83: Caragh McMurtry - Championing Neurodiversity in Sports from Olympic Rowing to Advocacy

When  Caragh McMurtry, a former Olympic rower for Team GB, shares her tale, it's not your typical sports saga. Our episode zooms in on her dual identity as an elite athlete and a neurodiversity advocate. Caragh's experiences highlight the untapped brilliance of neurodivergent athletes and the pressing need for a shift in the sports world's approach to these exceptional minds. Her journey, marked by both remarkable triumphs and deeply personal struggles, paints a vivid picture of the athletic landscape through a neurodivergent lens, challenging listeners to rethink their views on mental health and inclusivity in high-stakes competition.

This episode is a clarion call to coaches, athletes, and sports enthusiasts alike, illuminating the path to a new chapter in 's life and possibly for many others like her. Post-retirement, she transforms adversity into advocacy, leveraging her story to ignite change and inspire others who are navigating the tricky waters of identity beyond their sports careers. As you connect with Caragh's relentless drive and dedication to making a difference, prepare to be moved and motivated by the transformative power of embracing neurodiversity in the competitive arena.

Tune in to learn more about:

- Her impactful wave through neurodiverse charities 

- Gaps in the sports sector around the understanding, supporting, and proper inclusion of neurodiverse athletes and those facing mental health problems 

- The long period of athletes masking up their differences till retirement due to the ongoing stigma and discrimination against neurodiverse athletes 

- Challenges she faced throughout her sporting journey as a neurodivergent athlete before getting the proper diagnosis 

- How she constantly leaned on her resilience for a successful sporting career 

- The real journey of learning about herself after getting the proper diagnosis 

- The stigma and discrimination she still faced as steps were made to make an inclusive sporting environment 

- Why sports clubs, athletes, and supporters should wholeheartedly embrace diversity

- Nuggets of wisdom for young and retiring athletes 

… and so much more! 

Are you looking for Career Clarity for your next step, for more information, or to book a consultancy, make sure you check out www.2ndwind.io 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Firstly I'd like to say I think in 10 years time they'll realize there are a lot more athletes that are neurodivergent than is kind of believed at the moment. But I think hopefully there'll be a realization that every single person is neurodiverse, neurodivergent Neurodiverse describes everyone's differing neurology and behavior traits. No two people's brains are the same. It's like fingerprints. Neurodivergent are those who sit a bit further from the norm. It's kind of a social construct as such.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yeah the standard deviation from a median is off we go yeah.

Speaker 1: 0:36

But then you think about elite athletes. Well, surely they're not normal, because if they were normal they wouldn't be excelling and beating everyone else. So that's why, yeah, so many of the characteristics.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Hi, I'm Ryan Gonzalez and welcome to a second wind Academy podcast, a show all about career transition through the lens of elite athletes. Each week, I invite a guest to the show who shares their unique sporting story. Please join me to delve into the thoughts and actions of athletes through a series of conversations. Don't worry, there's plenty to learn from those of you that aren't particularly sporty. Elite athletes are still people after all. Let's be inspired by the stories of others.

Speaker 2: 1:21

His guest is Kara McMurty. She is a former Olympic rower for Team GB who began her career through the project awesome scheme. As a junior, she won a silver medal and won places on senior eight and women's four squads throughout her career before competing at the Tokyo Olympic Games as a neurodivergent athlete herself. Her diagnosis and mental health made it difficult to continue to function as a successful athlete. Now Kara decided to retire to form neurodiverse sports, to advocate for better treatment for similar athletes and to tell those stories that she herself has gone through. So she brings together people from across the UK and the world to hear and tell their stories on being neurodiverse and the power that brings for them. Kara, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Thank you. Thank you for having me Absolute pleasure.

Speaker 2: 2:13

I hope that today I'm going to certainly learn a lot about you, your life and sort of the transition that you have made from being a world-class rower, a world-class athlete in its purest sense, to really the impact that you're having on individuals today Awesome. So, kara, I'm interested to know about what you're up to today, retired athlete. You know in the introduction we're talking about the impact that you're having through the neurodiverse sort of charity, so can you just share a little bit more about who you are and what you're up to today?

