The Diary of a CEOI Won 11 World Titles Because They Said I Couldn't: Anna Hemmings MBE | E65
CHAPTERS
- 2:00 – 8:30
Discovering Kayaking and the Power of Environment
Anna explains how she stumbled into kayaking as a child and ended up in an unusually high-performance club that normalized world championships and the Olympics. Seeing ordinary people from her club compete on the world stage made elite sport feel attainable and seeded her own Olympic dreams.
- •Started kayaking around age 9 after trying many different sports.
- •Joined Elmbridge Canoe Club, one of the UK’s top competitive clubs in the late 1980s.
- •Club culture was explicitly about racing, GB team selection, world championships, and Olympics.
- •Watching the Olympics on TV as a child created an early, vivid desire to be an Olympian.
- •Being surrounded by “normal” athletes going to Seoul and Barcelona made elite success feel realistic rather than distant.
- 8:30 – 18:00
Being Underestimated: Size, Strength, and Turning Doubt into Drive
Anna recounts being repeatedly told she was too small and not strong enough for elite kayaking, especially in team boats, and how those judgments hardened her determination. She describes focusing on controllable factors—like strength—until she transformed a perceived weakness into a defining advantage.
- •A GB coach told her at 12 she’d never be big or strong enough to be a great kayaker.
- •She was also told she wasn’t suitable for K2/K4 crew boats due to size and appearance.
- •Used this feedback to fuel a resolve to become the strongest athlete in the gym.
- •Eventually bench-pressed 100kg and became the strongest woman on the GB team.
- •Highlights how performance assumptions were often based on body type rather than objective strength.
- •Winning world titles in K2 and qualifying for the Olympics in doubles was especially satisfying given early dismissals.
- 18:00 – 28:00
Team Dynamics: Trust, Vulnerability, and Healthy Conflict
The conversation shifts to how high-performing teams function, emphasizing that healthy conflict is impossible without underlying trust built through vulnerability. Anna explains how leaders must model openness and create conditions where people feel safe to challenge ideas, or risk fake agreement and disengagement.
- •Healthy conflict is essentially robust debate in service of a shared goal, not personal attacks.
- •Trust is the prerequisite: without it, people won’t challenge leaders or each other.
- •Vulnerability from leaders—admitting mistakes, limits, and uncertainty—creates psychological safety.
- •Workshop exercises asking people to share childhood challenges show how one person going first lowers the barrier for others.
- •Without open debate, teams nod in meetings then privately resist decisions afterward.
- •The same dynamics apply in romantic relationships: feeling heard matters more than “being right.”
- 28:00 – 43:00
Sports Psychology, Limiting Beliefs, and Building Real Confidence
Anna describes working with a sports psychologist from age 16 and how mental training became a key differentiator in elite sport. She outlines how doubts, fear, and misdirected focus sabotage performance, and how she now helps clients surface and replace limiting beliefs with more useful narratives grounded in their strengths.
- •She started sports psychology work at 16, driven by a growth mindset instilled by her mother.
- •At the Olympic level, physical differences between finalists are minimal; the mental game often decides the winner.
- •Common mental blockers: doubt, fear, anxiety, nerves, lack of confidence, choking under pressure.
- •Limiting beliefs are examined not for their origin but for how they currently serve or hinder outcomes.
- •She coaches clients to audit beliefs, map pros/cons, and design more helpful alternative beliefs.
- •Confidence comes from selectively recalling past successes and the strengths behind them, not from ignoring failures.
- •Even without direct successes, people can draw on analogous wins and transferable attributes.
- 43:00 – 53:00
Intrinsic Motivation and Short-Horizon Discipline
Discussing discipline, Anna explains that grand goals like “Olympics in four years” rarely get you out of bed on freezing mornings. Instead, she relied on intrinsic drivers—achievement, connection, recognition—and short-term milestones, a model she now applies to leadership and team motivation.
- •Long-term goals are motivating overall but not sufficient on difficult daily grinds.
- •Monthly targets (gym metrics, time trials in running/swimming/paddling) powered her achievement drive.
- •Other intrinsic drivers included enjoyment of training with teammates and coach feedback.
- •Different athletes were driven by different things (recognition, contribution, affiliation).
- •Dean Spitzer’s work on supermotivation informs her use of diagnostics to identify core drivers.
- •Leaders often mistakenly motivate others using their own drivers instead of the individual’s.
- •Knowing and designing work around intrinsic motivators leads to more sustainable performance.
- 53:00 – 1:01:00
Visualization, Law of Attraction, and Taking Action
Anna details her structured visualization practice as an athlete and how she continues to use it in business. She and Steven explore the controversial “law of attraction,” ultimately agreeing that vivid mental rehearsal programs the subconscious and behavior, but must be paired with consistent action.
- •As an athlete she set aside 2–15 minutes to visualize races after relaxation.
- •She mentally rehearsed every lane, weather condition, false starts, bad starts, and comebacks.
- •Visualization builds belief that desired outcomes are possible and primes calm execution under unpredictability.
