Navigating Victory: Joe Jacobi's Whitewater Wisdom
Join Kassi Kincaid for an enlightening discussion with Joe Jacobi, Olympic gold medalist in whitewater slalom canoeing, acclaimed performance coach, and author. Discover how the principles of elite performance in sport translate to personal and professional excellence in all areas of life.
Transcript:
Kassi Kincaid (00:00):
Welcome to The Edge of Creativity Podcast. I'm your host, Kassi Kincaid, and joined with me today is Joe Jacobi, Olympic gold medalist, performance coach, and author. Joe, it is such an honor to have you on today.
Joe Jacobi (00:18):
Kassi, this is great. Looking forward to the conversation.
Kassi Kincaid (00:21):
Oh my word! I am so excited to hear all about, well, just starting off your Olympic journey, I mean, not many people can say that they are Olympic gold medalists. Where did that journey begin for you?
Joe Jacobi (00:37):
Yeah, thank you for asking. It's kind of a fun time to be talking about it as here we are in the summer of 2024 with the Olympics just a few weeks away. So yeah, it's a nice opportunity to revisit that. What's kind of funny about my story, so my sport was whitewater canoe slalom, and I grew up in the Washington DC area, which I know a lot of Americans wouldn't say would be a great place to grow up today. But from the perspective of whitewater canoeing, it's amazing because we have this incredible world-class, whitewater river, the Potomac River, right in a major metropolitan area like most of the good whitewater river rapids in the United States are located in rural and mountainous parts of the United States like Colorado or Appalachia or the northwest. And here in Washington, and I'm not here, but in Washington DC where I grew up, you had a world-class, whitewater river, amazing rapids right in the center of the city.
(01:40):
So that made it very good. But as far as the Olympics go, what was interesting, so I really took to the sport in the early 1980s and my sport wasn't actually an Olympic sport, and it was not only Olympic program at that time. It had been in 1972, and then it was added again for 1992. So in the early 1980s relative to the Olympics, it was kind of in no men's land, but there was still world championships. And then later there would be a World Cup. And Kassi, what I like about my start in the sport was I wasn't attracted to success at the Olympics. I just liked paddling on rivers, and I really liked the people with whom I paddled on rivers. And we had an incredible training group in the Washington DC area. It's generally recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest training group in the history of our sport. When I first went to my first training session on the Potomac River, everyone there was like a world champion or world medalist or the legendary coach of our sport. So I grew up around the very best paddlers in the world.
Kassi Kincaid (02:55):
And I love how you said that it wasn't something like the weren't ever your main thing that you wanted. You just started out doing what you loved and it just went from there.
Joe Jacobi (03:08):
Actually at the time, our sport was officially added to the Olympic program in, I think it was in early 1989. Just a few weeks later, my canoe partner and I finished a few months later. We finished fifth at the world championships that year and we medaled in the World Cup. And so we were already pretty good. We were kind of already a top five boat in the world at the time our sport became an Olympic sport. That definitely became an incentive to continue for my canoe partner and I to train together. So we were in a two person canoe, which requires a lot of teamwork, a lot of unspoken communication, and that was a really interesting part of the journey as well. But yeah, a lot of kids today, they really want to go to the Olympics in something or they can dream about that.
(04:07):
For me, it was never about that. It was more about the essence of the sport, which probably has something to do. I just sent you an email just before today's podcast to tell you, hey, I just finished paddling out on the sea. I mean, I'm 54 and canoeing and paddling is still a huge part of my life. And so that's I think the difference. I meet a lot of Olympic athletes who get success at the Olympics and then they can't wait to be done with it. They don't ever want to do their sport again. And canoeing is just one of those sports that if you adapt to it the right way, it's truly a sport you'll do for your entire life.
Kassi Kincaid (04:45):
I love that. I mean, I've never trained for anything like that, but I could see the two perspectives of maybe the athletes that just like, oh, my word, the test you want to get over, right? Let's just get past this, try and get a gold medal out of it. Or people that like you that I just love the sport and whether I get the gold medal or I'm going to keep doing it no matter what.
