Gift biz unwrapped episode 181 You have to fight the bad habits. You have to fight the lazy feelings. They don't just go away just because you have a particular goal in mind. Attention gifters, bakers, crafters and makers pursuing your dream can be fun. Whether you have an established business or looking to start one now you are in the right place. This is gift to biz unwrapped, helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.
Join us for an episode packed full of invaluable guidance, resources and the support you need to grow your gift biz. Here is your host gift biz gal, Sue moon Heights. Hi there And thank you so much for taking a little bit of your time to be with me today. Make sure to stay till the end of this episode because I have a special announcement for you. It's something that I've been working on for months and finally I'm so excited.
Now is the time I can share it with you and yes, sometimes I can be a little bit of a tease and just play around and that's not why I'm waiting until the end. I just want to make sure to give my guests today all of the attention that she's due and then share with you something extra special. Like I said at the end, don't leave cause you don't want to miss it, but first I want to talk with you about my guest.
She is an Olympic medalist and I brought her on the show because even though she's not a gifter Baker crafter or maker, she has qualities that she needs to use to get her to her level of success. That very much relate to success for us as maker entrepreneurs. Some of the things we're going to talk about are preparation, a mindset, dealing with factors that are sometimes out of your control and how intuition can play a big role in your success. Let's jump into this right now.
I'd like to introduce you to Asia Evans. Asia is a two time Olympian and has won a bronze medal in the 2014 winter Olympic games as a brakeman for the USA women's bobsled team. Throughout her track and field career, Asia was known for her dominance in both the sprints and ShotPut at the university of Illinois. She won three big 10 titles the five time NCAA division one. All American recently completed her second Olympic game in February at the 2018 winter Olympics in South Korea.
She and her driver, Jamie Gribble, poser placed fifth Asia, comes from a family of elite athletes and today we're going to talk about the drive, the passion and the discipline needed to win. Welcome to the gift biz on wrapped podcast Asia. Hi. Thanks for having me. I am so excited to have this conversation. I'm excited. You know, it's kind of a different thing because you aren't like a maker or a creator like our audiences, but I think some of the drive and the passion yeah.
And the commitment that you have to have to become the level of Olympian you are, the level of athlete can go over, I think. Yeah. I completely agree. I mean a lot of the things I've learned on my path to becoming an Olympian or even Olympic medalist have helped me in all areas of my life and I've grown in all aspects of my life, not only just the Olympics, so it's kind of worked synonymous with my life and every
area. We are going to expand on that in a second, but before we do, I have a traditional question I like to ask everybody and that is if you were to describe yourself as a motivational candle, so in a color and in a quote, how would you describe yourself through a motivational candle? This was such a unique question.
I had fun trying to figure out my idea for this, but I think my favorite color is purple and I never understood why I was so drawn to the color when it began, but I'm captivated by it and the more I looked into it and the kind of characteristics associated with the color purple, it's like just ambition, power, strength, peace, magic. And so that really ties into me and some of my characteristics. A motivational quote for that.
Would be a Bible verse of mine that's a favorite of mine is Joshua one verse nine and it's have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. For me, especially with the places my ambition takes me, it's a little scary.
And developing confidence and whatever I do has been a game changer for me and knowing that from the beginning and having that confidence because essentially I went into the sport of bobsled where I had no background in this floor. I came from a completely different sport and to go in there and in two years when an Olympic medal sounds crazy even saying it right now, but it took a lot of confidence and trust and ambition for sure.
Absolutely. And saying that it's scary, I would say is an understatement. I agree. It's definitely intimidating. Well, you know, I said in the bio as I was learning a little bit more about you F wheats have run in your family, right? And professional athletes from your father to your uncles all the way down. So you were surrounded by that already. How did your journey go in terms of zeroing in on your sport cause you were track and field in high school and college?
I grew up with a very athletic family and it always encouraged me to want to do sports. My uncle and cousin both were major league baseball players and my father was a swimmer and my brother played in the NFL for eight years and my mother was a track and field Supersite in her collegiate years. And so growing up my mom just kept us really active. She never forced us to do any sports or do anything.
