The first speaker was Jackie (Jacqueline) Ros, founder of Revolar, a safety wearable for runners and everybody, really. Her word was confidence.
She developed Revolar because her little sister is a sexual assault survivor, and a phone often isn't fast enough to call for help ... particularly because 9 out of 10 times, your attacker is someone you know, and safety isn't black and white. With a touch of a button, you can have a friend virtually walk you home and map your run. You can press it once to check in, twice to make your phone ring - convenient excuse to get yourself out of a situation where you feel off - and three or more presses will send for help.
Ros chose confidence as her word because she believes it is the number one thing holding women back. We have an unconscious bias, saying sorry for having an idea when we should own that. For her, confidence has overwhelmingly been the thing that has gotten her foot in the door.
As a start-up/small business owner, naive confidence has been the best thing on the planet. She had no idea that building a hardware company was so much harder than building a software company, which is also why it's been harder getting investors.
(The tiny white thing at her waist is the Revolar.)
The second speaker was Laurie Nakauchi, a teacher and ultrarunner, who chose superpower as her word.
Nakauchi, an ultrarunner who has finished 11 Leadville 100s, said that she was terrified when she was first going to speak, but knows that you have to step into fear.
She picked her word for two reasons:
- We're really good at pumping each other up, but so hard on ourselves - why do we do that?; and
- As a teacher, she always teaches that we have superpowers and kids always believe it, but adults? Not so much.
We need to realize what our superpowers are. We don't often take the time to figure out what they are, but we can never use them if we don't know what they are.
Her superpower is the power of "Why not?", saying "why not?" when someone suggests something to her. It's how she got into her first marathon and long distance running, how it got her into ice hockey, how she got involved with the Iditarod, and how she and another friend (or two) became the first women to run the Colorado Trail.
The final speaker was Siri Lindley, world champion triathlete and coach, who chose gratitude as her word.
Her talk was amazing and contained a lot, so I'm going to do my usual and condense it down to bullet points.
- The reason for her writing her book (Surfacing) was to help people.
- She was riddled with fear and anxiety as a kid, but at the same time, had an incredible imagination with incredible dreams.
- We can be so paralyzed by fear that it can hold us back from doing anything great.
- Our mind is here to protect us from pain and fear and failure, but it's not the voice we should always listen to in our lives.
- We are so amazing as human beings; we have hearts as gifts. We can do anything we want in our lives. Fear is okay; bring it along with you, but do the thing anyway.
- When we fail/fall is when we figure out what we're made of and how we can be better - failure is a gift.
- Tony Robbins - growth leads to progress; progress leads to happiness.
- A bad race is needed to catapult you to the next level; look at bad races as opportunities to learn and grow.
- Where focus goes, energy flows; you truly create your destiny with how you think.
- We owe it to ourselves to step into the unknown, take a chance, and strive for something way beyond ourselves because if it is important, we will get it.
- She is so grateful for everything that has happened in her life. When struggle comes her way, it's okay, because she knows that something amazing is going to come out of it. If you keep your mind on that fact, the struggle is easier to bear.
- Focus on what you have and not on what you don't have.
- Saying eff it and doing it anyway is an empowering thing.
- Often times, it's when you least expect something amazing to happen is when that something does ... but you have to hang around long enough for it to happen.
She mentioned something at the end of her talk that reminded me of a message that Jen Szabo had last month - we sometimes need someone to believe in us first ... but we have to feel it ourselves for it to come to fruition.
I should mention ... because I've forgotten to thus far ... is that if you ever want to listen to these talks yourself, they are always posted live on the Skirt Sports Facebook page during the event and then in the video section afterward. I highly, highly recommend listening to Lindley's talk, especially.
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