The Mental Fitness Practice of a World Champion Freediver

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the little bird marketing company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, mama bird, and we're going to do something so different today and so amazing. You're going to hear a story. You're going to be inspired. I might cry.

I'm just full disclosure, let's figure this out. But if you've been listening, what you know is that I love connecting with people. And my good friend, Patrick Kosciuski from London, well formerly London, let's say, you know, England adjacent. Good friend, we refer to him as PO, but Patrick put me in touch with Helena and my goodness this has been just such an amazing conversation.

You are going to love, love hearing from her today. And if you have been feeling, I don't know, a little ground down by your life, take a deep breath and enjoy this podcast. So Helena, welcome to the show.

Helena Bourdillon: Thank you so much. It's an absolute joy to be here.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, you know when you go to helenabourdillon and the website, first of all, it's totally impressive, but having spoken with you and just really having felt the way it feels to be around you, that's actually a little bit more impressive. But if you haven't been impressed as of yet on this podcast, I have with me a four-time world champion free diver. And there's so many other records that she holds, you can go check it out on her website.

But I want you to hear a little bit more from her about how she came to even this sport and also what that means for us. So Helena, give us just a little bit of, can you give yourself a few accolades? Can you tell us all the important stuff first so everybody can get the context of the wow? I hate to make you a little uncomfortable, but it is important.

Helena Bourdillon: Okay, I need to cram 26 to 51 years of my life into, whoa, 90 seconds, let's go. Okay, so in 2000, when I was age 26, I was actually in the depths of depression, so much so that I was planning my suicide. And I'd spent an awful lot of my childhood and teenage years and young adulthood suffering with chronic depression.

And it got really bad in 2000. And I, as I say, I was planning my suicide and I somehow managed to find the courage to reach out and ask for help and change the trajectory of my life. I relying on my family, my friends, my doctor and therapists, I began to kind of improve. Life got better. I started using specific tools to help myself and then I actually started my own business and ran that for a few years.

And then by 2013 I wasn't doing too badly and I discovered a sport that really completely changed my life. I discovered freediving. I was away traveling in Thailand. I was with a friend who said they wanted to do their scuba. I'd done a lot of that as a child, which I'm very fortunate to have done in my teenage years. And I said, find a school that teaches free diving.

And the moment I put my head underwater that very first time, everything changed. And it was as simple as the silence of the underwater world, which isn't actually silent, it's just very different noise, enveloped me, and the voices in my head silenced. And I felt this level of peace I'd never experienced in my life. And I became slightly addicted to it in a very healthy way, I hasten to add.

So I start in 2013, I did my first competition in 2014. And as you very sweetly mentioned earlier, last year I became a four times world champion for my age group. I am now called a master, which is quite nice to be called a master at anything. I'm masters level one now and yeah, I've got some world records in that category.

I've got national records in masters and in the senior category. So yeah, it's been an amazing journey and now I get to speak about my experiences and how my life has changed and what I use to get me from there to here today.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, well, I've had a couple of people talk to me about how inspirational your story is and I think one of the things that it leads to is mental fitness. What does that really mean? And I want to come at this really early in this podcast to say, you know, as an entrepreneur and as an employer there is a lot of talk we hear about wellbeing and culture in corporate world. And these, you know, and then on the other hand, I'm a mom. I've got three kids. I'm thinking about their wellbeing.

How is wellbeing different from what you're talking about in mental fitness? I want to kind of help, you know, define those two things and then we could understand maybe a little bit more of your story.

Helena Bourdillon: Brilliant question and so essential for how unfortunately I feel the wellness and the wellbeing initiatives that are used all over the place, while very well intentioned, don't actually really get to the bottom of it. They help with the symptoms. They don't deal with the root problems.

A mental fitness works from the root, you know, it's all about building those strong foundations so that we, it's something that I call quiet clarity. It's a place where we find ourselves that we can perform from that is no adrenaline, you're not muscling through, it's not built on that, I must achieve it, it is through actually being.

Quiet clarity within yourself, knowing what you're capable of and being able to explore the boundaries that we're very good at setting very rigidly, how much further we are actually capable of going. And freediving has been the most incredible tool to help me discover that. And now I help other people discover it through the tools that I use within the mental fitness umbrella I talk about.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, now I'm sure you talk to a lot of different groups, but specifically I just want to kind of make it more personal. Hey, it's my podcast I could do whatever I want, but yeah, I'm a serial entrepreneur. It's a demanding job. I wouldn't say it's the most demanding job, it's not brain surgery, but we all on some level struggle with this mental fitness idea. I refer to entrepreneurship as the stunning discomfort of entrepreneurship. That's how I've felt all the time. It is very uncomfortable. I am suited for it. I'm not risk averse.

