Now in its third year, WEXPO events have delivered national economists, Government Ministers, senior government representatives, business and community leaders in addressing issues such as health, education, cost of living and opportunities for business and community success.
WEXPO is a people led initiative that that allows community and business leaders to gather, network and residents to engage with exhibitors and learn from experts
WEXPO now takes a new slant on connection. WEXPO is going on the road with WEXPO Student Edition. This is where WEXPO links up with schools in Western Sydney for a special presentation purposed to educate students and attendees on life skills such as building resilience, success mindset, overcoming adversity and more.
Showcase speakers are prominent performers in sport, academia, community and business.
On November 4 an audience of around 200 students, teachers and guests gathered at CathWest Innovation College Mt Druitt to hear heard a very inspiring keynote presentation by Blacktown’s own Olympic medal winning diver and business owner, Melissa Wu, plus a demonstration on weightlifting from her brother, Josh.
CathWest principal Paul Stenning welcomed guests and said that supporting the WEXPO Student Edition aligned with his school’s mission of enabling students to start careers and opening opportunities for jobs.
The event was sponsored by ACU Blacktown Campus and Dean Valentine Mukuria in her opening address urged students to dare to dream and to take on board messages from Melissa’s presentation to develop their own ambitions.
Melissa was introduced Member of Blacktown and WEXPO Patron, Stephen Bali who said: “We've done three years of WEXPO and this is the first time we're going to the school – everyone’s excited.”
Here is an edited transcript of Melissa’s presentation.
I really appreciate you guys having me here today. I'm very proud to be an Olympian, a five-time Olympian in diving someone who's local in the area, someone who not only has lived here for many years and grew up here, but also as mentioned, I own a business, I own a gym with my brother Josh who's here as well today. So, to have the chance to not only represent this area, but to now work here, help the next generation of athletes coming through, it's something I'm very, very proud of.
I don’t know if many of you know a lot about diving, it's not a huge sport in Australia, but I actually got into it. My older sister was a swimmer, so that's where I first saw it. It's not very popular, but we're working on that. But today I'm going to chat to you a little bit about my journey as an athlete in diving and some of the challenges I've overcome along the way. And I think that my experience as an athlete shaped who I was a lot.
The things that I learned from it helped me not only in my sporting career to I wanted to achieve, but now later in life, in business, in any other thing that I encounter, the challenges along the way, the things I learned from diving have helped me with that. Whether it's sport or whether it's your job that you want to do later, whether it's music, anything that you guys want to do, the things that you learn along the way.
And I guess my overall message today when we finish would be just to never give up on your dreams to have something that you're working towards and focusing on. And when things get tough, that's part of it. In life, that's where you learn the most and keep what you want to do in sight and never give up on that.
I've been to five Olympics. My most recent was the Paris Olympic games and I'm very fortunate to have had a very long career.
So as a young athlete, I was lucky enough to have a lot of good role models and I grew up in Sydney, but then I moved to Brisbane and was training up in Brisbane with a lot of Olympians at the time. And even though I was lucky to be in that squad, it was also tough because we were basically reviewed very frequently on our performances.
And even day to day in training was was nerve racking because everything you did at training; it felt like they were judging you and they were taking notes and we'd have these review meetings and you'd get told that you weren't hitting targets. And I think even at that age, so that was before then, that was probably when I was 11 or 12. It was a lot of pressure for me because I had this opportunity, and I had this opportunity to dive with athletes at where I wanted to be at that Olympic level. And seeing them every day really inspired me. But at the same time, I had this worry every day that I wasn't going to measure up.
When I first made this Commonwealth Games, I was really young. But everyone was like, oh no, you're amazing at this pint-sized little diver. And they kept telling me all these positive things. And for me, I always really struggled I think even at that age because inside my own head was telling me, oh, you're not good enough. What if you get kicked out?
And then I suddenly made this event, made this Commonwealth Games where I won a silver medal and suddenly people were, I got thrown into the media and that was back in the day before social media when we just had TV and radio and things like that.
Lacking in self-belief
It was funny in my head I guess just being told all these amazing things, but then also lacking that self-belief at such a young age. And I guess that was the start of a big challenge for me that I had to work at throughout my whole career basically was having that confidence and that belief in myself to be able to perform to the level that I knew that I could.
