Episode #35 How you can be a champion

In this week's episode of The Learning Network Podcast, I am joined by courage creator & resilience revolutionary, the appropriately named, Nadine Champion! Nadine is an international speaker, mindset coach, champion kickboxer & martial artist whose mission is to help women get back up, leave life’s dressing room and courageously create a life they love.

Rising to prominence by doing her first ever public speaking event in front of 2,500 people, Nadine was the closing speaker for TEDx Sydney with a speech entitled “10 Seconds of Courage”. She took a giant swing at creating a new life as she demonstrated the mindset tools that had led to her success but were also instrumental in her resilient recovery from cancer. The presentation’s much talked about grand finale changed the course of her life, launching a successful professional speaking career and seeing her author a book of the same name.

In this episode, Nadine is going to unpack a few things around courage and resilience and how we can be the best versions of ourselves. Nadine explains how she uses mindset training to overcome that wild voice in our heads that doesn't always say the nicest things by using our emotions, feelings and thoughts as fuel for positivity rather than letting them get in our way.

We also chat about how this mindset shift can be used to help students get through their HSC. Kids often get hung up on self doubt, with questions like, "I don't know if I can do this," and "will I be good enough?" As someone who left school at the end of year 11, Nadine empathises with the overwhelming pressure that can come with being a teenager; the pressure of exams, the pressure of questioning what you are going to do with your life, the pressure of figuring out who you want to be. Here, Nadine let her mind get the better of her, but after achieving her black belt, she realised she could reset her ability to handle the pressure and returned to studying, going to TAFE before getting a degree from UNSW. 

On the topic of getting through those final exams, Nadine pointed out that "when it comes to succeeding in the endgame, the big event... learning to handle the pressure" is so important. As Nadine explains, "If you're never stressed, and then you go into a really stressful situation, and you're not used to what happens to you physically, mentally, emotionally, it will usually have a detrimental effect on your ability to perform your skill set... so if you're leading up to big exams or anything stressful in life, what I always suggest to people is they do something extra that will give them strong emotions at a regular interval leading up to it. It might be just going to Zumba, it might be posting silly dances on Instagram reels, something that makes you feel out of your comfort zone so that when you are literally out of your comfort zone, it's not your first rodeo, you have a little experience with it. Experience is everything I believe." Here, we can see that the content, knowledge and the physical actions are a necessary part of the external skill set, but how you mentally handle pressure and stress is just as important. 

Listen to the whole episode and grab the show notes at thelearnnet.com/35 and learn how you can use your mindset to make a truly positively impact on you & those around you!