We kind of played around with all types of sports and it wasn't until my freshman year of high school where I actually did track and field and I stuck with it and we were really successful. I went to Morgan park high school out in Chicago and the city and the Chicago public school and we had great success there. And then I went on to go to university of Illinois where I was told about the sport of bobsled.
My senior year of college, my coach kind of introduced the sport to me and so when he was telling me about, I was a little hesitant because I'm used to checking fields and feeling like my Olympic success was always going to come from what I thought I was doing to get there, which was track and field. So I always saw myself being on the Olympic podium and making it to the Olympic games. But I just assumed that it was going to be through track and field.
And so my senior year of college was in 2010 and I was doing the 2010 when I left Olympic games. And my coach told me about the sport and how they look for athletes like myself who come from other sports like track and field. I mean you have football players like Herschel Walker who did bobsled, but specifically he told me about this check if an athlete named Veneta flowers who became an Olympian in both summer and winter Olympic sports.
And so it really inspired me at the time, but I just brushed it off because I thought that my bread and butter was going to be track and field. And about a year and a half later I went out and tried for bobsled because after college I graduated and I decided not to do track professionally. So I was working in Highland park at EFC sports performance and I was doing my internship and got offered a position
there. So I was helping all these people I met accomplish their goals and the dreams they set themselves and I felt like I didn't give myself that same opportunity. And so I did a lot of research and went out for the bobsled team and ended up being a really good fit for the sport. That's interesting because you were seeing that what you were talking to other people and challenging other people to do, you had to turn the mirror around on yourself.
Exactly. And I felt like I was preaching all these things, but I wasn't practicing it and I felt that void. I felt like something was missing. I loved what I did and helping them, but I felt like I didn't give myself that fair chance. Okay. This is perfect because I think a lot of people who are listening, I think that starting a business, which I know is a little bit different than sports, but starting a business is for everybody else. Like everyone else can be successful but not them.
Right? And so I want you guys get biz listeners to be listening to this because this is what Asia did. And so my question for you is how did you change your mindset? You just can't say, okay, well Asia ante up. Let's do it. What did you do in terms of a mindset to turn around and say, okay, I'm going to not be afraid. I'm just going to put myself out there and do it. How did you do that? Well, I had to my resources for sure.
After training and working at EMT sports performance, I went to the owner and I told him about the sport of BAFTA. And this was two years out. So this was in 2012 and the winter Olympic games were in 2014 and so within two years I needed to learn it and understand the sport so I could make it to the Olympic games. And so I told him about my vision and my goal and he said we could do it.
And so in order to kind of get in the quote mindset, I could to a bobsledder I worked with football players and they are gritty, they have a great work ethic and they're used to that team atmosphere, but yet they're used to competing against each other. And that's simulator track and field. But in track and field is still a little more individual.
So that on and off switch mentality I had to get used to as is being an athlete and a competitor at one moment and then a teammate and helping your essentially your competition and your team move forward and build a lot of the behind the scenes. So I had to learn how to switch that on and off as well as the physical and, and I worked really hard with all NFL players in the off season because it was around the same time as my preparation for Bob.
But and so I trained with them for three months and went out and tried out for the team and my trials were going so well that the coach stopped me and had me come to the side and was like, okay, so we see what you can do but let's see if you could push a bop lift. So I actually stayed a few days later and in like plastic in New York we have the Olympic training center, which is where our headquarters is for the most part for
bobsleigh. We have our push track there, which is how you practice pushing on dry land and training outside of winter time and being on the track as well as one of our home tracks. And so I stayed there practice and learn the technique and continue with trials. Over the next few months I've made the national team. And from there we went through the world cup season, so that was the season before the Olympic games.
And then the next season I had to try out as well and make the national team before I made the Olympic team. Okay. So I have a number of questions for you now after all of that. Yeah. Oh my gosh, yes. But it's so good. So Asia first for some of our listeners who may not be that familiar with bobsled, talk us through the sport and how many people comprise a team and how the whole bobsled works. Yeah, so bachelor is a winter Olympic sport.