Joe Jacobi (05:13):
It's funny, I went to high school in the Washington DC area. It was in the suburbs, it was actually in Maryland just outside of Washington, but kind of amazingly, there was another Olympic gold medalist from my graduating class, high school, graduating class. Mike Berman was a 200 meter breaststroker and probably recognized the greatest 200 meter breaststroker of all time. On the day that he won his gold medal at the Olympic Games, he broke the world record for the sixth time, the fifth time, his own world record. So he was just incredible and very specialized. A lot of the swimmers swim different events, different lengths, different disciplines, relay races. Mike didn't do any of that. He was 200 meter breaststroke focused on that one thing, and he was amazing at it. But yeah, Mike couldn't wait to be done with it. And he said something to me after the Olympics in '92, he actually talked about how nice it would be to do a sport that you can do for a long time that you'd really enjoy doing.
(06:26):
He goes going up and down the black line the way I did it, you want to stop immediately. And funny enough, we kind of lost touch for a few months after that. And I remember I was doing a speaking engagement in Little Rock, Arkansas, and it was back in the day when they put the USA today newspaper outside of your hotel room. It was a long time ago. It was spring of 1993, I remember opening to the sports section. And on page three there was this big photo of my high school classmate training and kayaking out at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. He changed sports. He had said it would be so nice to do a sport like yours. That was so fun to do. And he didn't make the Olympics in '96 in kayaking, but he made it to the Olympic trials.
(07:15):
And he has this great perspective of having done a sport like swimming and a sport like kayaking. And that makes him very unique from being an Olympic champion of why you do a sport, what you get out of it, what you take away from it, and how you can apply it to your life beyond that. And I think that's really, I think what gets interesting, especially as we move into our conversations today, is that I think winning the Olympics is a cool thing, but I also knew very early on that for me to kind of be of help to other people, it was taking a sport that people know very little about taking the ideas and the lessons from that sport and meeting people where they are and showing them really there's some ideas here that really are for living better, performing better, connecting better with the people you care about most and just living a more rich life.
Kassi Kincaid (08:10):
I love that. And how you turned, it's like those moments to meaning, right? And as a speaker yourself and a coach, I love how taking our experiences in life can be a benefit to other people.
Joe Jacobi (08:26):
Absolutely. You just need to really put that time into thinking about how you want your work, your art, your creativity to create to others. In the book that I wrote, which is called Slalom, and it just is a transfer of all these experiences and lessons that I learned out paddling the river and having success on the river transfer to navigating the river of life. And there's a story in there that I love sharing with people. We were on the bus going to the closing ceremony in Barcelona, and this was just less than a week after we had won the Olympics. And the legendary coach of or sport, the coach that was on the riverbank at my very first workout on the Potomac River, he said, well, Joe, you're headed back to the United States the day after tomorrow as an Olympic gold medalist. What's next for you?
(09:28):
And I said, well, I'd like to do some speaking. And my brothers helped set up a few speaking engagements and who would've thought a canoeing athlete would have an opportunity to share their story? And this coach's name is Bill Endicott. And Bill said, can I give you a little advice? And I said, absolutely. And he said, well, I coached Norm Bellingham four years earlier, and I knew Norm. We had gone to summer camp together. He won a gold medal at the Olympics in 1988 and Seoul, South Korea. And Bill said, I'll tell you what I told Norm said, for a few weeks you'll go home. You can wear your team USA uniform and wear a gold medal around your neck, and you can be really bad at speaking, but people will think this is pretty cool what you did. But he said, after a few weeks, it's just human nature for people to say, Joe, that's really nice that you had success at the Olympics, but how does that help me?
(10:25):
What does it mean to me? And Bill paused. And then he said, if you can figure out how this helps them, you'll speak about the sport as long as you want. And so I'm still speaking about it today 32 years later, not because I want to, but just because it's helpful and I have put mean this has been still all these years later. I mean, it's kind of reinventing that process every day. What is it about the water that can be transferred to people to help them do better? And not only did I figure that out on the river, but I'm actually reinventing that now. Paddling out on the sea where I was today, surfing offshore waves and especially made kayak for surfing these waves called a surf ski kayak. And I have a weekly essay that I write I've been doing for a little over six months now called Thinking In Waves.
(11:22):
And it is literally about, I'm never going to be Olympic champion or world champion or the best at surf ski. I'm actually fairly new at it, but I'm starting where I am and I said, Hey, who wants to be on this journey? I'll share these lessons as I go. And all of it is going to be taking the ideas of learning how to surf these waves from the people I've learned them from, and transferring that to an innovative model for clear thinking and making better choices. Choices. And it's been incredible experience doing that. And I am enjoying this creative project so, so much, Kassi. It is just been wonderful.
