Changing Lanes
Changing Lanes
Family business leaders are not the only people who have to meet the challenge of planning for life after a successful career. This fascinating article deals with the issue of ‘succession’ from the perspective of elite athletes.It’s interesting to note that are there are many similarities between the issues faced by young athletes at the end of their sporting careers and family business leaders looking to create a new life for themselves.The Sunday Age 30-5-2010 by Ardyn Bernoth - http://www.theage.com.au/sport/changing-lanes-20100529-wmkf.html
Dealing with these issuesAs discussed in our last issue though the problems often seem intractable the processes for dealing with these issues is relatively straight forward –
The key is often the involvement of an ‘outsider’ who can take the sting out of what can often be a highly charged situation.
- Identify the current state of play
- Clearly define desired outcomes
- Introduce some simple tools & processes
- Develop a One Page Plan
The key is often the involvement of an ‘outsider’ who can take the sting out of what can often be a highly charged situation.
YOU would think winning three Olympic gold medals and being lauded as one of the greatest distance swimmers to have lived would be enough achievement for a lifetime. Not for Grant Hackett.
''I told my wife, if I am only remembered for my swimming career, I will be disappointed,'' Hackett says.The swimmer, who hung up his Speedo LZR suit in October 2008, is as ambitious for his life after sport as he was as a four-year-old cutting his first laps. The man who spent 24 years ''swimming up and down that black line'', churning the water to capture 10 world championship gold medals and successive gold in the 1500 metres freestyle in the Sydney and Athens Olympics, now thinks ''there is more to life than a sporting career''.
Part of his post-sport persona is in plain view; he has a gig on the Nine Network's Postcards program and Wide World of Sport. But he is in front of a camera, on average, one day out of seven. For the rest of the working week he eases his 198-centimetre frame behind a desk at Westpac. Hackett has morphed from aquatic hero to banker. He is involved with Westpac's private client business and is about to launch a new unit to manage the ''wealth and financial risk'' of athletes and entertainers.
''I knew that when I retired I had to move into something I was passionate about,'' Hackett says. ''Then, I had to completely immerse myself so I did not give myself the opportunity to look back and think about the glory days. I had to realise I couldn't go straight in at the top. I had to be prepared to start all over again.''Many elite athletes do not see things as clearly when the lights go out on their sporting careers.Dr Nathan Price from the Australian Sports Commission's athlete career and education program says simply that some athletes leave sport unprepared for ''life on the outside''.''They have little in the way of skills, a career and the things which mean they can move on with life,'' Price says.
Hackett estimates less than 25 per cent of athletes are prepared for life after sport.''It is a hot topic. Things have changed a lot in the past five years but they still have further to go,'' Hackett says.The problem lies at the centre of each athlete's being - their identity. Many athletes' identities and their self-esteem are linked entirely to their sport. When they retire, they can be left with little sense of worth, little sense of who they are.
As Claire Mitchell-Taverner, a former Olympic gold medal-winning Hockeyroo, says of retirement: ''The very core of who you are is really challenged.''
Athletes can enter a period of ''mourning and grief”, Price says. ''When they give up sport, they lose so much - their sport, the limelight, their social circle and their support networks.'' The loss of identity is so great it can cause them to spiral into depression - some go into clinical depression and have to be professionally rehabilitated.
Olympic swimmer and silver medallist Scott Miller, Olympic diving gold medallist Chantelle Newbery and champion cyclist Jobie Dajka are some high-profile names who have fallen into the grip of depression and substance abuse following their sporting careers. Dajka was found dead last year after battling years of depression.
Those athletes who successfully reinvented themselves once the cheering ended started the process long before retirement.
Hackett started planning for a life on dry land at least two years before the Beijing Olympics, his last competition.
With the words of Dawn Fraser ringing in his ears - ''One minute you are meeting kings and queens, the next minute no one wants anything to do with you'' - Hackett began arranging meetings with people in the areas in which he was interested, media and finance.
Early in 2008, he met with Gail Kelly, head of Westpac, and set up a job, though Beijing and potential retirement were still months away. He also prepared psychologically for retirement by reading books about identity.
As he speaks, enthusing about utilising the characteristics that made him a world champion in other areas of his life, he gives the impression that the transition from superhuman to mere mortal was relatively easy.But he admits it has been a struggle, the hardest thing being the blunt realisation that he had to start again. Doors were open to him, but not at the top. ''There is pride to contend with. But you have to swallow your ego and just get on with it,'' he says.
Hackett also credits his parents, who always strictly enforced the rules of their household: ''No good grades, no sport.'' This dictum did not desert him and many years later as he swam for Australia he ''chipped away'' at a commerce law degree. Not busy enough with careers in media and finance - as well as having a wife and eight-month-old twins - he is now also doing an MBA.