So for women right now we only have two man Aqua, so you have a driver, but I also go by pilot and they're in the front of the sled. And then you have the brakemen, which is my position. We also go by pusher and we're in the back of the sled. The goal of the brakemen is to get this leg going as fast as possible at the start of the race.
And then we hop in after the man and then we're kind of like holding on in the back through this mile long track of twists and turns and bumps and all types of G4S while the driver Sears down the track using the velocity and the momentum we created at the top of the track. So you're the one at the back who's like ducking then so that you, So my goal is to stay as aerodynamic as possible and relaxed in the back of the sled regardless of how crazy it feels. So awkward.
I don't even know what the compared to, I mean honestly, we have to wear helmets because you risk concussions. We wear burn invest because if you were to crash the friction from the ice and the speed we're going at a cocreate burns. So it's a very intense course. It's very loud, noisy, and as a brakeman you don't know what's coming next. So it's a little counterintuitive.
You want to be nervous, you want to be tight, you want to be kind of scared, but you have to teach yourself to be relaxed and loose and taking all these twists and turns as you go down the track and hopefully come out in first. That's crazy because as you're just describing it at the beginning of the race, you need all your strength because you're the one who's building the speed and then you dump in and you have to do the exact opposite. You have to then relax.
Yes, and the drivers, they go from straining to put all their effort into their push push to having to snap out of that relaxed and be focused and steer down, attract. And when I say steer, like it's not a steering wheel in there, we drive by using these D rings. So essentially like two wheel drive. So the runners, which are the blades this last, this one, so two runners in the front. If you pull the right D-ring, they go to the right.
And then if people the left when I go to the left, and that's how you fear the sled down the track. I didn't know that. I thought you had a steering wheel. I mean one of the original bobsleds were included this year and we'll, but they advanced their technology so much that it's kind of a rope system and a D rating system where they're kind of pulling these rings to help maneuver this led down the track as efficiently as possible. Yeah. Got it. So let's talk a little bit about training.
How do you as a professional athlete train for this? I'm sure, I mean it's physical, but it's also psychological. Can you give us a feel for how that works? I really started to embrace the psychological aspects a lot this past Olympic journey because I didn't realize going into the sport how much that was a factor. Especially for an athlete like myself.
I'm one of those athletes that rely on what I produce and my production in like using that as my way to show that I'm doing good to show the team when I'm capable of show to where where I'm capable of. And sometimes in the sport you don't have as much power as you would like to. Like I come from track and field.
If I'm an Elaine against seven other athletes and I come at earth and I'm in first place, but with Bob, just because you're the fastest say it doesn't mean you're going to be with who they deemed the fastest driver. Sometimes the coaches and the board pick and choose who races with who. So you don't really have much control over that as a
brakeman. The coaches pick who the drivers race with and so the best thing I could do was put myself in the best physical shape as well as being mentally ready to accept. If I'm not racing with the person I had my eyes set on or if things change, being able bounce back because that's what happened to me at the 2014 Olympic game. I primed myself physically to be the best brakeman in the country, let alone the world and to race with the fast pace driver at that time.
And so the entire season I raced with her and we were winning Meadows and doing great first in the world. And then at the Olympic games, the week before I race, they switched by, fled and I raced with the second rate driver. And so if this would've happened to me a few years side to that I might have shut down. I might have not been able to even pull off a
metal. And so that mental aspect really came into play and I had to understand that this is the hand I'm dealt and I have to make the most of those cars. And so that's when Jamie and I really built a resilient bond and decided to go out and pull this off for ourselves despite who was calling the shots. And so the mental aspect has been a journey for me for sure. Physically, we do a lot of our off season training during the summertime leading into the fall.
And so it's pretty much the same as like football off season training. You really want to work on your strength and conditioning and your speed. And so I don't necessarily have to be in like class in New York at the Olympic training center longterm over the entire off season training. I can do my workouts pretty much anywhere.
