← Becoming UnDone® with Dr. Toby Brooks
Becoming UnDone® with Dr. Toby Brooks
150 | Vonn & Liu: Two Olympians, Two Comebacks. Grit Meets Freedom in Olympic Dreams
00:32:25
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Foreign. This is becoming undone. I go insane for the Olympics. And even as I'm working on this episode, the Winter Olympics are on right now. And when I was writing the script, Team USA's men's hockey team was up 5 to 1 in the third period. And I was trying my best to get some work done. In an airport as I was trying to get home. Trying to get work done. Trying. The Olympics are on, man. My memories of the Olympics and my insane love for them go way back. Like, way back. One year in 1992, NBC Sports embarked on this ambitious and innovative broadcast idea to cover the 22nd Summer Olympics in Barcelona. They called it the Olympics Triple Cast. It was the first of its kind project, and it provided three dedicated channels of live games coverage on the red, white and blue channels. The red channel was mostly team sports like basketball and baseball. The white channel was mostly individual sports like gymnastics and boxing. And the blue channel was home to swimming in week one and track and field in week two. At the time, cable was still pretty new. Pay per view was an even newer idea still. So the Triple Cast was considered a groundbreaking idea
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for all those who believe
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in their inalienable right to choose.
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This summer, we present the Olympics triple cast, three cable champs for 15 days,
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24 hours a day.
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It's 9 o', clock, and the summer Olympics are underway at Jim's Place. They're into boxing at the Lions, basketball, Pagan, Dave's gymnastics. But how are they watching three different events at the same time? Introducing the Olympics Triplecast. Three exclusive cable channels, each televising different events simultaneously live, with no interruptions. Switch back and forth between events as you please. But to get Triple Cast, you have to order the triple cast. Call 1-800-Olympic. You'll save money, too, because a full day of uninterrupted viewing is regularly $29.95. But if you call now, you'll enjoy 15 days for less than $9 a day. That's a 70% savings. So instead of watching just part of the Olympics, you can choose to see it all live on three cable channels. The choice is yours. The Choice is triple cast. Call 1-800-Olympic now.
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It was ambitious, if not downright risky. And as it turns out, the whole thing was, at least to the bean counters at NBC, a massive failure. Press releases at the time said that the network expected to sell around 2 million subscriptions for anywhere between $95 to 170, depending on what you bought. Actual sales numbers failed to eclipse 250,000 paid subscriptions. So with NBC paying more than $400 million for the rights to broadcast the games. It was estimated that more than $100 million was lost on what would later be referred to as the largest sports broadcasting megaflop in history. Nobody asked me for my opinion on the thing though. I was a 17 year old high school senior to be at the time. And when I heard the plans for 15 straight days of 24 hour coverage of the games, I couldn't believe my ears. I was going to watch every single minute. My family lived in rural southern Illinois on a 39 acre plot of land that's so remote that whoever lives there today still can't get cable television. And they won't ever. But we had a satellite dish. It wasn't one of those little 18 inch DIRECTV jobs that you'll see. It was a full blown like 10 foot diameter white fiberglass monstrosity that looked a lot like what scientists use these days to scan for evidence of life on other planets. We'd mounted it about 100ft from my house in order to get a clear shot of the horizon and to get us channels that otherwise there was no way we would have been able to get from our house on the outskirts of civilization. When it was first installed, that dish had a manual crank jack that would let you point it to different satellites in the sky. And each satellite was home to different channels. So if you wanted to change the station, it was literally a three person job. If the show or movie that you wanted to watch happened to be on a channel that wasn't broadcast on the satellite where the dish was currently pointed, somebody, usually me, would have to go outside and crank the jack. Meanwhile, somebody else, usually my sister, had to stand at the door to relay the commands delivered by standing near our single television. Usually my mom. Stop, go back a little. Right there. That's what my sister would say. Those were the frequent commands that were sent, passed along and received in the ridiculously labor intensive task that was needed so that you could watch whatever it was that you wanted to watch. Now when I look back, this was a pretty funny intersection of kind of high tech newfangled stuff and a ridiculously low tech execution. In later years we'd get an automatic dish pointer. But in those early days we did what we had to do with what we had. But back to the triple cast. There was no possible way that my folks were gonna pay upwards of a hundred bucks for me to watch the Olympics. But lucky for me, they didn't have to. We had a decoder chip too. The guy My dad had bought the system from. Previously, the