I don't struggle as much with imposter syndrome, especially American women. Oh my God, imposter syndrome is just rampant. It's just like, I just want it to go away. But anyway, it is very real. Everybody feels it at some time. The idea that somebody wouldn't feel it at some point is really ridiculous. We make decisions minute by minute. I mean, it's just constant. And then it can be so overwhelming that we experience decision paralysis.

All the while, everybody's asking us to be totally present and totally awake and totally alive to every moment and also taking care of the wellbeing of everyone around us. So I do know that you get called into a lot of corporate settings to really give a sound talk about what this means. So tell me what you think about some of those high stakes environments and why you think you have a message. What is it that you're seeing that just over and over again kind of gives you pain.

Helena Bourdillon: Well, I mean, you summed it up perfectly. This is something that actually affects everyone on the planet, particularly in the environment, the world stage of everything that is coming at us the entire time these days. There's no respite, there's no downtime. If ever there was a time we need to be able to come back to ourselves, to find that quiet clarity, it really is now.

In terms of being a woman, in terms of being an entrepreneur, in terms of businesses, you know, there's that decision paralysis, there is the imposter syndrome, there's the presenteeism, and all of those things lead to, they erode the performance and eventually lead on to burnout. So that's the pain, that's the financial cost to any business. And ultimately to anybody's life, whether it's their personal or their professional life, those environments ricochet and ripple throughout.

I work with what I term as the high-stakes sector. I work with corporates in finance, in legal, in tech. I work in security and for example in the UK along the lines of the NHS, the emergency services. I work with construction companies. There isn't really an area where this isn't going to benefit people, but that's where I focus my attention.

And ultimately, when I close my eyes and think about my ideal audience, I close my eyes and I see myself as a 15 year old girl because I think every teenage child could benefit from learning these tools so that they can start feeling like they're slightly more in control of what's going on inside them.

Priscilla McKinney: Oh my gosh. Okay. I don't want to steal your thunder because people need to call you and reach out to you and hear your incredible story and your keynotes and some of your workshops and things like that. But can you tell me a little bit like what, let's work a little bit on that difference. It's not wellbeing. It's not fluffy. It's not feel better about yourself or pat on the back. Tell me a little bit about the science that you've learned and how that has informed some practical tools that you give people to help frame this. Where do we start?

Helena Bourdillon: Absolutely. Now I use five specific tools, three of which I started using before I started freediving and two that kind of became glaringly obvious to me once I started freediving as well. And these are actually all tools that freedivers use specifically. And we dedicate our training to becoming calm, focused and able to think clearly under pressure. So if ever there was a holding tank to try this stuff out, of potentially life and death, it's a really good place to try it out. And so it's all about staying calm and staying present.

It's five tools. They are psychological, physiological and psychological. Some of them take 60 seconds. Some of them take a little bit longer. The whole idea is you start with the one that resonates most. And I tend to say, do it till you're blue in the face because I'm a free diver. And occasionally, if I've held my breath too long, I might start getting slightly blue lips. Hopefully not completely blue in the face, but you practice it. This is a practice. This is not a one and done.

But that said, these tools, the difference is immediate. And the more you practice them, the more automatic your response becomes. It is retraining your nervous system so that it just happens automatically. You feel the pressure rising. You're like, okay, I know what to do. My body knows what to do. We naturally have physiological triggers that our body does when we find ourselves in stress situations and they can calm us down. It's tapping into those and using them to help us bring ourselves back to this calm clarity. And they're not complex, it can be a bit repetitive doing them, but the difference is noticeable immediately.

Priscilla McKinney: So you got three from just your own journey of recovery. Tell me about the two that you got after you started free diving, because that is so interesting. What's the layer that that added when those were high stakes? You're not home and you're 50 meters below, 60 meters below, I mean, that is very high stakes. So what was the learning from free diving?

Helena Bourdillon: Well, interestingly, and this is one that everyone will have heard of, cold water stimulation is a massive one. It's a very, very efficient way of calming our heart rate down. And I discovered that when I freedive because the moment you splash water sort of around the eye area, it stimulates what we call the vagus nerve, the major component of our rest and digest nervous system. And so it triggers the messages sending to the brain saying, I'm safe.