Speaker 1: 2:49

Yeah, sure, so I mean you covered it a bit, but I think what I'd like to highlight is that what we know in retrospect to be innately autistic characteristics in myself made me a very, very good athlete from the start. So I came from a kind of council estate background and Project Awesome was really aimed at getting state school kids into rowing and, yeah, I kind of my attention to detail, my hyper focus, that pattern recognition, all of these traits that are quite common to autism. They made me very good and I ended up winning a silver medal at the Junior Worlds in the under-23s, kind of from very much training on my own and that's very unusual. And I know that at juniors I was the only kind of state school kid racing on the GB team that year. So that's me really bigging up the sort of neurodivergent characteristics and how they can be strengths. But when I started rowing on the team, I guess my differences weren't necessarily embraced and everything that I knew you know everything that I knew worked for me and the way that I got the best out of myself, that wasn't okay because it was different and that's really what kind of I guess started that kind of battle with mental health issues and then the misdiagnosis of bipolar. So I think my career was there are some things that I'm proud of and I'm sure we'll go over that but there's a lot that could have been better and as much as some of that will be my doing and my learning, and perhaps if I had had role models I would have known what to do and what not to do earlier, and that's part of what I'm trying to do with neurodiverse sport.

Speaker 1: 4:32

But there's definitely a lot that needs to change in the sports sector as well around understanding of neurodiversity and different styles of thinking. We discussed it before we started recording and different behaviors and how purely autistic behavior. I say autism but it's ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and other conditions as well. But purely neurodivergent behavior is not difficult behavior or bad behavior. When you see bad behavior, it's usually unmet needs and people feeling isolated and like they can't be themselves. And actually if the sports sector better supported these athletes and staff, what people would thrive. There'd be a lot less safeguarding issues and ultimately I think you'd see a lot better performances. Some of the world's best athletes are neurodivergent. I think in those cases it's kind of like they've just luckily stumbled upon an understanding coach or they're that spectacular that no one can argue with their differences. For anyone who's kind of just behind that, it's very potluck as to whether you're going to find somebody understanding a system that's understanding and really kind of make it. That's the motivation for neurodiverse sport, the organization that I founded, yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:46

For me. Thank you for that, because the way you articulate it is wonderful, a great understanding for me in terms of, certainly, who you are right now and what you're about. I mean, it's interesting for me because, as I grew up, sport for me was a place of diversity. Indeed, for me, I saw sport as one of the only places or platforms where things were equal, or at least you only judged based on what is essentially that physical ability to play the game or do the sport or to get across the line first. What you've described is that difference. Perhaps it's not necessarily when you are in the boat, but perhaps out of the boat, out of the water, but it was the differences there. That's where perhaps there was less of an acceptance for you. Is my understanding about right?

Speaker 1: 6:37

It's absolutely right. I remember having that kind of view of sport when I was younger and I was really drawn to sport because, well, firstly, I was a pretty hyperactive child but also you might not think it when you listen to me, but I don't love talking it was a way for me to speak through my actions and not my words and to gain respect and to communicate in a way that was less stressful for me. It was therapeutic. It was a way to express myself, to feel part of a team but to not have all the attention on me and my interactions with people. When I was at my community rowing club, I didn't feel judged at all. People were volunteers, the coaches were volunteers, people had jobs. It was just a lot more understanding. I think.

Speaker 1: 7:23

Then, when you get to the professional level, I guess perhaps it's because it just feels like the goalposts are really narrowed, not just in terms of performance. If it was just performance, that would be okay, because my performances generally spoke for themselves, but then, like you said, for me off the water or for someone else it might be off the track or whatever. It was those interactions that were under the microscope when I was performing. Well, it was kind of like car is blunt, car is honest, that's okay, that makes her a winner. But as soon as you get ill or injured, people kind of then pick on what makes you different and they create a kind of pattern and they think that must be why. Then you get the comments like you need to sugarcoat things. It was said to me if you were on the men's team, your bluntness would be seen as passion. But you're not. You're on the women's team, so you need to sugarcoat things. There's just loads and loads and loads and loads of instances like that until you feel like you're a walking bunch of rules. That's genuinely how I felt.

Speaker 1: 8:21

It's exhausting. That's kind of what I was talking about masking earlier. I basically said to you you asked me how I was and I said I'm really quite saturated at the moment. I've got a lot on. I'm fine to talk. I just might not be able to mask. So like, for instance, you asked me a couple of opening questions and I gave you a one word answer because I was like I can't think of what you want me to say right now. I needed more a question to prompt what I was going to say. I was like so yeah, but masking can be really, really exhausting and I think that is a lot of what causes people's mental health problems, because they're putting so much energy into just basically acting all the time.

Speaker 2: 8:59

Yes, just as you're saying that, it just gets me thinking of, wow, that the amount of energy that it must consume in order to walk in book of rules, but in order to conform to whatever the team norms or to that team culture. And if your natural self is, for whatever reason, different diverse in this instance, I suppose but brings a level of diversity to it, then that saps a level of energy that, to be honest, you should be using towards your sport or the performance itself, rather than that.