county sheriff who had lost the most recent election, had opened a satellite television business out of his garage and he offered what I'd later learned were black market decoder chips for sale. Now I can't make this up. It went something like this. A lot of hotels at the time offered premium satellite television with an appropriate chip installed in the receiver. All you needed was a multi digit code that got sent out once a month so you could punch that code in and you could literally watch every channel available for free. How or where our sheriff turned illegal satellite guy got the codes from was beyond me. All I knew was that it worked and that I could watch all the Olympics that I wanted. I spent that summer literally glued to the TV for 15 straight days. I ate in front of the screen. I had a sleeping bag in the living room and I only slept when I absolutely couldn't stay awake anymore, only to get up a couple hours later and do it all over again. I vividly remember watching Eric Sato's jump serves along with Steve Timmons and the other guys on the USA men's volleyball team competing. And I was watching it at 4am There was track and fields and gymnastics and archery and rowing. Literally anything but I watched because to me, the Olympics have always kind of stirred in my soul in a way that very few other things can. I was born in 1975 with the US boycott of those 1980 Moscow Games. I missed the Olympics as a five year old. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what I was missing. However, just four years later, I can still recall those 1984 Los Angeles games with clarity. I watched Greg Louganis capture two gold medals in diving. So I went out to my pond to practice. And then I see Carl Lewis on the track and it would inspire me to run around the yard as fast as I could. Hurdler Edwin Moses. Every once in a while I'd occasionally jump over an imaginary hurdle just so that I could pretend I was him. And that 1984 USA basketball team that had Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullen, that made me spend extra time out on my tiny little makeshift court, that interlocked five ringed multi colored hook of the Olympic experience was firmly set in my soul. I was absolutely in love with the Games. Why? Because in my nine year old mind, any of that was still possible. All of that lay ahead as a possibility. Like an infant who can't quite understand the logistical impossibility of Santa loading enough toys for every Child on earth into a sled. I couldn't count the cost that those athletes had actually paid to find their way onto that stage and subsequently onto my screen. I was transfixed by American heroes who could show me in vivid detail what the relentless pursuit of a singular and incredibly specific goal could look like. They had done it. And so would I. Never mind the fact that I had literally no shot at ever even sniffing of Olympic glory. The overwhelming majority of summer sports, and virtually every winter Olympic sport have never been popular or even possible. Where I grew up, my school didn't have a track team and to my knowledge, I think there was exactly one in ground swimming pool of any sort in my whole county. It was a public facility in a state park and it was smaller than an Olympic sized pool and there was no diving board. And my favorite sport of basketball. Yeah, good luck securing one of those spots away from elite college level talent or eventually NBA all stars. But when I was nine, who really thinks about that hard cold truth? I did some quick figuring in my head and I'd be 13 in time for soul in 88. No good. Too young. 17 for Barcelona in 92. Still too young. Have to settle for watching the triple cast, I guess. Right? But 96 or 2000, those might work. 21 and 25 would be my prime time. Those would be my games. Except they weren't. Anybody with half a brain could have looked at my ability, capabilities and resources and seeing the truth. There was absolutely no way I would be an Olympian. If you sit down and do the math, you can see pretty quickly that any journey toward Olympic greatness is a fool's errand for all but the most elite of the elite walking among us. With a world population of around 7 billion and roughly 10,000 athletes at a given Summer Games, that puts the odds of just competing there at about 1 in 562,400 of those competitors, less than a thousand will win a medal. So you're saying there's a chance? Those are just the raw numbers though. In the US there are more people that compete, specialized training is more plentiful, so the odds grow even steeper. Think about swimming, where in 2015 USA Swimming counted 362,000 pool going athletes among its ranks. And that number doesn't even include club swimmers or open water swimmers or those who were inactive from USA Swimming at the time of the count. And of that, 49 swimmers made the trip to Rio in 2016, which put the odds of making the team at 0.0013%. For all intents and purposes, it was a near statistical impossibility for an American swimmer to hit that algae ridden green water of Brazil's Olympic aquatic stadium in a Team USA swim cap. What about my preferred sport of hoops? Though no statistics that I'm aware of even attempt to tell the odds of how dismal my chances were. But consider this. The chances of a high school senior eventually playing in the NBA are about 3 in 10,000, or 0.03%. Those odds are about the same as getting four of a kind in the first round of draw poker. And that's just the NBA. The Team USA roster consists of the most elite of that bunch, with just 12 players being picked from among those