And the brain goes, well, we can calm everything down. We can lower the heart rate. We can lower the blood pressure. We can stop producing so many stress hormones. And then it's like, this cycle continues and everything calms. And when I dive, I call it the extreme sport of relaxation and it's really not that fascinating to watch because you'll see the diver lying on the surface of the ocean doing nothing. Take a few breaths and then they disappear.

If you're lucky, you have the drone that follows you on the dive and does a live feedback to the surface, which viewers can watch on YouTube or whatever it is. But it's not the most exciting sport, to be really honest. But so you're relaxing on the surface and then you turn and the water touches your face. And even if your heart was racing a little bit, you get that shift in the nervous system, that calming that makes my brain go, this is my playground. This is where we have fun. Let's go.

The other one, my keynote, the first part of the title is Free Diving Through Fear. And people say, are you not terrified when you dive deep? And it's a fair question, but you also need to understand that every free diver doesn't start diving to 20, 30 meters. My first dive was maybe three meters for about 20 seconds, which may sound like a lot to non-free divers, but it's not much. But it was so transformational, that 20 seconds.

But I train in a specific way that I never increase my depth too fast. It's a real balancing act between your body being physically prepared for the pressure at depth and your mind being physically prepared. And this is very similar to mental fitness because we can be really, really physically fit, but our body will only go as far as our mind allows us. We can only go so deep in the ocean if we're physically fit, prepared and stretchy and flexible and all of that. If our mind isn't up to the same level, it will create tension.

Then either we run out of air quickly or we risk damaging ourselves. So there's this real balance of making sure everything is in alignment, everything is equal. And this is as essential in real everyday life, I truly believe, because once our mental fitness is in balance with our physical fitness, or even a little bit better, then this amazing opportunity opens up.

I was talking about fear and when you dive sensibly and you go to depth in a really intelligent, calm way, you then have this experience of, I can be down at 30 meters, 40 meters, and I know I could hang there if I wanted. I can be totally relaxed. I can look at the blue around me. Occasionally hear whales singing in the background, which is an incredible experience, and promptly brought me into tears, which is a really weird thing to do when you're underwater.

But you take this confidence that you get from that, from being able to do that underwater, you take that to dry land and go, what can I do when I have air to breathe? And suddenly these boundaries, these opportunities you become much more open to and you're like, wait a minute. I can do that, what else can I do? And you become curious and you become excited and that affects the people around you. Your self-trust improves, that affects the people around you. You open up to your environment and the people around you so much more, which is essential to families, friends, communities and workplaces.

Priscilla McKinney: You breezed right past a phrase that really it's just almost going to be hard for me to repeat back to you because it just hits so at the core of what you're talking about and that is you said and then I could go to the depth in an intelligent and calm way. Wow. I mean if I could go back and tell my 20 year old self something I would say that, like how can you take steps?

Go to a depth in an intelligent and calm way. I have been a seeker all my life, I've been a pusher of like growth and learning and I don't think that I went about it in an intelligent and calm way. It was very very chaotic and very driven, not compelled, and that I think is something very different. And I can imagine in diving there's that piece of like you're not being necessarily driven for it but being compelled toward that, whatever it is you're trying to reach before you come back up to the surface. That calmness I think is what was lacking in my younger life and that is really hard when you're trying to lead an entire group.

Helena Bourdillon: Absolutely, it's the, I'm the leader I have to muscle through. And that creates a lot of friction within us. And it makes it much, much harder when we're able to come back to this quiet clarity. It is that true grounding. It's that sense of, and you build up from there.

And the going to depth intelligently, it's not racing, it's very well thought out. It's like good risk assessment. It's calm presence, it's clear headed thinking, it's good judgment, it's creativity. And it all comes from that original quiet clarity, that utter grounding. And it's a difficult one to explain because people kind of can go, it sounds a bit woo-woo, but it isn't. This comes from five science-backed practical tools that are no nonsense, they're common sense, but they slip past us or we think, yeah, we'll try them.

And when I do my keynotes, within the first five minutes, the audience have experienced the first tool from quite a harrowing perspective and they're all sitting there going, oh my God, I feel amazing now. I'm not trying to traumatize the audience, but I'm trying to really get people in touch with how we feel in a good way, not in a, oh my gosh, I'm at the end of my tether, I'm freaking out, I have no control over anything outside of me. That's true, we don't. But we can come back into ourselves and access that well of quiet clarity and perform from there.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm.

