Sarah Wells: Olympic Athlete - 400M Hurdles & Founder - Believe Initiative

Could you tell us about your journey starting from the Olympics to founding the Believe Initiative? 

I got into speaking because when I made the Olympics, I was sitting out with an injury. It was supposed to take 3 months to heal, it ended up taking 9 months, and so I got the word Believe tattooed on my wrist on the first day back in  training. I only had 6 months to heal from my injury and improve by an entire second to qualify. I knew the next 6 months were going to be really challenging. I also knew that after getting through the worst 9 months of my life that were the most mentally draining, I needed to Believe in myself. With Believe tattooed on my wrist, 6 months later I made the Olympics. I felt that believing in yourself worked. I started standing on stages, sharing that story of if you believe in yourself, you achieve your goal. 

Four years later, the Olympics came back around and I was now a medal hopeful, but I ended up tearing my hamstring right before the games and not qualifying. I was so devastated that I had quit sport for a year. In that year off, I questioned everything because I had been speaking about if you believe in yourself you achieved your goals. Now, I had believed in myself and I did not achieve my goal. I questioned if it was a sick joke that people tell you to make you feel better. When I realized that I believed in myself more strongly after not making the Olympics, that’s when the Believe Initiative was founded. You do not build self-belief through achievements, you build it through action.  

I thought of how I could help others build self-belief through action. Now, the Believe Initiative does events all across North America to help people understand the importance of being resilient and the power of believing in themselves. We host leadership sessions that help them become better leaders, learn how to build a team, learn how to be engaged, etc. They then use those lessons and apply it to a Believe Impact Project that connects a passion they have to a problem they want to solve. This builds that self-belief through action, which is what the program is all about. 

We have done this with thousands of people across North America and the impact has been amazing!

Fast forward to your career post-Olympics, how did you transition from being an athlete to being a speaker? 

Being an athlete, you are so immersed in training, recovering, fueling, resting and then doing it all over again. But I never knew what real life was like. After I retired and became a normal person, it was weird. Luckily, I had some amazing mentors in my life who made me question what I wanted to do after sport. And because of that story of getting Believe tattooed and overcoming my injury and then making it to the Olympic games, I had been fortunate enough to be asked to come and speak where I would share that story. 

As I began to speak, I realized I could really create an impact. I discovered this entire industry that surrounds leadership development and leadership training. I realized there was so much I learned from sport that I could create programming around and transition into that as my full-time job. Once I retired, it was a matter of how can I get this in front of more people and how do I create a community to get the word out even further? 

I didn’t think I would find anything that I would love as much as track and field, but I truly love what I get to do. 

How did you seek out and build relationships with mentors?

Mentorship is so interesting because I call them mentors, but it was not like we sat down and agreed to have a mentor relationship with an official schedule. It was as simple as meeting someone, finding them interesting, realizing they had a really cool perspective on a certain industry or experiences I wanted to learn from. It is about finding opportunities and being open to opportunities for mentors to come into your life. You do not have to join a formal mentorship program. It is as easy as meeting someone you are interested in, sending an email that maybe says, “here is who I am, this is what I thought was really interesting about you, this is what I’d love to learn more about”. Tell them why you want to learn it from them and what the big goal is so they feel like they are along for the ride. 

Once you establish that connection email, you can simply send them updates on what you have been working on or maybe ask them a question. Share an article that you think they might be interested in. When you create a true relationship where you are not always asking for something and sometimes you are updating them on what you are working on, they get to be part of that journey with you. That’s so meaningful. 

You mentioned that you were very fortunate in knowing exactly what you wanted to do after sport. For your peers who may not have realized it right away, what did you notice that they did to try and find their passion?  