ranks. So to truly have a chance at earning a place on an Olympic team, most athletes have to, number one, hit the genetic lottery, number two, be born somewhere where those abilities can be developed through quality coaching, and three, have the family resources to support that pursuit. I spent two years working with Division 1 college gymnasts when I was a graduate assistant athletic trainer at the University of Arizona, and college gymnastics is a sport that's fundamentally different from most every other college sport. How, you might ask Former U of A head coach and former guest on the show Bill Ryden said it best quote College gymnasts have nowhere else to compete after this. There's no professional league for 25 year old gymnasts. Their best years are well behind them. We are here to hopefully help them heal and love the sport again after for many of them it has injured and abused them mentally and physically for decades. End quote. A spot on that USA Gymnastics team is one Almost every American girl I've ever spoken to has had for at least a moment during her childhood though. And I'd guess that such is possibly due to the young ages and smaller statures of those athletes that make it seem tailor made for little girls. So while that timing may be different for athletes in other sports, the end result is the same. A relentless pursuit of that elusive glory can chew you up and spit you out. It can break you. And for many it does. And it leaves scars that refuse to heal. So that's my backstory, why I love the Olympics, and also why over the years I've grown more uncertain and uneasy with what I love the most. When I see athletes devote their entire lives pouring everything they have, financially and physically and psychologically into that single dream, it seems unhinged to the most conservative among us. Just like legendary Navy SEAL David Goggins has frequently said, being great necessitates being unbalanced
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I became obsessed with being the baddest that God ever created. Am I that I don't care? I believe it. And I was trying to tell him, once you begin become obsessed with something, obsessed, it's okay to be unbalanced for a while. It's okay, don't be all this. Some people say you got to be balanced to be the best in the world at what you do. It's not about being a Navy seal. People the best at what you do, you have to be unbalanced to find every bit of energy and strength that you have to pull it off.
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So that's why this year's games have been been particularly perplexing to me. And I'm still processing what I've seen. And even though the reality is that the two athletes that we're going to talk about today came at their Olympic dreams from the two extremes of possibility, they are both incredible and inspiring. I guess right now is as good a time as any to tell you that. I'm Dr. Toby Brooks and this is becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely risk mightily and grow relentlessly. Every week I bring you a story of another high achiever who's overcome failure and set back on their path to success. But every so often, I take some time to reflect all on my own. In word of the third, today we're looking at two kinds of comebacks. We'll be back after this quick message. Have you ever looked in the mirror and thought, what in the hell just happened to my life? When the career shifts, when the relationship ends, when the identity you've built your whole life around disappears overnight, that's not failure. That's what I call a purpose storm. Most high achievers aren't prepared for it because no one ever taught us how to train for a comeback. I'm Dr. Toby Brooks and I built the science of the comeback for people who refuse to stay broken. Inside the app you'll find research backed resilience training, daily prompts and guided reflection tools, performance psychology frameworks, identity rebuilding exercises, and personalized structured pathways to move from burnout and confusion to clarity and momentum. It's not hype, it's neuroscience. It's performance science. And it's hard won experience. If you're listening to Becoming Undone, I created a special offer just for you. For the next three months, you can get full access for just 49 bucks for an entire year or just 5 bucks a month with no obligation. And you can cancel at any time. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee to start rebuilding your life on purpose. Your comeback isn't accidental, it's intentional. Start yours today@scienceofthecumback.com Two comebacks, one fueled by grit, another fueled by freedom. And sometimes they look exactly the same from the outside. At the 2026 Winter Olympics, the we saw both First, Lindsay Vaughn, battered, surgically repaired, criticized, relentless, chasing another gold medal after tearing her ACL only to break her leg in a separate crash.
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Oh my goodness, no, I have no regrets. Those are the words from Lindsay Vaugh tonight, a day after this horrific crashed knocked her out of the Olympics. Vaughn posting on Instagram, she suffered a complex tibia fracture that will require multiple surgeries to fix. She crashed just seconds into her downhill run, the crowd stunned to silence as she was airlifted from the course. I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside the gate, twisting me, vaughn wrote. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever, adding, if you take anything away from my journey, it's that you all have the courage to dare greatly.