Speaker 1: 9:31

That's masking, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 9:33

And so now you're, and so through neurodiverse sports. Just let me know, then, what is the purpose of neurodiverse sport and how is that supposed to support athletes coming through?

Speaker 1: 9:46

I guess the mission is to raise awareness first of neurodiversity within the sport, so that neurodiversity that already exists but that is kind of unseen because people are masking, they're not disclosing.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Just to evidence that, like this last year with the work I've been doing with kind of presenting neurodiversity in sport as a positive which is very rare, that you see that it's always viewed through a deficits lens. It's always, if there's ever a story of a neurodivergent athlete, it's like wow, this person's amazing because they succeeded even though they have ADHD or despite the fact that they're autistic and not because of. So I've been really trying to change that narrative and I get messages from sports people athletes, also Olympic athletes message me and say I'm so grateful for what you're doing. I'm diagnosed as autistic. I haven't told my coach or my team because obviously scared of the repercussions. I just want you to know that has made me feel so much better and so much less alone. So yeah, that's part of that awareness raising thing. And then the second part is to try and instigate change, so to try and make neuroinclusive practice the norm in all sports.

Speaker 2: 11:02

Yeah, you were on a roll. However, now that you have opened the door, then that does move me to ask that next question, and so I suppose I want to come back to neurodiverse sport. One of the bits that you mentioned earlier on was if you had a mentor or somebody that you could have seen, would you have behaved differently? Would it have supported you in a different way?

Speaker 1: 11:24

And I think this is something that, having spoken to a lot of sort of slightly older or retired neurodivergent athletes because that tends to be when people are okay talking about it because they're like, oh, it's not going to affect my career, now I can talk about it I can be honest. The common theme is that it takes neurodivergent athletes a good eight to 10 years to figure out how they work as an athlete, because if you think about it, everything that you're fed as an athlete in terms of like how things are done, the best practice one percent is physio, psychology, nutrition. None of that applies to neurodivergent athletes because they're just different. For example, with the nutritionist, like it's all well and good me getting nutritional advice, but if I have kind of sensory sensitivities that mean I need to eat bland food and I say that to the nutritionist, the nutritionist is probably going to say get over yourself, you need to eat a variety of food. Whereas if they had an understanding, of autism they would.

Speaker 1: 12:23

They would in sport If they had an understanding of autism. They'd be able to work with me and I'd get relevant advice. And that's just one example, and another one is sport psychology and the amount of times that I got to talk, you know, talk to about your stress bucket, and I'm like, but you don't understand that I've got I'm diagnosed as autistic. I have a lot of 10 characteristics of ADHD as well. I'm like, if you understood that I cannot switch off, my brain does not switch off, and in retrospect I now know that I need to switch over. But you know, you get told you need to switch off, you need to meditate, you need to release the stress bucket, and it's like all relevant advice for me would have been how do we switch tracks? How do we use like sensory tools to kind of almost like hypnotize you into switching your brain over into sort of like standby mode? How do we get you to keep doing something, but something that's relaxing, rather than trying to force myself to switch off, which isn't going to happen? So that's just some examples, and I think it's why it takes so much longer for neurodivergent athletes to figure out how to do things.

Speaker 1: 13:31

So I think about way back, thinking about a time I really didn't react to a situation well and it wasn't, and actually I wasn't in the wrong, other people were in the wrong. But I really let it get to me and I think if I had had somebody to kind of say, do you know your autism? I didn't know, I was autistic at the time, but your autism, or for a lot of people with ADHD, it's the same there's a lot of people with ADHD in the police force. But I think for this reason we'll have like a very strong sense of right and wrong and justice. So I would get all twisted up. It would really emotionally affect me if something happened that was really unjust, which happened a lot in sport, because unfortunately, at least in the sport I was in, it's very much kind of like who can spin a yarn and it's very hierarchical as well, and I remember it did really really affect me.

Speaker 1: 14:20

But if I had had a mentor to say this is why you feel that way and actually not everybody feels that way, people come from different perspectives, people are motivated in different ways it might have allowed me to process those emotions quickly, to make quicker and to make sense of them. Instead, I held onto them. It affected my performance and I also wrote an end of season review and I basically went on a tirade about how this situation was really wrong and that's not what you want to do in sport. You don't want to put your head above the parapet, you don't want to be the person that speaks out and I've heard this a lot in regard to fairness and justice. The coach will be like right, you're a troublemaker, see ya, and that was like the start of the end for me, like way back. I say the start of the end. That was like two years into my career.

Speaker 1: 15:11

But yeah, that was like that was the start of the mental health issues.