In his ''wildest dreams'' he thinks about returning to the pool, trying to bag the third gold medal in the 1500 freestyle that just slipped his grasp in Beijing.
''I do miss it, I miss that feeling of winning, but given the opportunities I have now, I would feel like a failure if I went back,'' he says.
IN SEPTEMBER 2008, Shane Wakelin ran onto the MCG as a Collingwood player for the last time. He had played 252 games in a 15-year AFL career. ''Mentally, I still had the passion and desire to compete, but my body just couldn't get through another season,'' Wakelin says.
But rather than depression, Wakelin says the feeling initially was exhilaration. Like Hackett, he had planned ahead. He threw himself into a role on the corporate finance team at Deloitte and into environmental activism as an ambassador for the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation. ''There was a sense of relief when my footy career ended, I was definitely ready for a new challenge,'' he says.
But over the following few months dawned the difficult realisation that nothing he would do would compare to the thrills he had experienced in football.
Wakelin had done all the right things and never let football consume his identity. He says he always had other interests and studied for a bachelor of science and then an MBA in accounting and finance.
But he has still been through a difficult time since his retirement. The hardest thing has been the change to his physical and emotional self.
''I really miss all those things you take for granted as an athlete - being super-fit, being outdoors, the camaraderie with teammates, the opportunity to challenge yourself every week, to build yourself up for competition and all the emotion involved in that.''
You watch as your stomach bulges and it is a dent to your ego, he says. Suddenly, from being one of the most competent in a particular field, you are in an environment where you are inexperienced and unsure.''You are sitting in meetings feeling awkward and intimidated. It's quite a change,'' Wakelin says.
The AFL and the AFL Players' Association take the issue of footballers carving a life for themselves outside sport seriously. The career development manager for the association is former Hockeyroo Mitchell-Taverner. Like the Australian Sports Commission, the association is speaking to footballers while they are still playing to try to get them thinking about a post-sport career.
''We start conversations with them about what else they are interested in and what assets and experiences they can bring from football to a new career. It is certainly a process, not a half an hour chat,'' Mitchell-Taverner says.
She says it is hard to get athletes to think about the end of their careers when they are fixated on winning the next game or competition.
Price agrees. ''Some do not want to be distracted from the task at hand. Talking about another career can be almost taboo,'' he says. But he says the Australian Sports Commission's career and development program is managing to reach and give advice to most of its 3000 athletes. As testament to this, about 900 are enrolled in university courses.
''We try to get it so that their identities are not exclusively linked to their sport. Then the transition out is much easier,'' Price says. This transition is far rockier when the athletes do not choose to retire.SWIMMER Samantha Riley had no plans to quit her career six months before the Sydney 2000 Olympics. After breaking world breaststroke records, winning gold at the 1994 Commonwealth Games and then being named female world swimmer of the year, she strained towards gold in Sydney.
In April 2000, she contracted a kidney infection, was hospitalised and did not make the team. ''No part of me was prepared for that at all,'' Riley says.
She was able to keep busy with speaking engagements and sponsorship commitments in the lead-up to the Games, but sitting in the stands watching her teammates swim was devastating. ''I had put 10 years of my life into swimming, I just could not move on straight away. I had to allow myself to feel disappointed,'' she says.
There was pain and some ''darker periods'', she says. ''As time goes on, it gets easier, but it was so hard. My life was all mapped out - all the competitions, all the people around me helping to achieve that.''Not long after she retired she made a pivotal trip with other athletes and coaches to East Timor. ''We met children and athletes there and I saw what joy sport could bring. It helped give me perspective and make me see the Olympics was not everything.''
She says she realised that in many ways athletes lead a selfish life, with everyone around them (coaches, masseurs, dieticians) focused on the athlete and how to make them better. So, she decided to focus on making other people better and in 2001 started a swimming school in Queensland.Now, she can even put a positive spin on failing to win her ultimate prize, Olympic gold. ''Perhaps if I achieved all my dreams I would have just hung up my boots after I retired, not ventured into something else,'' she says.Riley is now happily married, with three young children. Her advice to other athletes is that ''life after sport is good, just don't expect the same highs and lows''.
PETER Antonie, regarded as one of Australia's greatest rowers, with gold in the double sculls at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, also bowed out of his career around the time of the Sydney Olympics. But he is unusual among athletes in that he had started preparing for the moment 13 years earlier.Antonie had been rowing at an international level since the late 1970s and it had dominated his life for 10 years. A personal drama in late 1987 sparked a crisis.
