and Katherine Johnson who offer a career planning framework and image consulting, respectively. Together they offer joint workshops about your verbal and visual presence.

You have various strings to play on when you tell your story or deliver your message. Words is the most obvious one for us humans but before you even open your mouth you have usually already communicated some things by the way you show up.

You know this from people wearing uniforms and what that communicates whether it’s a school uniform, a nurse or a fire fighter.

Katherine helps her clients align the way they show up and present themselves physically with what they wish to communicate.

Pam is the expert in verbal storytelling and how to connect you values with the way you talk about yourself.

The transition is a great time to make sure you are heading in a direction you like. It’s an opportunity to get aligned with your values and a chance to present yourself as the person you are and want to be, so that you can be seen, heard and valued for who you really are as Katherine Johnson says in this episode of Athlete Story.

In this session we cover points like

→ How do I reflect who I am NOW – and how do I bring forward who I was and the confidence I can find it that

→ How can you as an athlete envision your future career and communicate that with authenticity and no noise on the line

→ How are you showing up in the world and can people really see and hear you ?

→ How Katherine and Pam got into working in these fields

→ and a whole lot more

Presence isn’t the majority of who we are – but it is the first impression. Some of the themes they work on with their clients are

  • Discovering what are the qualities that they want to communicate to themselves and outwardly
  • Integrating the “who I was, who I am now,” to uncover what does that mean in terms of the types of work and career that I want to have. Where is the intersection between those values, interests, and skills?
  • What can they let go of?
  • Career prototyping

You can also watch a video version of this interview here.

READ the transcript of full interview by clicking here.

athlete transition - presenting yourself without your sports gear

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Athlete transition career planning expert - Pam Baker

«Do we allow ourselves to connect, or do we have that mental armour up about, “I was this person,” or, “Now, I’m trying to fit in so I’m leaving that athlete identity behind so that I can be like the rest of the folks around me.” It’s not necessarily either or, it’s really about all of ourselves being integrated to allow us to connect in that authentic way that we all really crave.”

Pam Baker

Founder of Journeous, Journeous

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Athlete transition image consultant Katherine Johnson

“These transitions are really good opportunities to stop and reflect on who you are now, what you want to move toward, how you want to connect with people, what qualities about yourself do you want to share. When we do that piece first, then we can look at the very tangible act of, “What do you put on your body?” Because you cover 80% of your body with clothes, you want to create a sense of congruent and that you are genuine. It’s a sense of confidence that you know yourself well enough, that you represent yourself in the best light possible.”

Katherine Johnson

Image consultant and former elite squash player, Spark

About our guest

Katherine Johnson is a former elite squash player who after sports trained to become an educator. After a few different jobs in the private sector and as a teacher. Her biggest lessons in life after sport is that life isn’t linear and how she ended up in image consulting was not something she had seen coming.  In fact her first reaction when a therapist suggested she pursue that was:

“No, thank you. I’m too deep for that. I would never want to talk to someone about clothes”

What she finds rewarding is that there’s, in fact, a lot of depth in the work as an image consultant the way she goes about it and that she gets to play a very supporting role.

It’s still surprising to me that it has to do with our visual appearance, but it ends up, it’s a piece I’m really good at. It makes sense to me when you actually look at the person first, when you connect with who you are.”

Pam Baker has a background in the corporate world where she led lots of different teams and hired lots of people for 20 years.  Seeing how so many people would sooner or later get to a point where they think. “I don’t think this is what I want to keep doing but I have no idea how to figure out what I do want to do,” she started to look into how we actually prepare our careers.

This became the basis for her career planning framework, Journeous where her mission as she says is:

“How can you give folks some of the insights and perspectives, and the ability to be able to create the career path that they find meaningful so we’re not looking at 7 out of 10 of us dreading going to work every day or not really engaged in the work that we’re doing? Because to me, it’s exciting to think about, if all of us brought our whole selves to work, what could that mean? I think it’s incredibly powerful. That’s really why Journeous came to be, to enable that, and enable that before people get to a point where they say, “Oh, I don’t like this at all.”

Here are the links to the gifts Pam and Katherine mentioned:

www.journeous.com/vision

www.katherine-johnson.com/gift