Speaker 2: 15:15

Yeah, well, actually, before we just step into that, before we follow that thread, I just want to come back to one of the bits you mentioned to do because, to do with that, that transition out of the game and you're talking about, it's usually after retirement or in retirement where elite athletes will come forward or take the time perhaps to be diagnosed. And I'm curious because a lot of those strengths that you opened up our conversation with are the same strengths that we talk about any elite athlete great at focusing, awesome at pattern recognition, so knowing when they can do these things, and that attention to detail to that 1% improvement all the time. So I'm wondering, is it in retirement, where suddenly those types of strengths are not just the norm, where suddenly elite athletes are turning around thinking, well, I've still got so much energy, but what's going on? I can see all of these things, but people are listening to me because they're no longer in that elite environment. Do they suddenly start to feel weird place?

Speaker 1: 16:16

Yeah, very potentially. So I think if they've had trouble in whilst they're in sport, they're probably more likely to recognise it at the time and then only go public or disclose when they retire. But in terms of self-revelation, and maybe they didn't recognise it in sport, I think there is almost like a certain type of athlete that definitely fits that category. So perhaps they didn't have as much trouble in sport. But and I'm thinking of certain athletes that have come out as having ADHD and have only realised after retiring and it's potentially because their whole kind of being, every single one of their characteristics, makes them an incredible athlete and they've kind of never had to go on that learning journey of what if I'm not in this perfect environment for me, for them, the kind of athletic environment is perfect for them, and then they kind of slow down. They don't have that kind of daily input of kind of dopamine and structure and purpose and I think suddenly, a lot of the time, I think the wheels kind of come off.

Speaker 1: 17:21

Sometimes you'll see like kind of troubling behaviour and substance abuse and potentially even alcohol abuse. I think that then prompts them to kind of seek a diagnosis. I'm really generalising here, but I'm just giving examples. Like everybody's different. And it's not just these things don't just happen to people with ADHD or autism. There's a number of things. There'd be somebody who's dyslexic, who's thriving in sport, and then they end up having, you know, they have to write a CV and they're like I'm really struggling, like what's going on.

Speaker 2: 17:54

Yeah, there's a generalisation, that's true. I think we're essentially just discussing and that's a hypothesis that has only emerged to me, really, while speaking with you, because as I'm talking to you, I'm looking at or, in my mind, visualising a lot of the coaches or the players or the people that I'm now meeting through my role, and there are certain those patterns in behaviour that make me think okay, there is an element of neurodivergence. I don't even know what the right phrase to say is, but neurodivergence. Clearly there's an element of neurodiversity. Yeah, neurodivergence. There we go. There's a level of neurodivergence in this individual. I don't think they're aware of it. Okay, how do I help them now to focus, to move forward, without me labelling or putting anything on them?

Speaker 1: 18:39

Yeah, so I've actually got some advice, Say I think in 10 years time they'll realise there are a lot more athletes that are neurodivergent than is kind of believed at the moment. But I think hopefully there'll be a realisation that every single person is neurodiverse, neurodivergent Neurodiverse describes everyone's differing neurology and behaviour traits. No two people's brains are the same. It's like fingerprints. Neurodivergent are those who sit a bit further from the norm. Whatever the norm is, it's kind of a social construct as such. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 19:13

A standard deviation from a median is half a week out.

Speaker 1: 19:16

Yeah, but then you think about elite athletes. Well, surely they're not normal, because if they were normal, they wouldn't be excelling and beating everyone else. So that's why, yeah, so many of the characteristics do crossover. I think what's important for people to understand about neurodivergence is it is a give and take, so people might have a slightly spikier profile as such. So if you want somebody to have incredible hyper-focus, it might come with some executive functioning issues, for instance. So it's understanding that people being okay with supporting the characteristics with which people struggle with in order for them to excel at the things that they're good at.

Speaker 1: 20:01

But yeah, I think there's so many characteristics that cross over, and wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where people didn't need a diagnosis label but everybody was just seen as a kind of collection of traits or characteristics that were unique to them. And then you kind of see those characteristics and say, yeah, that's great, that's great, we can utilize them because they are your strengths. Okay, these are your weaknesses, these are the support strategies that you might use, and that's what I was going to say. If you come across somebody and you think, oh, they've got a few neurodivergent characteristics, you don't need to go as far as to label them. You just observe those characteristics and kind of say have you? You know you're struggling with your time management, you're struggling with kind of executive functioning and you're struggling with reading and writing. Have you considered using this tool or have you considered looking at this? And then you're not labeling someone, but you're still offering them the help that they need.