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We'll be back after a quick break.
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You've read all the book, you've studied all the tips, you've watched all the videos, you're doing all the right things. Yet you're stuck. You're stuck in this cycle of trying to build a healthier life for yourself but not being able to trust me. I've been there. And that's exactly why I created Vida with Alita. I'm Aleda and I have a master's in kinesiology and I've spent years trying to build a healthier life. Now I want you to do the same. On this podcast, we talk fitness, mindset, habits, boundaries, and how to feel strong and grounded without any burnout or perfectionism. If that sounds like something you've been looking for, follow the show down in the description below and take back control of your health.
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3, 2, 1. Secondly, Alyssa Lou, a prodigy who walked away from the sport at 16 because she was burned out, but then returned years later, skating with joy and swagger and something she'd never had before. Ownership, A script that would have been rejected as far fetched, and a comeback that has brought her all the way, perhaps to the Olympic podium. It is like she's just playing on the ice, not even performing anymore. The joy, the passion. And she's figured out how to compete without carrying the weight of it. Two elite athletes, two comebacks, two completely different internal engines. If you're a high achiever, Listening to this. Their stories aren't just sports headlines, they're mirrors. Let's start with Lindsey Vaughn. Torn acl, public criticism, doubts everywhere. She comes back. Anyway, that's grit. That's resilience. That's the DNA of a champion. And I'll tell you what I felt while I was watching it all unfold. I was inspired. But after that injury, I was heartbroken. Because in a way, certainly not on such a grand public stage, I've lived that version of the comeback. Maybe you have too many. That one where your identity is so welded to performance that stopping feels like dying. A lot of high achievers don't just compete. We attach meaning to it. Lindsay didn't just ski. Entrepreneurs don't just build businesses. Leaders don't just build teams. We become the thing. And when your body breaks or your role changes, where the scoreboard shows all the zeros and you've lost, it doesn't feel just like losing. It feels like evaporating, like disappearing. Like who you were has died and all that's left is a shell looking for purpose. From a performance science perspective, we call this identity foreclosure. It's when your self concept becomes so narrowly defined by achievement that you don't know who you are without it. So what do you do? You do what Lindsay did. You chase one more medal, one more promotion, one more season, one more proof point. And Vaughn's grit, it's real. And honestly, it's admirable. But it comes with an edge. Grit without refined purpose can pretty easily become self destruction. It's not because you're weak. It's because you're wired to win. Lindsey took to the slopes in Cortina with a decimated ACL for sure, but without a doubt, the iron walled heart of a champion. Now let's talk about Alyssa Lu. Alyssa Liu was a teenage phenom. She was the future of US figure skating. And then at just 16, she walked away. To the world, it looked like quitting. But I would tell you, that's a purpose storm. It's when your talent outruns your identity. When the world sees you as nothing more than a metal or not. But you don't see yourself at all. Burnout isn't just exhaustion. Lots of times it's misalignment. It's when what you're doing no longer matches who you're becoming. Overwhelmed. Burdened. Crushed under the weight of expectations. Not only from everyone around you, but from within as well. So Alyssa stepped away. She willingly chose what we all thought was to Let her career die. In the high achievement world, that's sacrilege. It's irrecoverable. In some places, it's unforgivable. But then she came back, slowly at first, and in a way that destroyed the tired ideas that if you're a serious athlete, then literally everything you do has to be focused on just one goal. But this time, it didn't. She was back, but she was liberated from the weight of expectation and the chains of identity tied to outcome. Two years ago, if someone would have told you this was going to happen, you would have laughed. And that's what she has done all the way through this comeback. Laughed. And it's been pure joy. It's unlike most anything I've ever seen in an athlete at a high level. I can remember being crushed by my performance on the court when I didn't play well, by my performance in the classroom when I didn't test well. Heck, I think it was just two years ago I spiraled into a deep depression when I failed a certification exam. I'd never failed a test like that in my life, and I didn't even need it. But the failure felt like this indictment of my abilities as a human being. But Alyssa chose to embrace her inner punk rocker. She threw up two defiant middle fingers to all the pressures and expectations that made her so miserable. And she decisively chose to skate just for her. Then this happened. Oh, yeah. Podium down. That's what I you talking about. But here's the difference. She wasn't skating for validation. She wasn't even skating to prove the critics wrong. She wasn't skating to preserve some crafted identity. She was skating because she wanted to. And when she returned, everything was different. She had a different vibe, a different look, a different energy, freedom. And if you've been watching these games, you know she won. But here's kind of the central idea to all this. The medal wasn't the comeback. The ownership and the liberty was. From a performance science standpoint, what we're looking at here is motivation, structure. There are two broad types. First is extrinsic motivation. It's driven by reward and recognition, sometimes fear of loss and preserving that identity. