Episode Details

What happens when winning becomes tied to your sense of worth?

In this episode from the Sports Expedition series, Julia speaks with Explorer Suvi Mikkonen about one thing she has had to jettison and one thing she has had to reframe.

Suvi’s jettison is the idea that winning proves your worth. As an athlete, winning and losing became deeply personal. Winning meant she was good enough. Losing could feel like losing part of herself.

Her reframe is losing as learning.

Through coaching, Suvi has begun to shift the focus away from treating each result as a verdict and towards asking what can be learned from it. The result still matters, but it becomes part of a longer process: what happened, what can change, and how can we be more ready next time?

Julia and Suvi also explore how deeply competition can become part of a person’s way of operating. Suvi recognises that competition can motivate her powerfully, but that it does not motivate everyone in the same way. That means learning to understand what gets each person moving rather than assuming that what works for you will work for them.

The conversation also touches on comparison, confidence and self-doubt, and Suvi’s own practice of saying yes to opportunities even when part of her still wonders whether she is the right person.

A conversation about separating identity from results, learning how to lose, and discovering what sport can teach us when we are willing to jettison one assumption and reframe another.

About the Guest -

Suvi Mikkonen is a two-time Olympic taekwondo athlete and now a high-performance coach working with Olympic and world-class athletes. She is President of Hankuk International School, a globally recognised elite training environment based in Spain. Suvi is part of the IOC Women in Sport High Performance pathway and the Women Emerging leadership expedition, where she continues to develop her approach to human-centred leadership in sport.