Speaker 2: 20:55

That's right and it's interesting because it is a societal maturity in some respects whereby if you ask a hundred years ago, you know a representative sample. So you think of market research and a representative sample would have probably been just a group of men working in some senior office or some senior way, and then, bit by bit, it started to include women, started to include younger people, older people, people with different ethnicities, and here now we're stepping into this realm of thinking, neurodivergent thinking and saying, right, okay, we're the next frontier of a normalized population and I think you know technology is probably going to help us to be able to support different ways of thinking in a scale, and I think that's the key thing is how do you do that at scale is probably one of the key elements for us.

Speaker 1: 21:47

Yeah, I really agree with that because you got like, I think, for example, text to speech software is revolutionizing the lives of maybe non-speaking, autistic people or dyslexic people with dyslexia Not that everyone struggles with that, but there are people who would fit into that category where it's absolutely essential for them to be able to communicate and to contribute positively, because they will have great things to contribute. There's just barriers at the moment.

Speaker 2: 22:16

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And you know, kara, I suppose what I'm keen to do is, I suppose, get a bit of an understanding of the experience you went through as an athlete, just to give this a bit more context and really as a way because I know those who are listening are probably with us and join this conversation and it's like, so want to know a little bit more about you and how you've come to this conversation in particular. So can you take us back to? You know you were mentioning the skills you had, you know, coming through as an athlete, and that helped you, but it wasn't always, I'll say, plain sailing for you.

Speaker 1: 22:53

Can you just I'll talk about the rough waters.

Speaker 2: 22:57

Yes, there we go. We'll keep going on that analogy.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Yeah. So, as I mentioned, like the first couple of years on the squad were okay because my differences were accepted, because I was still performing. And then at some point I kind of my performance suffered and I think it came after me kind of putting my head above the parapet and then getting backlash for that and I was like not used to it. I was so thrown by how unfair it was. That's kind of like why am I being punished for like talking about fairness? There's anyway totally through me. And so my performance kind of suffered a bit. And then, in all honesty, I wasn't used to being not the best and I wasn't in. This is this is irregardless of neurodivergence here. Maybe there's a bit of perfectionism in there, but it was really a bit of a downward spiral from there. And then I think the kind of consistent being told to change this and change this and, as I mentioned, feeling like a walking set of rules. That was exhausting. But my natural predisposition is to problem solve and to bounce back. So what you ended up seeing was me kind of really suffering from the exhaustion and then bouncing back and then suffering from the exhaustion. Bouncing back gives us like horrible cycle and that that then resulted in me being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is actually scare, really common for autistic people like I've had a lot of people contact me having been misdiagnosed with.

Speaker 1: 24:36

Generally, women are misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder Because obviously the assumption is if a woman is different, it's probably their mood or their personality. This was 10 years ago. Let's hope. Let's hope that it's moved on since then. But, like I've had a nurse contact me who is a late diagnosed autistic, she had spent 17 years with a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder and taking lithium. So lithium is one of the many medications I was prescribed and that is a mood stabilizer and you have to take. You have to have your blood tested like every month or so when you're on that, because you can move into lithium toxicity if you take too much quite quickly and that's very, very dangerous. So it's like a serious medication. It's the kind of thing that people on psych wards take. Don't get me started on that. And then it's the medication that Kurt Cobain sings about, and yeah, so that's my fun fact.

Speaker 1: 25:40

That was one of my medications that I was taking. So I was taking 1400 milligrams of lithium a day multiple tablets and then I was taking 150 milligrams of Lomotrigine, which is another food stabilizer, and then I was taking 25 milligrams of cotypine, which is the anti psychotic. So this happened over a period of five years and you kind of look back and you're like how did I let that happen? Or how did everyone else let that happen? Like my, I went from being a world medallist to putting on eight kilos. Like my skin was sallow, my hair was falling out, my nails were chipping, I was like a shadow of myself but nobody said a thing because I kind of had this label of this, like label of kind of madness, I guess.

Speaker 2: 26:29

So what were you doing during that period?

Speaker 1: 26:31

I was training and racing. I think I had like a year or so out with it almost seemed like post-fire fatigue that's what they thought it was, but I don't know if it was just burnout. But then I got, I just nailed all my one percenters and managed to get back onto the team and I was trying harder than you could imagine anyone trying. I was doing absolutely everything and I was kind of still sort of milling around the bottom of the squad but good enough to be there, kind of irregardless of all the medication I was taking. But rather than people looking at it and being like okay, like this doesn't add up, like why is? Why is she struggling? Like let's look at this, it was just like. It just didn't care. It was just you were, as an athlete, you're a commodity.

Speaker 2: 27:11

Yeah, I was thinking is it the didn't care? Is it the job to be done? You're doing the job, just keep moving. And, like you say, you were in the squad.