So yeah, that was my first competition, silver medal in Synchro. This was my synchro partner. She was just a little bit taller than me. I don't think she'd probably still be that much taller than me. But yeah, we basically got thrown together for that competition. I did individual and syncro diving at that comp individual was not too bad, not my best performance, but my silver medal then was in synchro. That was a really good experience for me, even though I was really nervous.
I won quite a few international medals in Synchro individual. I was still competing, but it was very up and down for me. So that's where a lot of my success happened. At a young age in Synchro, I had to change Synchro partners between Commonwealth Games and Olympics. So, they do that fairly frequently in diving. They mix you up and you've got to work with other people.
So, this synchro partner that I had at my first Olympics, we'd competed together for probably a year or a year and a half and we'd done very well. So going into these Olympic games, even though I was so young, because I had already done a Commonwealth Games, I was still in this squad where there was a lot of pressure on me all the time. And because we'd done so well in the lead up, they basically going into Olympics said to us, you must win a medal, you must come back home with a medal.
And so going into the Olympics, I was confident in our ability to do that, but I was definitely very nervous. I felt like anything less than a medal would be a failure. So again, going in, all the media were behind me, everyone was saying, you've got this. And when we won that medal again, everyone was saying all these amazing things and in my head was, it was a big relief for me. It was like I ticked a box.
And I think at that age I didn't truly appreciate the gravity of an Olympic medal. It felt to me it was just like my duty to kind of go there and do it for the team and then come back. And so over the years throughout my career, I was lucky to win a medal at my first Olympic games, but then I didn't win another medal until three Olympics later.
It took me 12 years to be able to win another Olympic medal after that. And that journey for me was when I think I faced a lot more of the challenges and I had to kind of work through them a lot more.
But at this age I already had some issues with competition nerves and as I mentioned, competing by myself was a big issue and I was lucky that I could do it in synchro, but that didn't last forever actually.
I'll chat with you about some of the pressures and why I struggled to perform in competition. I think some of it was to do with the training environment that I grew up in and that pressure all the time. But basically, I Dunno if any of you guys have done anything where you felt super nervous before, has anyone woken up and felt like their stomach, like the butterflies in their stomach feeling sick?
That's basically how I have felt my whole career in diving for about 20 years on one thing that for me never got any better. I think when we care about something and you want to do well and it means something to you, that's why you feel nervous. That's why you feel these things. Your palms sweat.
If you didn't care about it and it didn't mean anything to you, you wouldn't get nervous. I think for me, when I was younger, I used to always get that feeling in my stomach in the morning and I used to always think to myself, oh, you're not ready. And all I wanted to do was just leg it down the street and just run. Or I'd be waiting on the platform to go up for my dive and I just want to run back down and go under my covers in my bed.
But what I learned later was that those feelings that you feel, the nerves, all those things, it's actually, it's your body's way of telling you that you're ready. But regardless, even though that's the case, it still sometimes feels really hard.
I had no in-between
And for me, that would be the same thing every time I would compete, whether it was at the lowest level or the highest level. I don't have an in-between basically. What that feels like is basically when you're walking up the stairs, the time goes really, really slow for me. It might only be 10 seconds, but it feels like a lifetime. And I constantly must tell myself positive things on the way up and you start to feel your legs shaking. And then one thing people always ask me is about that moment right before I dive, what that feels like.
And literally you feel it's kind of dead silence and the crowd's watching you and then they're dead silent. And so, you literally, as you walk to the end to dive off, you'll be in this massive pool with all these people, but all you can hear is the sound of your own heart beating. And yeah, it's like this eerie silence.
And I always talk about this moment I get when I'm walking to the end of the platform and it's like in those cartoons when you have the little angel and devil on your shoulder talking, and it's this constant battle in my head of me telling myself something positive and then you have this doubt that creeps in. Maybe it's not going to go, well, maybe I can't do this. But then you have this positive thought that you're trying to counter it with. And that little battle in my head happens with me right until the end of the platform.
And then when you go to the end, you turn around, we just stand on our toes. As you saw on the video, there's a million times and I thought I was literally going to fall off or in my handstand dive, you feel your arms shaking and you're like…. not on this international stage, I can't fall off.
But yeah, it's crazy. You train your whole life for this moment, but no matter how many times you do it every time in that moment, it just feels the same, just as nerve wracking. And it's like I said, it's because I care about it and I've always wanted to do well.