''It was quite dramatic, what you call a watershed, I suppose. I could see there was nothing else in my life other than sport and I knew the sport would not last. I had to find another life for myself,'' he says.So Antonie literally began walking up and down Melbourne's city streets, knocking on the doors of big banks and property companies. He ended up bagging a position with the ANZ trainee program and began working with them in 1988 as his rowing schedule allowed.
Retirement, when it came, was a relief, he says. He is now chief investment officer with funds management firm Mutual Trust and from his Collins Street office can look down at the Melbourne University boat sheds where his first career began.
He is an example of what Price would like to see become more common among Australia's athletes. ''No one wants to see our athletes cast on the scrap heap once their careers are over; it's not good for them and it's not good for the country's reputation.''
''I told my wife, if I am only remembered for my swimming career, I will be disappointed,'' Hackett says.The swimmer, who hung up his Speedo LZR suit in October 2008, is as ambitious for his life after sport as he was as a four-year-old cutting his first laps. The man who spent 24 years ''swimming up and down that black line'', churning the water to capture 10 world championship gold medals and successive gold in the 1500 metres freestyle in the Sydney and Athens Olympics, now thinks ''there is more to life than a sporting career''.
Part of his post-sport persona is in plain view; he has a gig on the Nine Network's Postcards program and Wide World of Sport. But he is in front of a camera, on average, one day out of seven. For the rest of the working week he eases his 198-centimetre frame behind a desk at Westpac. Hackett has morphed from aquatic hero to banker. He is involved with Westpac's private client business and is about to launch a new unit to manage the ''wealth and financial risk'' of athletes and entertainers.
''I knew that when I retired I had to move into something I was passionate about,'' Hackett says. ''Then, I had to completely immerse myself so I did not give myself the opportunity to look back and think about the glory days. I had to realise I couldn't go straight in at the top. I had to be prepared to start all over again.''Many elite athletes do not see things as clearly when the lights go out on their sporting careers.Dr Nathan Price from the Australian Sports Commission's athlete career and education program says simply that some athletes leave sport unprepared for ''life on the outside''.''They have little in the way of skills, a career and the things which mean they can move on with life,'' Price says.
Hackett estimates less than 25 per cent of athletes are prepared for life after sport.''It is a hot topic. Things have changed a lot in the past five years but they still have further to go,'' Hackett says.The problem lies at the centre of each athlete's being - their identity. Many athletes' identities and their self-esteem are linked entirely to their sport. When they retire, they can be left with little sense of worth, little sense of who they are.
As Claire Mitchell-Taverner, a former Olympic gold medal-winning Hockeyroo, says of retirement: ''The very core of who you are is really challenged.''
Athletes can enter a period of ''mourning and grief”, Price says. ''When they give up sport, they lose so much - their sport, the limelight, their social circle and their support networks.'' The loss of identity is so great it can cause them to spiral into depression - some go into clinical depression and have to be professionally rehabilitated.
Olympic swimmer and silver medallist Scott Miller, Olympic diving gold medallist Chantelle Newbery and champion cyclist Jobie Dajka are some high-profile names who have fallen into the grip of depression and substance abuse following their sporting careers. Dajka was found dead last year after battling years of depression.
Those athletes who successfully reinvented themselves once the cheering ended started the process long before retirement.
Hackett started planning for a life on dry land at least two years before the Beijing Olympics, his last competition.
With the words of Dawn Fraser ringing in his ears - ''One minute you are meeting kings and queens, the next minute no one wants anything to do with you'' - Hackett began arranging meetings with people in the areas in which he was interested, media and finance.
Early in 2008, he met with Gail Kelly, head of Westpac, and set up a job, though Beijing and potential retirement were still months away. He also prepared psychologically for retirement by reading books about identity.
As he speaks, enthusing about utilising the characteristics that made him a world champion in other areas of his life, he gives the impression that the transition from superhuman to mere mortal was relatively easy.But he admits it has been a struggle, the hardest thing being the blunt realisation that he had to start again. Doors were open to him, but not at the top. ''There is pride to contend with. But you have to swallow your ego and just get on with it,'' he says.
Hackett also credits his parents, who always strictly enforced the rules of their household: ''No good grades, no sport.'' This dictum did not desert him and many years later as he swam for Australia he ''chipped away'' at a commerce law degree. Not busy enough with careers in media and finance - as well as having a wife and eight-month-old twins - he is now also doing an MBA.
In his ''wildest dreams'' he thinks about returning to the pool, trying to bag the third gold medal in the 1500 freestyle that just slipped his grasp in Beijing.
''I do miss it, I miss that feeling of winning, but given the opportunities I have now, I would feel like a failure if I went back,'' he says.
IN SEPTEMBER 2008, Shane Wakelin ran onto the MCG as a Collingwood player for the last time. He had played 252 games in a 15-year AFL career. ''Mentally, I still had the passion and desire to compete, but my body just couldn't get through another season,'' Wakelin says.
