When Dame Kelly Holmes’ athletics career ended aged 35, she went into a spiral, wondering what was next.
The shift in identity from being an Olympic gold medal winning champion, to regular Kelly Holmes took a massive toll on her. But after spending a decade working on her mental health and finding a new purpose, she realised the lessons she picked up along the way could also help women in a midlife crisis.
Now she travels the world as a motivational speaker using her own story of celebrating the wins, feeling in the depths of despair and coming through a huge life pivot with a brighter attitude to life.
“The transition from everything I knew about reaching for potential, high performance, pushing myself to be the best version, achieving my dreams, doing my job that I wanted to do… I’d done all that by the time I was 35. Which is actually scary,” she told this week’s Second Act podcast with Ateh Jewel.
The menopause campaigner relates her pivots in life to that of being a woman in midlife, where we not only go through hormonal changes, but lifestyle ones when it comes to family growing up and moving away and career changes.
“What next? That is the challenge,” she reflects. “When you lose your identity, when you’re looking at change, when everything around you that you knew, the people around you who followed wherever your ambition was going, when suddenly all those people that you have as part of your community group go because you’re moving on to the next thing.”
“How do you find your tribe again, in anything you do? Who are you next, when you feel like part of your identity is gone? How do you reinvent yourself?”
“The transition and finding an identity was very different, and quite hard, but evolving into charity and being a global speaker as I am now (helped me) find my mojo.”
“Now I’m just getting started, I think there’s too much to go for. Maybe because I’m such a doer, I don’t want to run out of energy. I don’t want to run out of the ability to still keep being active and learning and growing. I hate the thought that as you do get older, certain things might come to us where you haven’t got the capabilities of doing it.”
So, what advice does Dame Kelly have for women in midlife trying to find their new purpose and tribe? “Know there is help and advice out there,” she says. “I think people should, especially in their midlife and onwards, go ‘hold on a minute. I need to grab everything I can grab’ because you might not have the health, you might not have the emotional connection with your life. You might not have the finances later on. So, in the point where you feel the strongest, bloody take it.”
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