So I worked with my trainer, Jacob Ross and my friend coach Les Spellman and together they helped me get into the best shape for the season, especially entering the Olympic year. It was a lot of the training as far as repetitive speed drove a lot of plyometrics, a lot of jumping and a lot of stuff just to be on my posterior chain. So like a lot of lifting weights, a lot of squatting, some power cleans and dead lifts.
And so I really wanted to build up that muscle and that power early in the season so I didn't have to go as hard during the season because once the season starts, we're traveling from country to country each week as well as racing and training on the actual opposite track. So, So you really have to look out at a whole six months or a year and structure when you're training and then when you're on the road it takes a little bit of a different look, right? So you have to look out and plan.
It involves a lot of planning, but during the season you have to be able to go with the flow and listen to your body. So as an athlete you become really in tune with our body and what it's telling us and we know how to push ourselves, which you also have to know how to relax and when to take it a little easier.
As you go through the season you're dealing with, like I struggled with jet lag and all these European countries we were racing in as well as having to train at 6:00 AM we would wake up, get breakfast, load our slips. So with Bob, so it's a really hands on sport. I fled weigh about 365 pounds and so that's the sled minimum wage and we have to move those sleds so we have to transport them ourselves. We put them in the truck. Coach's job is Chuck to the track.
We unload the sleds, put them at the line. We do all of that stuff as well as racing and preparing to race a train. Oh my gosh, I for sure thought you had other people doing that for you. We have engineers And coaches that help and the engineers are really great and they do all the behind the scenes stuff and the more in depth stuff for the slab, but a lot of the hands on moving of the sled and preparation of the sled is done that especially the night before a race.
People assume that's the day we have. Like You get pampered and you rest and carbo-loading like you do when you're running. Right. 94 race. We're sanding the runners, so the runners, like I said, are the blades, the SLAs that on, we're sending those down grid by grid from a hundred grit sandpaper down to polishing paper and then the drivers have their own busing system. So together that takes about four, maybe five hours to complete.
But per runner, if you have people helping you, you can get it done maybe in three hours, but that's another day with the work we have to put in at the end of the night before race. Wow. All right, so from my listeners perspective, I have a couple of things I'm curious about. What do you do on those days when you're supposed to get up at 6:00 AM to train and you're like, seriously, like this is the last thing I want to do. I just want to push this news button and I'm not getting up.
How do you force yourself to do that? I know we can all relate to this challenge. We're going to hear how Asia answers the question right after a word from our sponsor. This podcast is made possible thanks to the support of the ribbon print company. Create custom ribbons right in your store, craft studio in seconds. Visit the ribbon, print company.com for more information. Hard. I mean it's hard to force myself to get in that position or get used to pushing yourself.
I think that was one of the biggest things for me was you have to fight the bad habits. You have to fight the lazy feelings. They don't just go away just because you have a particular goal in mind. Just because I knew I wanted to win an Olympic medal and go to the Olympic games, it didn't mean instantly boom. I'm a new person that likes to wake up very early in the morning and work out.
No, I was still that same person that doesn't like to wake up there early to workout and so you just had to remind yourself why you're doing these things. And so when I was waking up very early to go to training, knowing I had to do all the behind the scenes work and do a workout on top of it later that day, it can be exhausting, but I had to keep my eyes set on my goal and I created a schedule so I knew what I had to do. So that helps me to get an idea of my day.
Did the schedule just make you like you knew you had to follow your schedule? Whether you wanted to or not. Having a schedule one may mean knew I needed to follow it and it encouraged me to get stuff done because then once I saw my schedule was clear, I was like, okay, like I really have time off and I can enjoy the rest of my day without feeling like I'm missing something or I need to do something.
And sometimes when you wake up and you know you have to do all these things but you don't have them written down, it can make you even more stressed and flustered and it can appear bigger than what it is. So one thing I tried to do was write down things I had to accomplish that day and if I could write a time for it, cool. If not, then I just knew I had to go through it.