I think if you don’t know what you’re passionate about, the best thing you can do is to get out there and try things. I recently read a quote that said, “you don’t find purpose, you build it” and I love that. When I think about how I knew that I wanted to build leadership training and speaking after sport, it was because I was taking opportunities to speak on stages and asking people for feedback on what to do to be a better speaker. Suddenly, I felt that I was using my story that I got to experience in sport to help other people overcome their obstacles and reach their goals. That feels like my purpose. Did I know that at the start? No way. But I was taking opportunities and saying yes to try new things and I built my purpose. If you do not know what makes you’re passionate about, go try something new. Whatever it is, gather more feedback to help you discover whether it is the thing you want to go follow. Even when you think you found it, you may take 3 steps along that path and discover that you actually hate that. By realizing that it might not be what you want, you can take elements from that path you can take to your next path. 

Taking what you learned from your transition from an athlete to a speaker, what would you say to people who are afraid that making a career change is a mistake or who do not know if the riskier step is the right one for them? 

People ask me all the time, “how did you know it was right to retire?” There were two signals that it gave me. 

The first cue was that I was saying I still wanted to be a high-performance athlete, yet I was making choices that were not the milestones that would get me to be a high-performance athlete. I was going to speeches, taking trains, overnight flights and getting home exhausted. I then tried to get back on the track and do my workout and have a terrible workout, of course. Clearly, what I was saying and what I was doing was very different. 

The second cue was that part of me was only still in the sport of track and field was because I was scared. What definition of myself will I have if I let go of sport. I think as you mentioned, a lot of people, whether that is a career change, a change in academic programming, a switch of a school, jumping ship on internships year over year, if you don’t let go, you don’t even have the capacity or room to find the right fit. For me, if I didn’t let go, then I never could have grown the Believe Initiative to where it is now. We can let go, and maybe that thing comes back to us, and we let it fill the void again, or we let it fill with something completely new. When you are scared to let go, think about the possibility rather than what you are afraid of losing. 

How do you differentiate goals that are genuinely personal and meaningful to you from goals that are there because it is everyone else’s? 

If you do not know whether you set this goal because you want it or if you set the goal because someone else wants it, ask yourself why you want to reach your goal 5 times. Sometimes we can come up with a superficial reason because our brains understand why it might be beneficial. Ask yourself, “Why do I want to do it?” Well, you might think of one reason and keep going until the 5th time. If I think back to why I wanted to do the Believe Initiative, it is because when I go 5 layers down, it helps me heal the pain I experienced when I didn’t make the Olympics as a medal hopeful that shattered my self-belief. By helping other people reach their best self, it helped my healing. If you ask yourself why 5 layers deep and, in the end, it is a superficial answer such as someone told me I should or everyone else does it, maybe you should reconsider the goal. That is what I encourage you to do - ask yourself 5 whys deep, and then you’ll know. 

How has your definition of success changed throughout the years? 

My definition of success has changed a lot. I think we all can get very hung up on outcomes, achievements, and awards. I am not saying that that is not important because it is. I was driven and I still am, by achievement. I wanted to win a gold medal and I wanted to be recognized by the global stage and that drove me, inspired me, and got me into action. But when we only define success by the outcome, reward, and achievement, we prevent ourselves the opportunity of maintaining that motivation. If we don’t get it, we fall off the edge of a cliff and we say, “Okay not worth it, what a waste of time and might as well walk away.” 

I have now realized that if you think back to the most successful moments of your life and you ask yourself “who did I have to be in order to get to those moments?” You may have had to be brave or ambitious or kind and all of these different things. You can distill those character traits into a top three or four and keep acting with those traits so that even if you do not reach your goal in this moment, if you keep showing up as the person who you were in your most successful moments, you will find another opportunity for success. That is how I define success now. Who is the person I need to be everyday to find success because even if I don’t get it in one moment, I will not fall off the edge of the cliff. I encourage everyone to distill down what are the elements that you believe led you to your success and show up as that person everyday. Make that your definition of success. 

Any final words of advice for young women searching for their career paths or chasing after their dream jobs? 

Biggest piece of advice aside from believing in yourself is to ask for help. I cannot tell you how much I have been able to accomplish and achieve because of the amazing people I have had in my life who have shared best practices and shared their wisdom and rocket launched me in an amazing direction. Ask for help because we don’t realize how much it can fast forward our careers. We also need to remember that we are not being annoying by doing so because they get something from it as well. It is so beneficial to your career and people want to help more than you realize.