110. Separating Your Role From Your Identity with Athlete, Author, and Leadership Specialist Lisa C. Willis

110. Separating Your Role From Your Identity with Athlete, Author, and Leadership Specialist Lisa C. Willis

Introducing Lisa C. Willis

Today I’m talking to athlete, author, and leadership specialist, Lisa C. Willis about separating your role from your identity.

Her Career Journey

Lisa majored in political science at UCLA where she had an exceptional basketball career. After competing for Team USA at the University Games and seeing the belief her coaches and teammates had in her, she began to imagine her post-collegiate career with confidence. Lisa was drafted 5th and played four seasons in the WNBA. She’s the author of the book, When the Buzzer Sounds: A guide to transition players from the court to life after sports. She currently works as an apparel wear test analyst at Nike, helping to amplify the voice of the athletes in the design and testing process.

Separating Your Role From Your Identity

When an injury forced her off of the court, Lisa thought she could use her next job to replace the role of basketball in her life without taking time to grieve the loss of the sport. This caused her to minimize the significance that basketball had had in her life and the many roles she had taken on, from communicator to resilient teammate. With time, Lisa learned to separate her roles from her identity and found that even though her job title may be changing, her values and experiences were coming with her.

Inside this episode:

    • Lisa was inspired as a child to become a community-oriented judge and it wasn’t until late in her college basketball career when she saw how others believed in her abilities as an athlete that she began to imagine a career in the WNBA.
    • Playing overseas in the offseason helped Lisa to reevaluate the grind of American work culture and helped to shape her values. 
    • Lisa shares how having the wrong mindset when she stopped playing basketball kept her from transitioning properly to the next stage of her life. She learned to separate her role as a player from her identity as a person.
    • While coaching kids on the court, Lisa started hearing from parents that their children were beginning to excel in other parts of their lives. Lisa figured out how to serve these athletes mentally and emotionally to create mindsets where their source of validation came from within. 
    • Her job with Nike stems from a program designed to take WNBA players from the court to the still male-dominated Nike offices to disrupt and innovate. The program grew from the recognition that playing in the WNBA was far from simple and these women’s accomplishments would be an asset off the courts as well.
    • Lisa worked through imposter syndrome as the only woman coach on the Knicks staff. She reframed the moments where she felt inferior or singled out as a reminder that she was doing exactly what she was meant to be doing and list out the reasons why.

Resources

Related Posts