Challenges definitely have come my way throughout , I guess I'm 23 now , so over the last 23 years . The biggest ones , I would say just learning my strengths , kind of maturing into that . I always wanted to maybe be someone else , and I admired a lot of people , but Never fully understood that most of my strength is in my head , and if I don't value that and go into matches knowing that I'm there to problem solve and think my way to a win as opposed to being really aggressive or instinctual or like this macho athlete , that's not me , but I always admired those athletes to the point where I'd want to be them , kind of detracting from my own strengths , so .
It would look like I wasn't trying , but my brain was so active and alive that if my mental , if my physical took over , it would detract from that . Um , but I didn't realize that , so I , I toned up the physical at the expense of my mental game , and And trying to emulate people better than me , and it just taught me that you have to know your strengths and if you want to grow , grow like organically increment by increment , I was trying to grow like too fast in a way that I kind of got stretch marks or speed wobbles . So that was a huge lesson .
Some of the best pieces of advice I've been given was from our former head coach , now CEO of USA Volleyball , John Spera . He talked a lot about what it means to become a man and the importance of learning to become not only independent yourself but to become . Taking care of others , but you can only do that once you take care of yourself .
So that was a huge lesson . The second biggest challenge and then growth that came from that was probably just burnout . I got burnt out on volleyball and honestly kind of on life .
So I used to train probably too hard and I always thought I wasn't working hard enough , kind of from a perfectionist tendency , and I'm trying to really stay in the Goldilocks zone of of just right and it's interesting . Sometimes you grow faster when you try less , so . It's not about working as hard as you can .
