Standing at the national anthem, sick, sore, and not sure he deserved his spot, Tom Wickham had a choice. His partner Candace had said she might fly over with their baby son to watch him play. So he closed his eyes and made himself one promise: be the man his younger self would look up to. He scored inside the first five minutes. They won 5-0.

Tom is a dual Olympian and dual Commonwealth Games gold medallist for Australia's hockey team, the Kookaburras — but this episode isn't really about hockey. It's about the mid-career conversation that nearly finished him ("you care about everyone but yourself"), the three-word mantra he built to survive it, and why he now says the same thing to his kids, his clients, and himself. We go deep on pressure, purpose, and what it actually means to lean into your truth when everything in you wants to run.

Tom Wickham is a coach, mentor, speaker, podcast host, facilitator, and founder of Game Changer Coaching & Mentoring. Through The Game Changer Way, he explores leadership, pressure, performance, and what it means to live and express authentically.

Find Tom: gccoaching.co | Instagram @gccoaching.co | @tjwickham | Game Changer podcast

His Golden Thread in full

The Golden Thread

The Golden Thread… this is the essence we all carry. This is the highest frequency and vibration. This is authenticity.

I feel myself reaching a new threshold here. It is pleasurable and somewhere I want to return to. I get excited to vibrate along this thread.

It feels like home, true home, away from all inputs and yet so attuned to all of them at the same time.

When I am one with the Golden Thread, I feel I am not body, I feel I lose the judgement of the physical world and of myself.

It doesn’t even feel like love, it just feels silent, yet powerful beyond explanation… it feels like creation.

It feels like what sits before a heart beat, before life, before anything in this dimension. It feels like the threshold to the expansive unknown… our gateway to the next dimension.”