Carrying your family, your culture, and your heritage onto the field with you each week can feel impossibly heavy.

You carry your family name on your jersey, the expectations of your coaches in your mind, and the story of where you've come from on your shoulders.

That is a massive load for any young athlete to balance.

Ethan Jurgeneit knows exactly what this pressure feels like. He represented his First Nations and German roots while playing rugby at the highest levels. He proudly held the Six Nations flag before the international anthems played and carried the historical weight of his people into every game.

But somewhere in the middle of it all, Ethan discovered that true freedom on the field requires laying your legacy down and choosing to play exclusively for an audience of one.

Your culture is meant to anchor you, not weigh you down. Hit play to hear exactly how Ethan surrendered his expectations, and changed the reason he steps onto the field.

Carrying a hockey stick is a massive burden when you are also pretending to be someone you are not.

In this episode of No Striving, Brad sits down with premier hockey player Eliana Heard. She knows exactly what it feels like to step into a top level environment and feel completely scared out of her shoes. For a long time, Eliana chose the quiet route. She softened her edges and hid her faith. She believed that fitting in and gaining the applause of her teammates required her to bury her authentic self. The fear of being looked down upon was incredibly heavy.

But conformity is an exhausting burden for a young athlete to carry.

Eliana shares the exact turning point when she decided to stop conforming to the patterns of the world and start owning her true identity. She reveals the messy, entirely real process of figuring out who you are when the uniform comes off. Listeners will hear how she navigates harsh coaching feedback, the natural trap of comparison, and the intense pressure of tournament party culture.

More importantly, she explains what she’s learnt about the quiet power of authenticity. Teammates are naturally drawn to people who are simply not afraid to be themselves. Eliana proves that you do not need the constant affirmation of the squad to solidify your spot. You just need to be secure in yourself. You have to lead yourself before you can ever lead others.

Join Across Athlete Development for a deeply honest conversation about faith, pressure, and the courage it takes to bring your authentic self to the turf.

As athletes we can easily fall into the trap of striving. We set our sights on a goal, we put in the heavy work, and slowly the results begin to dictate how we feel about ourselves.

But what happens when the thing you are supposed to be good enough at suddenly tells you that you are not?

For elite short track speed skater Jonathan Moody, missing the qualification for the 2022 Olympic Games brought that exact terrifying question to the surface. He was completely devastated. The pressure had taken over entirely. Without the right results, he was left wondering who he actually was.

Jonathan spent seven years as a full time athlete pouring every ounce of his energy into training through deep isolation and severe physical setbacks. He broke his leg in three places, eventually caught up to the competition, and secured a spot skating for Great Britain. He had a head knowledge of God and believed his faith was steady. Yet in the aftermath of missing his biggest goal, he realised that he had attached an arbitrary concept of value to his physical performance.

He needed to step back and find out what it actually meant to compete with pure thrill rather than competing to prove he was worth something.

Key topics in this episode:

• The devastation in elite sports and the extreme mental exhaustion that leaves athletes hoping for an injury just to escape the pressure.
• The profound difference between knowing God loves you as a concept and actually living completely free from the need to earn your worth.
• How letting go of the desperate need for results removes the crushing weight of competition and brings back the joy of the sport.

If you are tired of waking up every day feeling like you have to produce results to matter, this conversation will radically shift your perspective. Hit play to listen to Jonathan and Coach Brad reveal how to stop striving and start living anchored in something far greater than a scoreboard.

You are born enough, you wake up enough, and you go to sleep enough. Listen now to finally experience that freedom.