- •The brain struggles to distinguish vividly imagined events from real experience, laying down helpful neural patterns.
- •Visualizing goals activates the subconscious to spot resources, people, and opportunities aligned with the goal.
- •Steven likens it to setting a satnav: you still have to “turn the key and drive.”
- •When you see yourself as a champion, your day-to-day training and decision-making shift to match that identity.
- 1:01:00 – 1:09:00
One Meter at a Time: Breaking Down Overwhelming Goals
Using a story about guiding a terrified friend up Mount Toubkal, Anna illustrates the power of radically shortening your focus when tasks or futures feel overwhelming. She applies the same principle to business targets and personal change: define the summit, then focus on the next small, feasible step.
- •Her friend with a fear of heights froze on the steep summit push, especially worrying about the descent.
- •Anna coached her to ignore the summit and the descent and focus only on “one meter at a time.”
- •The same applies to seemingly impossible business or life goals: know the destination but focus on immediate process steps.
- •Micro-commitments (“Can I do the next five minutes? The next step?”) are psychologically manageable and build momentum.
- •Over-focusing on the full distance/time fuels fear and paralysis, whereas narrow focus encourages action.
- 1:09:00 – 1:21:00
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Collapse, Misdiagnosis, and Emotional Alarm Bells
Anna recounts being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome at 25–26, just as she was targeting the Athens Olympics. She describes the drastic loss of function, the emotional toll of an invisible illness, dismissive medical encounters, and the eventual breakthrough via reverse therapy, which framed her symptoms as mind-body alarm signals.
- •Symptoms went far beyond tiredness: profound exhaustion, muscle pain so intense she couldn’t wash her hair for 10 seconds, and inability to paddle slowly for more than 10 minutes.
- •Doctors initially assumed overtraining and prescribed graded exercise; she knew this was wrong because she had been doing less training than teammates.
- •Standard tests in Florida showed “nothing wrong,” and a doctor told her she looked fit and was fine.
- •A UK doctor later said there was no cure and she would never again compete at the highest level, which was devastating to her identity and ambitions.
- •Watching the 2004 Athens Olympics from home while ill was particularly painful.
- •She remained determined there had to be a way back, sustained by optimism and a refusal to let the illness end her career.
- •Reverse therapy conceptualized symptoms as alarm bells about stresses, pressures, and emotional non-expression that she had long ignored.
- •A key trigger: years of training largely alone with a remote coach, isolating herself despite being an extrovert who gains energy from people.
- 1:21:00 – 1:33:00
Mind–Body Connection, Expression, and Changing the Environment
Anna explains the specific behavioral changes that helped her recover: expressing emotions instead of maintaining an invulnerable “game face,” reconnecting with people, and redesigning her training environment around her psychological needs. She and Steven broaden this into a discussion of loneliness, modern work patterns, and how emotional states manifest physically.
- •One of the biggest shifts was allowing herself to cry in front of others and honestly share how bad things were, instead of always saying “I’m fine.”
- •Non-expression of emotion is a common trigger in reverse therapy’s model; sharing reduces the load and breaks the isolation cycle.
- •Her “poker face” toughness, invaluable on race day, became harmful when applied to everyday life and relationships.
- •She recognized that as an extrovert, constant solo training with a distant coach deprived her of essential social energy and support.
- •After recovery, she rebuilt her training with more group work, on-site coaching, and better emotional self-monitoring.
- •Steven connects this to “freelance depression” and the loss of informal workplace community—as well as broader societal loneliness discussed by Johann Hari.
- •They note many illnesses (headaches, migraines, frequent colds) are emotional in origin but manifest physically.
- •By tuning into “mind/body” signals early and asking what needs changing (environment, relationships, pressures), she avoided relapsing even while training harder than before.
- 1:33:00
Identity, Labels, Vulnerable Leadership, and Reinventing Success
In the final section, Anna and Steven unpack how tightly held identities—athlete, CEO, social media founder—can imprison people and limit future options. They also discuss the balance between composure and vulnerability in leadership, before Anna reflects on her transition into coaching and leadership development and what now gives her meaning.
- •Anna realized she’d been saying “I’m an athlete, not a business person” even after 11 years running a company.
- •Steven has struggled to shed his identity as a “social media CEO,” even when exploring biotech, shows, and other new directions.
- •Labels give comfort, community, and clarity but can stunt growth; the antidote is to focus on underlying transferable skills.
- •They debate whether leaders should show fear or doubt in crises; Anna argues for honest vulnerability paired with confidence in the team’s ability to find a way.
- •She defines a resilient leader as someone confident in who they are and what they do, aware of strengths and development areas, who can bounce back and create opportunities.
- •They agree leaders shouldn’t pretend to have every answer, but must genuinely believe a positive path exists; if you don’t, collapse becomes self-fulfilling.
- •Anna now gets her deepest fulfillment from helping others unlock potential—coaching leaders on confidence, habits, motivation, and resilience.
- •She sees her post-sport career as another high-performance arena, proving that identities and careers can be successfully reinvented.