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is driven by autonomy and mastery and meaning. And both can lead to victory. But only one produces sustainable joy. Lindsay's comeback appears powered by legacy and grit and unfinished business, while Alyssa's powered by autonomy and choice. They're both courageous, but psychologically, they're different. And this is where I want you to lean in, because you may Be in one of these places right now. Are you pushing forward because you feel like you have to prove something or because you choose something? That distinction can change everything. I can tell you I've lived both. I've chased the next credential because I didn't know who I was without it. And I've also stepped away from things that I thought once defined me. And I return differently when healthy. That first kind of comeback is fueled by accomplishment, but it has a darker edge at its worst. I've seen it driven pathologically by the fear of irrelevance. That second is fueled by clarity. The first says, I can't stop. I've gotta win. Or worse, if I stop, I'm gonna disappear. The second says, I can finally return because I'm whole. That's the difference between achievement and survival mode. So here's the uncomfortable question. Why do you want your comeback? Is it to silence doubt? Or is it to express growth? Are you fighting to hold on to who you were? Or are you returning as somebody new? Because sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn't to push harder. It's to define why you're pushing at all. As an American, I couldn't be more inspired by the grit and the determination of Lindsey Vonn. As a competitor and even as a sports medicine professional, I'm amazed by the unbelievable toughness and sheer will that it took for her to even take that mountain. Grit is powerful And Lindsey is 1,000% grit. And Alyssa is no less inspiring, but for entirely different reasons. Or freedom. Freedom is transformational. And if you can combine both of those, that's freaking unstoppable. So we have two Olympians, two comebacks, two reasons. One destroyed her leg, shattered it chasing her legacy. One reclaimed her joy, choosing autonomy. Both are freaking courageous. But only one looked free. If you're navigating a purpose storm right now, burnout, identity, loss, reinvention, don't just ask whether you can come back, ask why. Because comeback isn't about winning again. It's about returning with a different reason. And when you do that, you don't just perform better, you become whole. This is becoming undone. Sometimes the most powerful comeback isn't who you were. It's who you were meant to be. Some quick updates about the show. We had a great week in the rankings. We hit all time highs of number four in the world in education and self improvement, and also hit an all time best at number 82 in Apple's top 200 for all categories. If you want to follow along and see the progress for yourself. You can now go to undonepodcast.com backslash rankings and cheer me on. My goals for 2026 were to stay in that top five in the education category and hit top 100 across the board. So before the end of February we did it. Now on to aim for number three and get inside top 75 in all categories. Who knows, with your help, we can do it. If you'd be so kind as to share the show with a friend and leave a comment for a review, I'd really appreciate it. If you're looking for specific support and direction as you navigate a purpose storm of your own, check out my website at Toby Brooks PhD.com offer personalized coaching, podcast guesting, inspiring keynotes for your event, and for less than a cup of coffee a month, you can check out scienceofthecumback.com where you can find my app to support your growth and reinvention. And as always, if I can help you, let me know and I'll do everything I can to help. Coming up on the show, I'm working on some exciting new episodes, including a follow up with former guest Roger Light, whose life has undergone some tragic changes since our last chat on the show. He isn't done yet. Then I've got former Australian fighter pilot Christian Boo Bosas, whose pivot following a storied military career has him speaking to C Suite executives and others, leading people, leading impact and leading in the moment. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a night drive creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. Tell a friend about the show. Follow along on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn at Becoming Undone pod and follow me at Toby Brooks PhD on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out my linktree@linktr.ee. toby Brooks, PhD Listen, subscribe and leave me a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Till next time, Keep getting better. Sa.