Speaker 2: 27:22

And as you talk about those, we all discussed the brutality of sport and if the numbers were adding up, or added up sufficiently they weren't even adding up, like if I was a coach I'd be like there's this they're not adding up in the sense that if you're in an eight, you're in your eighth, right, if I put it in that sense, or throughout the whole squad, and you're the penultimate person in that squad, the person who is working absolutely everything, as they all are, who didn't make the squad, or, as I know, with rowing it literally, is you against that other person when you're rowing off against one another, the one who you still beat? Your numbers were still adding up compared to the population that wants to do rowing.

Speaker 1: 28:07

I guess, when I look at it, if I had seen somebody who was like, who was so far off where they were and they looked visibly ill, I was really questioning what's going on. And you know, I filled in drugs declaration forms like over and over and over again with all this medication and nothing was ever questioned.

Speaker 2: 28:29

Tell you what that must have been a challenge for the I've got the name now but for the doping organization having to sift through their implications or the impact of all of these concoction of drugs, it's amazing.

Speaker 1: 28:41

I can tell you that, like none of them are performance enhancing, so they were probably like yeah everything made you karma to respect our level.

Speaker 1: 28:50

It's like taking bloody poison. But the turning point came when I kind of hit my lowest point. So at my lowest point, I think I pulled an arrow that was like 12 or 13 seconds off my PB. My PB I had done when I first joined the squad and this is five years down the line and, very fortunately for me, like a new performance director had joined and he had a like a very person centered approach which was, I think, off the back of a huge kind of bullying scandal and one of the head coaches getting pushed out and because it wasn't just me that was struggling in that way in terms of treatment.

Speaker 1: 29:31

But yeah, so he kind of was introduced to all the athletes and when, in my case, he kind of asked the coaches, like what have we done for this athlete I think they're probably talking about like how do we bin her off? Because she's like taking up space Good enough to say in the squad, but not really thriving, and they said you know, we've done everything we can for her, which consisted of sending me to the Priory. And then he was like I don't think we have. He hooked me up with the UK sport mental health panel had just been formed and I was their first kind of subject client and they were the ones that rediagnosed me with autism, and at the time it was labeled high functioning autism, so it would have been like Asperger's. But you can't call it either of those things anymore, because what's politically correct always changes.

Speaker 2: 30:21

Indeed, okay, all right, well, that's news for me as well.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Well, I think, in regard to like functioning labels, people feel like it's quite reductive than it For the people who are called low functioning. It's offensive For the people who are labeled as high functioning. It kind of disregards their struggles. I think is the thinking behind that. And then with Asperger's I think Hans Asperger was a Nazi, so I think that's why people are kind of moving away from that label. But so what they did was they I received like therapy, partly for some childhood stuff and partly for the previous five years, and part of that was using mood cards and giving myself a language for emotions. That was really, really, really helpful, because my emotional processing is just different and sometimes challenging. And yeah, it was just a real journey of learning about myself, titrated off of all the medication over like eight, 10 months, which had a massive impact. And then we created it was called a management plan, but I like to call it a communication plan in retrospect because management plans are well offensive, because I didn't need managing.

Speaker 1: 31:33

But the communication plan was for the coaches to not ask me open ended questions about my feelings in the morning. So you know, you'd have like a briefing, everyone's stretching and they'd kind of come up to you and punch you on the shoulder and be like all right, how you doing. I'm like what do you mean? What do I answer? How do I get the important information across? Like it's just unnecessarily stressful and not productive at all. So it was like you know, ask me a closed question or let's create some kind of rating system that I can easily say like I'm a three out of 10, or I'm a seven out of 10.

Speaker 1: 32:06

And then the second thing was to ensure I got the right message from a briefing, because I think differently. It's just to make sure we're on the same page if we're rowing in a crew crew boat and you know, sometimes maybe I've thought of something that other people haven't and it's good for everyone to know that. And then the third thing was something that the coaches didn't even need to do. Is the nutritionist? So it was ensure there was like bland food available on training camp, because when I'm really tired I don't need all those flavors and I don't need to go and knock on the chef's door and kind of try to speak another language and ask for some plain pasta after they've just spent hours slaving away making. Can you take the?

Speaker 2: 32:46

spice out please.

Speaker 1: 32:48

Yeah, making a really fancy meal. So this last, literally, was my communication plan. So those things combined those changes between when I was at my worst just before that intervention, and then a year later I my ergo improved by 17 seconds. Wow, okay, that's like what a difference that made. So then PB'd for the first time in five years, and that's just from very, very small changes.