Kassi Kincaid (12:02):
Oh, Joe, you can tell your passion just comes across so much for that. And I love how you have creatively taken your experiences from the Olympics and specifically not just the success piece, the gold medal and achieving all that. It's taking something that you love, being on the water more like that and helping people. That is such an innovative way to help people and not just through the medal side of it.
Joe Jacobi (12:33):
I think you can just, we were talking about human nature as my coach said it. I also think it's human nature for people to gravitate towards nature and specifically to the water. I don't really have a good reason why, but when people want to have serious, heartfelt conversations, they like to go to the water, they like to go to the sea, start new chapter of life, make transitions, it's really interesting. And so I knew, I think people have a lot of context when you say, what does a running river mean to you? Or what does surfing waves mean to you? And I think I just like to give people a lot of space to interpret what that is. And then slowly, if they're up for the conversation and they're up for the journey, let's put some context to that. The idea of surfing waves, I think it's one of the most misused metaphors we see around LinkedIn.
(13:35):
Hey, dude, let's surf the wave of success. And it sounds good, and I know what people are looking for. I mean, of course we all want the free energy of a wave that makes total sense, but there is so much more that we can put around that metaphor. And in fact, if we don't put more context around that metaphor, you'll actually use it to go further away from where you want to be. You'll misread the direction. I mean, if you really don't have clarity in what you're doing, sure you'll surf waves. You'll just surf it further away from where you really want to be. You'll surf waves of busyness instead of purpose and clarity. And these metaphors are nice, but when you apply them incorrectly, they can be hard on you as well. And that's what kind of got me excited about first bringing clarity to what does it look like to navigate the river of life? And I wrote about that for a long time and then wrote the book on that. And now I'm doing that with the waves and I'm really enjoying writing about the waves.
Kassi Kincaid (14:46):
There is something that's so calming about the waves. I love going to the ocean. And yeah, a lot of honestly, my milestones in life ironically have been around the ocean. So that's really interesting that you say that. Hearing somebody else say that, I was like, oh yeah.
Joe Jacobi (15:02):
Yep, yep. I mean, there's a lot to it and it can be calming, but the thing about the sea is that it's also a force of nature. I mean, it changes. We can't control it. And so there's a lot that goes into how you prepare yourself and then how you prepare yourself for the relative to the conditions around you. And yeah, there's a lot of steps that go into that. And you don't get to control all of it, but you do have an opportunity to work for it. And I think that the idea, one of reasons that I get so excited about thinking in waves is that the acquisition or the capture of free energy in our life, and believe me, it's there, the free energy is there, but capturing it the right way that's in alignment with your purpose, your values, your goals, and doing that in a way that's yours and not someone else's way.
(16:09):
That can be really helpful. And the other part about thinking in waves is that the reality of a real wave and how it models life, the wave is not permanent. The wave rises, it collapses and it rises again. And so you can't miss with waves except if you believe that a wave is permanent and it's going to last forever. And I think once you get over that and you really appreciate the nuance and the, it's not going to last forever that the wave is going to collapse, but you still have choices when that happens. That's really how the waves model the life, the ups and the downs of it.
Kassi Kincaid (16:54):
That's such a great reminder too, because I feel like we all know that in life, whether it's good or whether something is bad, it's not going to last forever. But just thinking in terms of waves, I love that because we all know some waves are like the Hawaii waves or like wherever in the world that are just huge, right? The swells, but they'll roll on. And it is a perfect analogy.
Joe Jacobi (17:19):
It's really fun to draw those out and to play with this and see where it goes. And I have so much fun publishing this, and I have a large mailing list for another essay that I write very infrequently now. And I've started this new one, it's really small, but in six months it's doubled in size still to a small number. But amazingly, something's working. There've been no unsubscribers, and almost every email gets opened. And I love that. And it's not easy to bring people along on a journey. It really does take time and you've got to put some effort in. Thinking in Waves is not a done for you kind of system. But again, I mean I think one of the biggest pain points in life is trying to use someone else's system to really get to where we want to be in lieu of developing a system that really works for us. If it's not your own, I think it's going to get really hard really quickly at some point soon.
Kassi Kincaid (18:34):
Absolutely. So as we're talking about creativity and impact, Joe, what would you say would be some of the most meaningful moments to you maybe that you've heard people say of your Olympic journey and helping people through thinking in waves?
