Hello, my name’s Ed Knowles, and I’m the producer and the host of the Olympic Channel podcast, the only official podcast about the Olympics. And so I’ve been working as a journalist for, well, the best part of a decade. I started out working for a TV channel called Setanta Sports News in about 2008. So yeah, it’s been a really interesting time to be alive. And I think lots of things have changed since that period. One of the things that has been consistent, though, is there’s been a lot of pressure. I thought that is true now more than ever; there are lots of pressures on young people. Money and financial things, and just comparing yourself online. So I think one of the things that is the most important thing is to just enjoy it, kind of embrace the pressure. It will always be there, especially if you’re in a kind of a mindset of wanting to improve yourself. And I think that’s it’s good to feel pressure. So rather than kind of letting it be a negative, try and see the positive sides to it.

I’ll always remember – and I’m going to name drop horrendously here now – there was a time when I was doing a speaking engagement for the Olympics, and Thomas Park, the president of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, was coming along. And he comes with all his people. And there was like a set of all the guests as well. And everybody started stressing out to me about the fact that the president is here, the president is here. And I remember, I just took a step back, I breathed. I was actually DJ-ing at the time, so I mixed the next record into the into of the other record because I knew that record would then take us into the bit that we needed to get to in the kind of event. And then I smiled, and went and met the president of the IOC. I have this mantra for myself in those moments, it’s like, “You have done so much work to get to this point, you know, enjoy it. It’s now time to enjoy the fruit of all those things that you’ve been doing every day, whether that’s getting up early, reading, whatever it is, whoever you’ve met. You’ve got to that moment, so enjoy it.”

And I think another thing that I wanted to say is that I have struggled in the past with being in pressurized moments and not being courteous or smiling to people. And it really makes a huge difference, and it’s something that I’ve learned the hard way. And that if you’re in a pressure moment, showing that you can handle the pressure by being funny, by being just smiley, and just being polite, it makes such a huge difference. And if you can just take that deep breath and take it with a pinch of salt. You know, it’s very rarely that important.

And I think the final thing I wanted to say was just, it will go wrong. One day, you will be pushing yourself and it will be too much, and you will break, and you will do something that you regret. And that’s okay. Just learn from it. Move on. And breaking is part of the process. I mean, look at all these athletes who are at the Tony Robbins podcast, there’s just loads of them. They pushed themselves to the limit, and they broke, and that’s okay. So yeah, embrace those things rather than let them kind of get on top of you. It’s okay to use that as a platform to go and achieve elsewhere.

So I hope that helped out. Listen to the Olympic Channel podcast and, keep going.

Rachel Carlton, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

A big thank you to Ed Knowles for his take on coping with pressure. I imagine that pressure is a recurring theme in his life, whether among the Olympic athletes themselves or his coverage of the Olympics.

Ed’s advice to embrace the pressure, as well as his personal anecdote on his encounter with the President of the International Olympic Committee, really resonated with me as an aspiring journalist. I remember feeling similarly starstruck when I had the opportunity to interview former Vice President Al Gore, and I too relied on my experience and the background research I had done to get to that point to keep cool under pressure. And as Ed acknowledged, things will go wrong – in fact, as I was walking to the interview location that morning to meet Gore, I rolled my ankle and sprained it pretty badly, undoubtedly anxious for the upcoming event. Who knows- maybe I was distracted enough by the sharp pain running up my leg to forget how nervous I was!