Hong Kong's Yvette Kong reflects on learning to embrace life beyond swimming and how an athlete's sporting journey can be the foundation for what comes next.
Yvette Kong overcame mental health struggles to achieve her dream of competing at Rio 2016, before stepping away from elite sport ahead of Tokyo 2020 and building a career out of the pool.
Drawing on her experiences as an athlete, Yvette has now founded her own company focused on helping people thrive in a world increasingly driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
We caught up with her in Lausanne, where she visited Olympic House to sign the Olympian Wall, to discuss her transition from elite sport and the importance of seeing yourself as more than your sporting identity.
One of my biggest realisations on my mental health journey was that well-being and performance go hand in hand. In swimming, there is a saying that a happy swimmer is a fast swimmer, and I think that is true in many senses.
I only learned that relatively late in my career. I had been so focused on the output and had allowed results to define me. I became much healthier when I shifted my perspective and looked at myself as a human rather than just a swimmer.
As athletes, we focus a lot on achievement – but achievement at what cost? The question that stayed with me throughout my sporting career, and then into other areas such as the workplace and teaching, was: can we strive to be our best and live out our best while still feeling whole and in one piece?
More than a swimmer
It was hard to let go of the sport that I loved so much and had trained for so many hours every day.
It was also a transition of identities. I had to accept that I was more than a swimmer, even though my life had been consumed by swimming, and learn to appreciate the different sides of myself.
That didn't come naturally, and I had to keep reminding myself of it. But we are humans, not just athletes or swimmers. There is so much potential within us – we only need a little patience and courage to unlock it.
Ready for the age of AI
Before the age of AI, we focused heavily on skills: do we know how to do something?
But the age of AI asks something deeper of us, something that many athletes already possess, and that is capacity. It asks how we adapt, thrive and keep moving forwards.
The good news is that many of us are already equipped with these capacities through our sporting journeys.
There is no reason athletes should not feel excited and confident about moving into different fields. It takes the belief that we can also do well in other areas.
The athlete journey is a foundational building block – it is not the end.
Finding an anchor
If I had to pick one human capacity that every athlete should build alongside their sport, it would be agency.
Agency has several meanings, but most importantly it is about knowing who you are, understanding why you want to do something and understanding the deeper purpose behind it. It's asking why and following that why.
We live in a time when there is a lot of information and a lot of uncertainty. Without an anchor within ourselves, we may become lost. Without that anchor, it is difficult to be our best and pursue what we want.
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*This story was originally published on Olympics.com*