And so I will use my reminders app on my phone and I would literally put in my phone, everything from I'm training today, make sure my backpack, my workout for the day. If there was certain nutrition things I needed to follow, I would put that in there. And then as I would go throughout the day, I would Mark off when I did it. So if I looked at my phone and I realized I did two things already, I would Mark those off.
And then I'm like, okay, halfway through my day I have such and such left, let me knock it out so I can enjoy the rest of my day. If I wanted to go have dinner somewhere or if I wanted to do some of the sports stuff, those types of things, I would try and knock out as much as I could earlier in my day so I can have the rest of my day off. Sure. And then you'd have that portion of the day off and you deserved it cause you put in all your time for the day. So yeah, that's what I said.
So like it kinda made me realize what I had to accomplish today. But then as I started to accomplish those things, I felt encouraged. So I was like, okay cool. I knocked this out. That was the biggest thing on my list. I only got this, this and this. I can knock that out in a minute or it doesn't even feel like you'll go throughout your day and realize you've done so much and you still have the rest of your
day. So I think having things written out really helped me and was a game changer for me because it didn't allow my thoughts to overwhelm me as far as like, Oh my gosh, I have so much to do and it's time to do it and you forget everything. Right. That's a great takeaway for our listeners because it correlates so well for business and it's so much better to do the things that you don't like first and just get them out of the way done, you know, at the first top of the day.
Well, yeah, it's not even just that. I don't like the ones that will take the most odd needs because I work out so hard at such an elite level, but I'm just like everyone else, I don't get extremely drained after work. I see it release endorphins and you get energy and stuff despite how tired you are from the workout or how fatigue you are. So I like to accomplish my workouts earlier in my day.
Not bright first thing in the morning, but I definitely like to accomplish my workouts and things that I know that will physically and mentally exert me the most earliest Monday so I can knock it out. And then as I go through my day, I just pay attention to things I need to do, whether it be respond to emails or this and that. I write kind of things down as they come to my head because I find that really helps me to remember what to do and to knock it out. Yeah. So you're following a plan.
Let's circle around to nutrition. What does that mean for an Olympic athlete? Yeah, nutrition could be like for an Olympic athlete it could be your best friend or your worst enemy. Myself, I love to snack. I love to eat without any strings attached and I just want to enjoy my meal. Yeah. So Asia, I would say to that, well, yeah, you can cause you're going to work off any calories that you have throughout the day. So just go ahead with whatever you want.
Right? And that sounds so simple, but that's not exactly how it works because even though my schedule is in 10 I still have to maintain a certain weight throughout the season because it's essentially kind of a weight class sport. You don't want to go over the maximum weight of for the race day. So it's the combined weight is you the driver and the sled. And so after our first run down the track they weigh us together and if you're over weight you're disqualified. Oh man. So that's important.
And as well as your energy. So like you don't want to just eat anything that tastes good or eat crazy candies and sugars and junk food. You want healthy things to give you the energy. Cause I have very long days, especially behind the scenes when it comes to maintenance on the sled and doing my workouts and different things. So I have to make sure I'm energized and myself so I'm not eating as many of the bad things as I
want. It's more so about fuel in my body and making sure I'm managing my weight throughout the season. And does nutrition at all. Have to do with building muscle and all of the behind the scenes thing too. Yeah. For me, I don't have a problem building on muscles.
I'm one of those athletes where I need nutrition to help me to maintain a lighter weight because they changed the weight limit for Bob slit down 15 kilos from 2014 when our Olympics 2018 went Olympics, so that's essentially over 30 pounds a different, so we had to be 30 pounds lighter. That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. Five of the kilos could come from the slip, but the other remaining, I'm sorry, it's 15 yeah, so five of the kilos come from the sled.
The remaining 10 so the remaining 22 pounds has to come from the driver brakeman combination and so team USA is a little on the muscular built side and so we were already in 2014 near the way limits, so we really had to work to move weight and maintain a healthy lean weight for the 2018 winter Olympic games because we had to be lighter. I want to take a little bit of a step back in your journey also because I liked when you were talking about the fact that it was kind of a step by step process.
