Heather Mitts Feeley on Purpose, Self-Care, and Staying Present
How can you take care of yourself and find purpose through significant life transitions?
In this episode of Prevention Pioneers, Olympic gold medalist Heather Mitts Feeley discusses the challenge of transitioning from a professional soccer career into motherhood, how she takes care of herself, and finding purpose.
Major transitions in careers or life stages can shake your sense of purpose. For Heather Mitts Feeley, gratitude, presence, and self-care have been vital in connecting with her purpose and supporting her mental health in this chapter.
Let’s dive into her insights and explore how you can get more gratitude, presence, and self-care in your daily life.
The Challenge of Transition and Finding Purpose
For professional athletes, finding purpose after retiring from their competitive career can be a challenge. Heather explained, “We’re expected to kind of reinvent ourselves. Like, what are they going to do next? That’s always the expectation for all athletes.”
Heather’s natural athlete career transition was working in television, which required extensive travel. Her next personal step was becoming a mom, which she describes as her “most amazing phase.” However, she said, “once I added the motherhood bit into it, it was just really hard to juggle it all.”
These major career and personal transitions made her reflect on her purpose. She and Mike discussed how one can have multiple purposes throughout their life, and how these purposes can change. For Heather, reflection during the COVID-19 pandemic provided her with greater clarity on finding her purpose in life at that moment.
Gratitude
Gratitude helped Heather recognize the good things in her life, which in turn gave her clarity around her purpose. During the pandemic, she read The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan, which inspired her to write down three things she was grateful for every day.
That and the pandemic highlighted her gratitude for family, as she said, “It just made me realize that I already had so many amazing things right in front of me. It made me appreciative of what I already have. And obviously, my family was always a part of that.”
Some other ways to practice gratitude include:
- Mindful reflection meditations
- Writing down things you’re grateful for on slips of paper in a jar
- Visual prompts around your home to remind you to reflect on gratitude
- Writing more thank you notes or telling people in your life you’re thankful for them and their actions
Staying Present
After the pandemic, Heather gained more clarity on her current purpose: staying present with her family instead of being on the road.
She acknowledged that staying present is a challenge and not something she was used to as an athlete. She said, “Because all [athletes] look forward to is the next big game, the next World Cup, the next Olympics. I mean, we’re looking years in advance. So living in the present was not something that I did when I was playing in sports.”
Some tactics to help you stay present include:
- Mindful breathing and meditation
- Grounding exercises
- Focusing on one task at a time instead of multitasking
- Mindful listening
- Body scans
- Digital detox time
- Practicing gratitude
Defining Success
The concept of success can put a lot of pressure on athletes, especially after they transition into a new career. Heather believes that “You get to define what success is.”
In her definition, “success is finding your purpose and your passion, doing what you love, and then doing it to the best of your ability.”
Self-Care’s Role in Mental Health
With her purpose solidified, Heather’s attention turned to preventive mental health and self-care. She realized during a discussion on another podcast that parents often overlook self-care, and many parents don’t realize they’re not taking care of themselves until they reach a breaking point.
She says that self-care for parents is “Just figuring out exactly what that is that you need in your life to kind of fill your own bucket. Because when you fill your own bucket, you’re more likely to fill everybody else’s.”
Heather’s self-care routine includes setting aside one self-care activity every day, usually meditation, and taking breaks as needed. Staying present, gratitude, and mental health also go hand in hand.
Some other ways that parents can perform self-care include:
- Scheduling self-care time (even if it’s one activity a day)
- Practicing mindfulness
- Exercising
- Connecting with others
- Taking breaks
- Setting boundaries socially
- Making time for hobbies
- Seeking help when needed
Learning From Trauma
During a self-care trip, Heather reflected on past traumas and how she’s learned from them. After her parents’ divorce, she spent time with some rebellious friends, one of whom passed away in a tragic car accident.
“I realized that soccer saved me,” Heather said, because it gave her a new purpose and surrounded her with motivated, smart teammates for inspiration.
Mental Health for Young Athletes
Heather also advocates for preventative mental health in young athletes. She reminds them that pressure and butterflies before a game are normal, and “it just means that you care and that you want to do well, and it’s just a part of the game.”
However, she acknowledges that social media provides a new challenge to mental health due to the hurtful comments people make and the difficulty in knowing how to handle them. She advises young athletes to be mindful and “If you see that something is affecting you, ask, ‘Is it worth it?’”
She suggests that they try to reflect on why a comment affects them and to work on it from there.
Final Thoughts on Purpose and Mental Health
Significant transitions and shifts in purpose occur throughout life. Knowing how to reconnect with yourself will help you stay resilient and shift through them. To learn more about Heather Mitts Feeley’s insights on purpose and self-care, listen to the full episode of our mental health podcast.To learn how Spirence, our preventative mental health platform, can help you explore gratitude, self-care, and mindfulness, book a demo of the platform.