Speaker 1: 33:14

The coaches didn't always follow through with, like, when I was doing better, they were kind of like, oh, she's fine now Kind of forgetting that.

Speaker 1: 33:21

It's just a way of thinking that is permanent to me.

Speaker 1: 33:25

It's not a mental health issue, because you kind of mentioned about the coaches and their attitudes before and about if you just about kind of hit the times that they want you to, it's kind of it doesn't matter if you're thriving or you're surviving. When the coach, the head coach, was informed of the plan and the fact that I would have like a communication plan or a management plan and this quote from the performance director, the head coach was apoplectic with rage Because he basically was like this athlete does not deserve, who basically said this athlete does not deserve to have us kind of treat them differently, or they would call it preferential treatment. And I'm like how on earth can you embrace neurodiversity in sport and people who think and behave, think, learn, behave differently? If that's the attitude of coaches, like if somebody doesn't kind of fit the mold and what is standard practice doesn't work for them and making a tweak or a reasonable adaptation is seen as preferential treatment, then you are always going to have a sub-sector of the population excluded from elite sport.

Speaker 2: 34:40

That is right and that is well said. That is well said because the implications are on. The implications go across all types of diversity. So the implications of that are if you're not prepared to put in women's changing rooms, then women won't play the game.

Speaker 1: 34:56

So I wanted to say something on that and obviously I can't speak to the experience of being black or ethnically diverse, or I don't know how to be politically correct, but Something that you can see.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Well, yeah, preserving to a different gender ideology or, you know, I'm heterosexual as well, so I can't speak to that. I am a woman. But I would say, like in my experience of elite sport and obviously also kind of having an eye into various other Olympic sports Probably different in non-Olympic sports I would say, probably more progressive, but in Olympic sports, especially in some of the elite sports, the lack of diversity is shocking Over the whole of my whole 10 years on the Great Britain rowing team there were two black people. Like that's outrageous. And in terms of private school representation, I think at the Tokyo Olympics it was something like 70 or 80% of athletes were from a private school background. That's outrageous, like what's really frustrating as well, what is outrageous Actually, may I add to that? I don't think there's ever been an Asian person on the team ever.

Speaker 1: 36:12

But if you are in any way diverse because obviously I had the, so the socio-economic kind of background difference as well and that did make a difference I didn't feel I could involve myself in a lot of the conversations because I would always think, like God, we're living in a really privileged bubble here and I do not like it. It was kind of ostracised in two ways the kind of different thinking, but then also the different background. And if you are in any way different and you come to that kind of environment, you know straight away it's not necessarily said, but you know you have to leave your diversity at the door. So there are cases of, like I said, there's one or two black people, there's one or two openly gay people not on the men's team, that would never happen.

Speaker 1: 37:01

There's one or two openly religious people, but you can really tell it's like they're not allowed to bring it all and they have to kind of leave the true diversity and the true self at the door and then just bring what's an acceptable kind of shell and then that is also then kind of taken by the kind of media and the comms team and presented and kind of used as a diversity washing. And how did I even get onto this topic? I'm just going off on a tirade. I was about to link it back to the point and then I was like what was the point? I don't know. You can link it back.

Speaker 2: 37:40

I love it.

Speaker 2: 37:41

I think you've gone down a great tangent and, like you said, there's no masking today, which actually now I'm in the conversation, I'm like well, this is a good thing, because I would have hated it to have been bland.

Speaker 2: 37:51

In that way You've brought a bit of spice to it.

Speaker 2: 37:54

It was around that diversity and it was around the changes that sport and the coaches needed to do to accept you.

Speaker 2: 38:01

So the fact that someone was went into a rage for the fact that they had to adjust the processes, the protocols to support you to be at your best, demonstrated to me the challenges, not just in that sport but across all sports, whereby we need to make changes to embrace diversity, if anything, because you're missing out on talent.

Speaker 2: 38:23

And once your diversity was, I'll say, correctly diagnosed or correctly accepted and the adjustments, communication or management plans were put in place, you not only achieve the personal best, but you smashed your PB from five years, six years prior to that, and by, I think, four or five seconds, as you mentioned. And that's the benefit of diversity, that's the benefit of accepting it, and it sort of makes what your mission is today, through neurodiverse sport, even more powerful is supporting people like yourself who have still the natural physical talent to make it, but then also have the mental talents to make it as well, and if accommodations aren't made, that talent will never make it to the sport, it will never transition to careers after sport, and so it's so important, it's vital that that actually continues.