But rather than depression, Wakelin says the feeling initially was exhilaration. Like Hackett, he had planned ahead. He threw himself into a role on the corporate finance team at Deloitte and into environmental activism as an ambassador for the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation. ''There was a sense of relief when my footy career ended, I was definitely ready for a new challenge,'' he says.
But over the following few months dawned the difficult realisation that nothing he would do would compare to the thrills he had experienced in football.
Wakelin had done all the right things and never let football consume his identity. He says he always had other interests and studied for a bachelor of science and then an MBA in accounting and finance.
But he has still been through a difficult time since his retirement. The hardest thing has been the change to his physical and emotional self.
''I really miss all those things you take for granted as an athlete - being super-fit, being outdoors, the camaraderie with teammates, the opportunity to challenge yourself every week, to build yourself up for competition and all the emotion involved in that.''
You watch as your stomach bulges and it is a dent to your ego, he says. Suddenly, from being one of the most competent in a particular field, you are in an environment where you are inexperienced and unsure.''You are sitting in meetings feeling awkward and intimidated. It's quite a change,'' Wakelin says.
The AFL and the AFL Players' Association take the issue of footballers carving a life for themselves outside sport seriously. The career development manager for the association is former Hockeyroo Mitchell-Taverner. Like the Australian Sports Commission, the association is speaking to footballers while they are still playing to try to get them thinking about a post-sport career.
''We start conversations with them about what else they are interested in and what assets and experiences they can bring from football to a new career. It is certainly a process, not a half an hour chat,'' Mitchell-Taverner says.
She says it is hard to get athletes to think about the end of their careers when they are fixated on winning the next game or competition.
Price agrees. ''Some do not want to be distracted from the task at hand. Talking about another career can be almost taboo,'' he says. But he says the Australian Sports Commission's career and development program is managing to reach and give advice to most of its 3000 athletes. As testament to this, about 900 are enrolled in university courses.
''We try to get it so that their identities are not exclusively linked to their sport. Then the transition out is much easier,'' Price says. This transition is far rockier when the athletes do not choose to retire.SWIMMER Samantha Riley had no plans to quit her career six months before the Sydney 2000 Olympics. After breaking world breaststroke records, winning gold at the 1994 Commonwealth Games and then being named female world swimmer of the year, she strained towards gold in Sydney.
In April 2000, she contracted a kidney infection, was hospitalised and did not make the team. ''No part of me was prepared for that at all,'' Riley says.
She was able to keep busy with speaking engagements and sponsorship commitments in the lead-up to the Games, but sitting in the stands watching her teammates swim was devastating. ''I had put 10 years of my life into swimming, I just could not move on straight away. I had to allow myself to feel disappointed,'' she says.
There was pain and some ''darker periods'', she says. ''As time goes on, it gets easier, but it was so hard. My life was all mapped out - all the competitions, all the people around me helping to achieve that.''Not long after she retired she made a pivotal trip with other athletes and coaches to East Timor. ''We met children and athletes there and I saw what joy sport could bring. It helped give me perspective and make me see the Olympics was not everything.''
She says she realised that in many ways athletes lead a selfish life, with everyone around them (coaches, masseurs, dieticians) focused on the athlete and how to make them better. So, she decided to focus on making other people better and in 2001 started a swimming school in Queensland.Now, she can even put a positive spin on failing to win her ultimate prize, Olympic gold. ''Perhaps if I achieved all my dreams I would have just hung up my boots after I retired, not ventured into something else,'' she says.Riley is now happily married, with three young children. Her advice to other athletes is that ''life after sport is good, just don't expect the same highs and lows''.
PETER Antonie, regarded as one of Australia's greatest rowers, with gold in the double sculls at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, also bowed out of his career around the time of the Sydney Olympics. But he is unusual among athletes in that he had started preparing for the moment 13 years earlier.Antonie had been rowing at an international level since the late 1970s and it had dominated his life for 10 years. A personal drama in late 1987 sparked a crisis.
''It was quite dramatic, what you call a watershed, I suppose. I could see there was nothing else in my life other than sport and I knew the sport would not last. I had to find another life for myself,'' he says.So Antonie literally began walking up and down Melbourne's city streets, knocking on the doors of big banks and property companies. He ended up bagging a position with the ANZ trainee program and began working with them in 1988 as his rowing schedule allowed.
Retirement, when it came, was a relief, he says. He is now chief investment officer with funds management firm Mutual Trust and from his Collins Street office can look down at the Melbourne University boat sheds where his first career began.
He is an example of what Price would like to see become more common among Australia's athletes. ''No one wants to see our athletes cast on the scrap heap once their careers are over; it's not good for them and it's not good for the country's reputation.''
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