So that's where this comes in, what I call this decide and do moment. Something I learned over the years was that, whatever happened in that last moment right before I took off in my dive would be the moment that would, I guess control what would happen.
If I let that voice in my head that self-doubt win, then that's when things wouldn't go well. But if I trusted myself and trusted in what I could do and tried to really reinforce that positive thought right before I took off, then that's how it would go. So, for me, I always knew as a young athlete how powerful my mind was, but I didn't always know how to control it. In in the beginning, it was strong, but it was strong, I guess more in a negative sense. And it really held me back for a long time. But over the years I learned how to get better at that and control my thoughts and try and use it to my advantage a little bit more.
It's amazing in the moment when you're at Olympic games, but it's like this roller coaster and you kind of hit this rock bottom a little bit after.
Learning to perform on the world stage
And my first games, I struggled with that a lot, and I had some mental health issues and actually at the time I was living in Queensland but decided to come back to Sydney and change programs, dive with a different coach. For me, that was a massive step for me in trying to improve my mental game I guess, and how I felt about myself. But even when I moved back here, I felt a lot better in myself, but it took me a long time to get ahold of those comp nerves and that self-belief and being able to perform on the world stage.
So that was around that time then where I really started to hate diving and I wanted to kind of quit and thought, is it really worth it?
I guess I got to a bit of a turning point where I just felt like I was doing the same things for a long time and getting the same result. I've always been a person that works hard. And so a good measure for me, and I'm someone that always loved training. I loved training and not so much competing because of what I talked about before, how nervous I would get, but I really loved the feeling of going to training.
So I got to this point in my career after coming fourth, fifth at the Olympics when I thought, okay, if I want to do another four years of this again and try again, something has to change.
I must do something a bit differently. I started seeing a psychologist who helped me really work through a lot of that stuff. A lot of it was working on me as a person, not as an athlete. We started there. So I even remember the first time that I went to him very first time, he said, right, we're just going to start with something easy.
So how you look at things makes all the difference. And it comes back to that your mind is a lot more powerful than you think it is. And the same thing could happen to you, but the way you look at it and what you take from it and how you learn from it could be completely different. I learned to, rather than looking back at all my results that I wasn't happy with or the things I hadn't done, rather than looking at that negatively, we tried to reframe that and look at all the lessons that I'd learned along the way and all the things I could take in my toolkit to help me going forward.
And because I did it like that and I focused on me as a person, that's why all these things I learned along the way helped me then later in life, in business and these other things because we're all so much more than what we do.
We're able to do what we do because of who we are and the things that we learn along the way. And for me, that was the case. So yeah, those were some of the things that I worked on in terms of mindset shifting that being a lot more positive. And then one other thing that I also did was based, oh, sorry, I'll talk about this while we're on that.
Walking from diving happy
I think for me, learning those things, I learned from my psychologist before when I was younger, I used to think that these things on this side were the things that were going to make me very successful if I worked hard, if I focused, if I was strong, and I would try really hard and I just couldn't perform under pressure.
But when I worked with my psychologist and they focused more on the things that were more on me as a person, I learned that these were the things that were going to make me successful. Doesn't mean that I wouldn't work hard or have all these things as well, but rather than having this, I guess hard mindset, mindset on it, I basically learned to care about myself a little bit more, focus more on these things, optimism, positivity.
If I got those things right along the way, then that would ultimately help me achieve my goals rather than just hoping that if I kept doing the same thing, that I get the same result basically.
And there was a lot of times where I thought, it's not worth it. I just want to quit. I dunno if I can do this. And I think just that thing, it's the unknown. It's not knowing if I could do all the right things and keep trying, but there's no guarantee that I'll be able to do it.
And I think for me, as I got older, that really weighed down on me a lot. And I struggled with that a lot just knowing I could go through all of this and never know, but at the same time I knew that if I did everything I could do that I wouldn't have any regrets later.
And no matter what happened, if I achieved my goals or I didn't, if I won another Olympic medal or I didn't, I knew that looking back, if I could walk away and be happy with everything I'd done and know that I'd left no stone unturned, that that would make the biggest difference for me.
See Melissa’s full video presentation at www.wexpo.com.au
WEXPO is supported by media Partner Blacktown News - www.greaterblacktownnews.com.au