Speaker 1: 39:14

Yeah, I appreciate that we're like a bit strapped for time so we want to wrap it up soon. But I think one of the questions that you sent ahead of time thank you for that was regarding, like, are there any lessons that I could bestow on athletes who are retiring? And obviously, having retired, you know, about a year ago myself, I think my biggest lesson is so when I I talk really openly and confidently now, because I've regained that confidence from actually being honest, open and being accepted by a wider community, so I've kind of stepped into the neurodiversity community and as much, as as much. As you know, some of it isn't for me, a lot of it is, and feeling accepted is is so powerful and it's really, really built my confidence back up. I can tell you, when I finished even though I had, you know, got back to my PB and I was really thriving at points I still faced stigma, discrimination, and I also still had those memories and then the kind of, to a degree, trauma of what had happened. I don't like to use the word trauma too much because there are people living in war zones and that's kind of offensive but my confidence was kind of it was on the floor.

Speaker 1: 40:25

So when I retired, I genuinely was like on the fence about do I just fade away into obscurity? Do I get a job? My two options that I had for myself was do I fade away or do I get a job where maybe I'm kind of latching onto someone else's project? And what happened was I had a couple of conversations with people and then I actually had to explain the context of what happened to me in sport, because my CV was so terrible and there was nothing on it Because while I was going through all that, had no energy to do anything extra curricular, also didn't have the connections outside of that a lot of people do when they come from a more privileged background. So I had nothing. So I kind of had to explain like it was almost like an apology, like I don't have anything, this is what's happened to me, but I promise like I've got loads, go give me a chance.

Speaker 1: 41:12

But then in telling my story, people were like that's really impactful, you need to do something with that. And so it was actually people me being honest and people listening and kind of feeding me little bits of, I guess, recognition, reassurance, respect that allowed me to slowly build that confidence and decide that I was going to do something myself. And I didn't suddenly become confident and think, right, I'm going to create this organization that people from the around the world, it will affect people from around the world. That that's how kind of big it's got.

Speaker 1: 41:49

I didn't go into it thinking that that's been really, really gradual. What I went into it thinking was I need to use my story to do the right thing for other people, and I always go back to that when I feel overwhelmed. But so I think my lesson would be don't ever cap yourself. You're probably capable of so much more than you think. Be really honest and authentic and make sure you are following your kind of passion and like what is your purpose. I think unless you follow that, it will always be hard and it might not be palatable, it might not be what you thought you wanted to do or you other people think that you should do, but I think being really honest with yourself and, yeah, like I said, not limiting yourself is so important. That's my big lesson.

Speaker 2: 42:40

I think that's a great lesson. And look through the course of this conversation, just hearing you bring those to life through the, through. The moments of your life, the moment of your experience I think are wonderful, and now the impact that you're having through neurodiverse sport I think is is quite amazing. So for those who are listening, Kara, can you just share who is neurodiverse sport for and how do they get in touch with you? How do they follow you to learn more?

Speaker 1: 43:05

Yeah. So I guess it's got two main audiences. One is the kind of neurodivergent people themselves, whether they are athletes at the moment or just people interested, who maybe don't even participate in sport or exercise but maybe might want to be inspired. And then the other audience is people who maybe know nothing about neurodiversity or maybe they're in the sports sector and want to know more. And I would say we've got a website, so wwwneurodiversesportcom it's a bit of a mouthful, apologies and then we've got an Instagram which is starting to get pretty lively. So that's just at neurodiverse sport.

Speaker 1: 43:41

And then I'm on LinkedIn and neurodiverse sport also has a LinkedIn and that's probably where you'll find more of the sort of I don't want to say behind the scene stuff, but the campaigning side of things, like what we're doing to. You know, recently we submitted a response to the government get active strategy and the disability consultation document. So if you're more interested in that side of things like, maybe head to the LinkedIn. But and my name is spelt really strangely, but I'm sure that you'll put that on the bio- that's absolutely fine, kara.

Speaker 2: 44:18

Look, I've loved our conversation. There's so much that I'm going to continue to reflect on, I think, what you've certainly laid out on top of your experiences. You've laid out the steps that you've had to go through in order to get to where you are today and sort of come through that, and thanks for sharing so openly and honestly. So thanks very much, kara, for being on the show today.

Speaker 1: 44:38

No, thank you. Thank you for making me feel really comfortable. That is not always a given, so thank you for that.

Speaker 2: 44:45

Thank you for listening to the Second Win podcast. We hope you enjoyed hearing insights from today's athlete on transitioning out of competitive careers. If you're looking for career clarity for your next step, make sure you check out secondwinio for more information or to book a consultation with me. I'd like to thank Claire from Betty Book Design, Nancy from Savvy Podcast Solutions and Saris from copying content by Lola for their help in putting this podcast together. That's all from me. Take it easy Until next time.