You know you first were seeing success obviously in college. People had their eye on you already and then when you jumped over into sled, the nationals, the world, it was a progression. So you kept going from one event to another and seeing success along the way. Talk a little bit about that, cause no one just goes from being local to all of a sudden being an Olympian. Right. I don't think I explained it that well because the success progression wasn't as smooth as it found it.
It was rough coming into the sport in 2012 I came in alongside three or four summer Olympians from the 2012 summer Olympic games and we were all really good. So it's a competitive atmosphere. They named nine women to the national team. Three of them are drivers and then the other six are a pool of brakemen. So we all travel together throughout the season. But only three pregnant end up racing.
And so every time you're on the ice, you're basically competing against your teammates for a spot in the top split. So that's where you were talking about the difference between a solo sport but also a team sport and you have to go back and forth. Right, Exactly. And so you really have to be able to understand that no matter how good you are individually, you still may not get the race you think you deserve or you may not get this or they're testing different combinations so you're not raising.
And so that's hard to understand because in track and field, if I didn't race or if I didn't get anything, it was mainly probably because like, you know, I wasn't performing at my best. You were responsible for your own performance then. Exactly. But now with Bob, but it just may be a combination of other factors that you're not even in control of. And so you have to be able to understand that and not let it affect your performance and your motivation moving forward.
That is so interesting and I'm sure so tough. It's Delta. Yeah. What did you learn from that that you take away today? One of my biggest lessons I learned from the sport of bobsled was to separate business and personal. I've always kind of been, if I don't like you and the person, I don't like you in the business atmosphere type of person. So like it's not going to switch on and off just because of the setting. And so as an Olympian and as a bobsledder, you have to be able to separate the two.
So on the personal side, you're thrown into a situation with eight other women where you're traveling the world around each other. 24 seven I'm rooming together, eating together, doing all these things. And these are women you may not necessarily get along with or you would choose to be around outside of sport.
And so you're kind of forcing the situation where you have to kind of embrace it and you build bonds and friendships, but you have to be able to separate the two because it gets messy, it gets drama, food. And in order to perform, you have to be able to put feelings aside and do what you need to be done in order to be successful in the floor. And a lot of times we have to help out the same people we're competing against.
And it's so confusing and it's so hard sometimes because you can easily come right off of the ice and move to your teammate or something and then you're all there helping each other move on your sleds and to the truck and doing all this work when you don't even feel like seeing them let alone helping us. Oh my gosh. So how do you do it? Just continually try and keep your feelings in check or what do you do?
Well, I had to understand that people aren't going to hold you in the same regard as you hold other people in and yourself. And so you just have to be open to understanding different people and personalities and act accordingly. I think that I kept my goal and my mission in mind, which was to make the Olympic games and when the Olympic medal And you did. Yeah. And having that in mind helped me to maneuver through a lot of the unnecessary BS that would have distracted me throughout the process.
I had to learn that this girl would act like my friend one day, but then secretly be trying to take my position and just name that. Even though I have a good relationship with one, it may not mean that I raised with them the entire time and I had to learn how to be a good teammate to everyone despite how I was feeling.
So it was a lot of internal things I had to work on to be become a successful Bob better because it's not just about results and statistics, it's so much more involved and you're around these people for weeks and months at a time in other countries and small city and so you have to learn to respect each other's space and to still get what you need to do done. Very interesting. I had no idea there was this whole other level behind bobsled. That's crazy.
I think for our listeners too, you can kind of take this back and relate it to a work environment. If you have an assistant who's coming in and maybe they have been challenging, they're in a bad mood for some reason. You still have to keep your eye on the goal And not let it affect your peace.
One of the things that really helped me get through a lot of that stuff was to understand that sometimes how a person is acting as a reflection on them and where they're at in their life and not a reflection on you. And so if you stop taking so much to heart and everything someone does or says You think it's about you. Yeah, I think that can mess you up.