Joe Jacobi (18:54):
I think one of the things that I thought would be kind of fun to talk about today especially is we're getting ready to watch all these amazing Olympic moments in Paris and Paralympic moments after that. I think that creativity and play was such an important part of our Olympic journey, and I've seen this play out in many times today in thinking in Waves. I just sort of wrote a very short essay. All my thinking in wave essays are very short and they're very to the point, but it was really talking about the problems of, it was called over resiliency, not even a word, but over resiliency. But the idea is that this really, the things that lead to being very rigid is exactly what restricts you from putting yourself in a good position for getting good surfing on life's waves. And when you're rigid, it's very hard to really feel the water and to kind of read the environment and read the changes.
(20:04):
But when you're in a state of play, in a state of creativity, that's all you're doing is you're sort of reading the world around you and how you're adapting to it. So it actually takes a lot of being contemplative and flexible, not rigid and resilient and gritty. And I don't want to say that those places don't have a part in the journey, but again, it's like, I mean, again, I go back to LinkedIn and I just look, I've followed and had conversations with a lot of Navy Seals. I think David Goggins is a really interesting person, but I don't know how good those values are for just the average person just trying to do a little bit better. And then they're trying to put the standards of a Navy Seal over a life that just doesn't apply to the life of a Navy Seal. And that's going to lead to rigidity and frustration and ultimately not reaching your goals.
(21:02):
Conversely, creativity in play gives you an exercise. It could create a space for really aligning yourself with the environment. So in our training for example, we found little ways to gamify what we were doing and make it more interesting. And one story I wanted to share with you on the podcast, I haven't talked about it very often, but even when I was the chief executive officer of USA Canoe Kayak, the national governing body for the canoeing in the Olympic Paralympic sport, I was invited to a swimming session at a high performance training group in Charlotte, North Carolina by an Olympic swim coach named Dave Marsh. And a lot of the athletes in the elite group were going to be competing at the Olympics in London. And I got there, I was just assuming to watch. And as soon as I got there, Dave took the clipboard in the whistle and he put it around the whistle on my neck, gave me the clipboard, and he said, go ahead, coach.
(22:06):
And I'm like, I don't know anything about coaching, swimming. And he goes, well, you better figure it out. And I'm looking, I recognize some of these superstars in the pool and they're looking at me like, tell us something. I was so nervous. It was one of the most nervous I've ever been because I didn't expect it. So then I saw a big pile of kickboards on the side of the pool and I said, Hey, everyone, go grab a kickboard. And they went and got it and they jumped back in the pool. And I was explaining that in canoeing, when we take a paddle stroke through the water, the idea is that we want to get the paddle as vertical to the water as we can to pull the most amount of force with it. And I imagine in swimming, you want to do the same thing with your hands.
(22:54):
Your hands are your paddles to, let's imagine the kickboard is like a paddle, and now you've got to propel yourself and go from point A to point B. And we made a little race and I said, the winner gets to go down on the slide. There was a big water slide next to the pool and oh my gosh, Kassi. I somehow, I just figured out how to turn this moment into playful and fun and all these elite athletes, some of the best swimmers in the world were laughing and giggling and just having a great time, but they were being so serious too. They wanted to win because they love going down the slide. You think a kid likes going down the water slide. You should see an Olympic medalist on a regimented training program when they get told by the coach, they get to go down the slide.
(23:40):
It's a piece of candy. Oh my gosh, they went crazy. And so the winners went down the slide and a big smile on their face. And so it's that kind of creativity. And when you run into a group, a team that is open to that sense of play, the way it opens them up, say, now that we're talking about a sales team or a leadership team, bringing that sense of play, which is practically, I coach so many people like this. This is non-existent for so many organizations, so many sales teams, so many leadership teams. This is such a key skill. And it can be learned, it can be practiced. And honestly, the cost of not doing it, I mean just it's my personal belief, I believe it is costing the team better performance.
Kassi Kincaid (24:35):
Man, I love that you incorporate play, Joe, that is just so awesome. I feel like there's so many times in life we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, right? Everyone is striving in life not toward a physical goal medal, but everyone is kind of striving to get that ultimate point. And I feel like we put so much pressure on ourselves that we can't relax enough to ultimately reach our best performance. Like you said.