Especially with me going into a sport like that, I didn't realize people were doing stuff because they were maybe intimidated by me or you know, we're essentially all working for a different position. I'm thinking people don't like me that like obvious other factors and then once you realize it's a competition or it's a business, you got the personal feelings aside and you get what you need to get done for your own goals.
If you remember what you have except for yourself and why you're there, it helps to mute out all the other noise. Excellent. I love that we brought this up. That's really going to be helpful to everybody, so I really appreciate that. Let's move on and talk about what's happening with you today. Tell us what you're thinking. What's in your life today? Right now I'm kind of on this open path to discovering what's next for myself. I've been blessed to be in two Olympic games.
I don't think that chapter of my life is officially over with because I have had Olympic goal set on my sites since day one of being an athlete, let alone being in the sport of boxing. I know it's possible for us and I know we have the talent and it's right there, so like the fact that I know I can really go for gold makes me want to return, but I've also had a knee surgery and I've just been trying to lay low and figure it out the next move.
I think that my mindset is so different this time after your Olympic game versus 2014 after the Olympic games. Because I felt like I had to have a plan, I had to have something said, I had to have my next idea down. Because that's the first thing that after you win an Olympic medal is like what's next and you gotta feel like you have all these things. And I rested into something that, I guess I wasn't ready for it because I ended up getting injured and having knee surgery.
So I think that right now I'm just kind of trusting the process and seeing where my journey takes me, trying to approach this phase of my life with the same confidence I had when I approached, but in the Olympic and going for that. And so I think that it's gonna pull off for me and I'm gonna make myself, You also have maturity now you have experience with two Olympics, right? So you're walking in as a different and more experienced person really. And you have four years, you have four years now.
Yeah. And the things I want to explore it and relate to my old shirts and some of my create some new shift for me fell.
It's all about I think at this point in my life, the mentality asset and not scaring myself and stressing myself into thinking that I don't have it or I don't have anything next like I just have to trust us and trust the process and this culture with the same confidence I did when it came to wanting to win in the Olympic medal and Bob said when I had no background in this sport. You're right.
I love when you say it that way because so many people are afraid of the unknown and for you just to say, I'm going to trust the process, I'm going to go with what feels right. I don't have to decide everything right now yet and just see what comes of it And doors for yourself. Even when I look back, just from talking to you and looking back when my coach told me about Bob flick, I had a set in my head that I was going to be an Olympian and track and field and you couldn't tell me otherwise.
And so little did I know that he planted a little seed in me that kind of stuck around and I ended up accomplishing my goals just a different way. And sometimes I think you have to be open to the various ways your goal comes to fruition. Like a lot of times we think you have to do this, this and this in order to get your goal. But if you focus more on your goal and what you want for yourself, and it shows up in various ways and manifests in so many different ways.
Like I never would've thought I would have ended up becoming an Olympic medalist in bobsleigh, let alone a two time Olympian and Bob. But, And think of what would have happened if you would have been so rigid and say, no, it's track and field. I'm not doing bobsled. You might've missed it entirely.
Hi or if I had that feeling where I wanted something more, even though I was having success at EFT force performance and even though I had great success training my clients and helping them, but I still had that feeling on the inside. I think your intuition kind of guides you a little more than you give it credit for sometimes. Yeah. Just listening to it and trusting that it's meant for it to work out in the end and you're meant to be happy and confident and that could fear it as much.
I think everyone's just in a fearful state a lot of the times and even when it comes to talking to other people and getting feedback and help, sometimes you got to realize people project their own fear onto you so they may have their own fear, insecurity and you have to make a decision of what you want for yourself regardless of what anyone tells you what anyone else says and do it because a lot of times you won't even accomplish something that you know you want for yourself
because other people are scared for you. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's just like how love is, success is the same way, not a zero sum game. Just because you're successful doesn't mean another person can't be successful. I mean, when you win an Olympic medal, no one else can win that medal in that game in that year like you, but it doesn't mean they can't be successful in some way. So if they lose to you in one race, that doesn't mean they might not win in another race.