Joe Jacobi (25:06):
Kassi, 1000%. And I would actually not only what you said is 1000% true, but on the other side of it, we're so often putting a face on as if it's all good for us and it's not all good for us. And I think this is the hard part. This is the work, and it's not an instant change. You can do it on your own, you can do it with a coach, you can do it with an accountability partner. It's really hard work. No, I shouldn't say what I would say. It's simple actually, but not easy to find your own way. But this is sort of one of the big themes of our conversation today. I think especially if we're going to talk about creativity in play, if you are using someone else's way and borrowing their step-by-step way of doing things, it's going to be tough.
(26:09):
And I think it's not whether I think you'll get there or not, maybe you will. Most likely you might, I want to be optimistic, but I won't be as optimistic that you'll be happy getting to the result, not having done it your way versus done it someone else's way that was sort of out of not aligned with your values and the way you want to perform. So I have this, I am calling this, I'm a bit older than you, Kassi. I call this midlife peak performance. And the only difference with it is that it's a process of learning how to define your own peak performance, not letting someone else do it for you, whether we're talking about transitions from first half of life to second half of life or just a midlife transition. I mean, I have clients that are 35 years old that are giving a lot of thought about midlife, whether it's a transition they want to make now or even, I mean, one of my favorite client stories was a 35-year-old client that came to me that was projecting ahead to what they didn't want at age 50 and what they didn't want to be experiencing at age 50.
(27:25):
It was one of actually the most forward-thinking client collaborations that I had been a part of. And it was so cool to do that he had seen the pain points of a challenge that we needed to work on of something that had happened during high school and then what the impact of that was in his mid thirties. And if we didn't make the correction what that was going to look like at age 50. And it was really cool to sort of go through that process, but I think that's what's on the line for people. And yeah, it's not easy. And being very focused on your own way of doing thing and building it out. What does Kassi's performance plan look like for Kassi? It takes a little time, but it's worth it to put in that time and put in the reflection and do the work on that.
Kassi Kincaid (28:18):
I love that, Joe. So Joe, just wrapping up today, what would be one parting thought, something that you would love to leave our listeners with today? We have covered so much, but what is one thing that you would love to leave us on today?
Joe Jacobi (28:36):
So I think one of my biggest influence on the thinking and waves, we have a surf ski coach named Boyan. Boyan is from Bulgaria and he lives in southern Spain. And Boyan has a lot of what I write about is sort of transferring a lot of boon's outlook on surf ski to thinking and choosing and performing better with our values. But Boyan has what he calls the golden rule of surfing. And I'll tell you the golden rule and then we'll make the application to life. This is sort of the parting words. So the golden rule of surfing is no matter what you want to do and where you want to go, focus on surfing the wave you're on, no matter what you want to do and where you want to go, focus on surfing the wave you're on. And the idea behind this, Cassie, is that so often in life we want to change, we want to pivot, and that makes total sense.
(29:45):
That's a good thing. But how we do that, we often want to just so quickly abandon what we're doing. We want to abandon the job that we're doing, the work we're doing, the thing that we don't like so much. But the thing is the wave that we're on, if you understand the dynamics of surfing well, it's energy, it's momentum that you get to carry into the next thing. Not to mention leaving the thing you're leaving on good in a way better than you found it. And so I think this idea of that no matter what you want to do, be present where you are, capture all the energy you can from the wave you're on, do as good a job as you can with the wave you're surfing right now. Then take that and start to look for where the transition points are and where to go and how to do that. And I would much rather do that than just jet off the wave, lose all my momentum, be stuck in the ocean just with the waves hitting me from the side with no momentum, no speed. That's like the worst situation to be in when you're transitioning. So there's an art to that, there's a science to that. But yeah, no matter what you want to do and where you want to go, focus on surfing, the wave you're on to the best of your ability.
Kassi Kincaid (31:08):
Wow, Joe, that is so profound, and I find myself doing that constantly, having to remind myself, it's so easy to look at all the future waves, but to really capture the moment to use the energy that is such a powerful life reminder. Thank you so much, Joe, for being here today. This has just been an honor to have you on our show!
Joe Jacobi (31:30):
Kassi, I enjoyed it so much. Super excited to follow your journey going forward and support the podcast and your community. And this has been great. Thank you so much.
Kassi Kincaid (31:42):
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode on The Edge of Creativity podcast. Be sure to follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming conversations, and we'll see you next time.