And honestly, I'm going into 2014 Olympic games, one in win gold. I didn't go into just one into one. An Olympic medal. No. Cause you want to shoot for the top. Yeah. And I won Brian. Then you think I'm complaining about bronze or not winning and go? No, you shoot for the stars. Well I don't think you missed very bad. I've held your Olympic medal and I think it's pretty super awesome. Asia. So real quickly, are you doing anything else right now?
Are you testing out some other things right now since you've got four years or what's up with you? Yeah, I can turn it around with a few things. Yeah, it's possible that the games, I've worked with some really amazing sponsors and so I've been getting into a lot more modeling things and I did some broadcasting, so I'm going to play around with those a little bit. You might see me on your television screen. Oh, you got to tell us if you are. I will for sure.
So hopefully some of those things will be coming into place so, and it's all been so fun and so I'm enjoying every minute of it. Wonderful. Well, I love that you are testing out new things and just keeping all of your options open. I think that's a great example for us. Yeah, I agree. Let's close this out now, but as we do, I want to invite you to dare to dream. I'd like to present you with a virtual gift. It's a magical box containing unlimited possibilities for your future.
I don't know, maybe there's even some golden there. I don't know. We'll see. This is your dream or your goal of almost unreachable Heights that you would wish to obtain. Please accept this gift and open it in our presence. What's inside your box? Asia. Ooh, this is fun. I've never really like kind of done this and a lot of times like you set goals for yourself and you set these things for yourself, but then you're scared to say it kind of out loud. Well, this is like the law of attraction.
You're putting it out into the universe so it can come back to you. Olympic gold is definitely in my box. I know it's there. I feel it every day. I felt this since I've been an athlete, let alone done. Bob says so I know Olympic gold is in that box and I know, I think a successful career for me is in that box for acting or broadcasting.
I've been doing a lot of stuff on television and it's been working out for me and I'm getting a lot of good feedback from that as well as getting my foundation off the ground with my mom. I know that's intuition. We've been working on that for awhile. I don't know anything about that. I've been working with my mom creating the Asia foundation.
My name is spelled Aja, so it stands for aspiring journeys ahead and if we want it to be a mentoring program to work with Chicago public school students and basically kind of introduce them to for us and it can help create different types of journeys and lead to different types of paths. Like I said, I started off in track and field. It ended up leading to me and an Olympic medal in a totally different sport.
But I have friends who did football and basketball in college and one's a lawyer and one's a doctor so it can lead to different things. And so I think it's all about just opening your eyes up to the journey and see where it takes you and sports are one of those avenues that I think can really help kids And starting off young like that too. Yeah, Getting involved young. Well you are certainly a great role model to start a foundation. I think that's fabulous.
If any of our listeners want to know more about this foundation, where would you direct them? I can direct them to my Facebook page. It's Asia Evans, facebook.com Asia Evans, and then if they want to learn more they can shoot me an email and we can send them some more information or direct message on there. We're still working out all the details and it's kind of just been something I little project so hopefully we'll get a project off the ground and our first even herself later this
year. Super well give biz listeners, you know there's a show notes page that's going to be attached to this. I will give you all of Asia's social media sites as well as any updates, Asia and the foundation as they come by. We'll just update the show notes page too, so cause people might actually listen to this a year from now, two years from now, maybe four years from now when you're on your way to gold again. So we can always keep this alive and update it accordingly.
Because I love the Asia foundation, I didn't know anything about it. On behalf of me and my listeners, I want to wish you all the luck and I'm so excited to watch your journey continue and thank you so much for sharing. Really, really solid advice in an interesting different way, you know, from an athlete perspective, but so much of it that we can relate to our businesses. So thank you so much Asia. Thank you for having me. It's been a blast talking to you. There you have it.
Gift biz listeners and I really liked this episode because I have some intuition of my own. I feel like four years from now I'm going to be reminding all of you about this episode and that's going to be because Asia Evans wins a gold medal at the next winter Olympics. That will be so exciting. And something else that's exciting that I referenced in the very beginning of this podcast is that I have a special announcement for you. I have just put the finishing touches on my free masterclass.
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