Helena Bourdillon: Right, I've done what I need to do now and now I feel that I need to go and take some time for myself. I have to spend time with my family. It's a much more compassionate place to ourself, to the people around us, to our team. And it ripples out. It's very strong and it ripples out and it affects everyone in such a good way. That ripple can change companies, can change communities, and we need that more than ever right now.

Priscilla McKinney: I love that. Okay. I want to talk a little bit more about mental fitness, but I want to just, you know, kind of context this for me. In my twenties, I was very impacted by the writings of Frederick Beekner. And this is more about listening to your life, about really, you know, it is about maybe a stillness. I'm not sure if the stillness is it, but so much just listening, like what do you have here?

And then my thirties was really guided personally, I think, by Marianne Williamson, this return to love. Like, how do you come back into yourself? How do you understand what that purpose is? My 40s, my 40th birthday, my sister gave me the Gifts of Imperfection from Brene Brown and rocked my life. I know we all probably know where we were when we first read that book.

But my 50s, I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday. And it's return to stoicism. You may not be familiar with him, but his book, The Obstacle is the Way, just, I mean, it was just insane how provocative it was to me at the time, just in what you call this high stakes environment, you know, making decisions, trying to lead a team, feeling imperfect in that. And, you know, part of it is a realization that you're your own obstacle.

But that is a lot about mental fitness. Now he went on to write several other books, and this last book he wrote is called Wisdom Takes Work. And so I say all of that long intro to say, I love what you're saying here, that these might be simple techniques you offer to people, but it is a practice. And when we talk about mental fitness, it's not addressing wellness issues on the top, taking care of yourself, taking a little time off or, you know, working from home or having a pet or all these things that people like to talk about. To me, it's just such an exhausting conversation because it doesn't get to that fitness.

Listen, you can hear this, you can listen to Helena and then do not practice it, and it is of no value to you. So entering into this mental fitness, what would you say to my audience? They're in high stakes jobs, right? So how do you change your mindset from taking care of myself to becoming mentally fit? What do you think needs to shift?

Helena Bourdillon: Well, I'm going to assume that your audience are already in high stakes sectors, that they're around our age group, sort of 40s, 50s and 60s, which is a very different arena to 20s and 30s. The awareness is key and it's sometimes people struggle to grasp the fact that these tools are actually very simple and you only need to start with one of them. And once you've got that locked in, you add another one and you stack them like that.

Now, I specifically in my talks and the workshops, I get the audience to feel the shift. And as I say, I use the first tool and that is my most significant tool. It's my go-to tool. And the shift is quite astonishing for less than 90 seconds. And it's the awareness of what's going on. And the more you do that, you can have your pre prescribed practice of first thing in the morning, getting up and doing whatever it is you do. Absolutely brilliant, yes.

But these specific tools, being aware to go, right, I feel the pressure is mounting, I'm going to take 90 seconds for myself. And it's that old adage where they say, you should meditate for 10 minutes every day. If you have a busy day, you should meditate for an hour because you will be so much calmer and so much more focused at the end. I'm not saying you need to sit and do these exercises for an hour. Very few, I mean, three of them are all within less than two minutes. I am a little and often, practice them frequently.

And interestingly, one of the tools is a breathing tool. And there was a study about focused breath work that came out of Stanford in 2023 that said when you do five minutes of focused breathing, it not only calms you down in the moment, but it protects against future stress. It then went on to say that 20 minutes is no better than five. And as I say, very categorically in my talk, we can all spare ourselves five minutes, especially if it's going to bring us to that calm, quiet clarity.

So we then go, I know exactly what I need to do next. It's this, this and this, then the day is done. I go back to my family or whatever it is. And when we're not in that place, we're trying to fill every single bucket and do all the jobs and more often than not we're not doing them justice, we're not doing ourselves justice, we're not doing our work justice or the people who rely on us. But when we can do it from that place we are so much more present for ourselves, for what we're doing so we actually get it done a lot faster and a lot better and more importantly we are there for the people around us, some who might really need us.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, right. Yeah, and we need ourselves to be there. Like nobody else understands the pressure you feel during the day. Nobody, I mean, you know, I live with basically Yoda. Let me just tell you, I've got like a very wise husband, very supportive, but it doesn't matter. Like he's not with me in the day. He doesn't know the kind of decisions I face.

And I remember saying something to him just recently about I just don't understand why, you know, this happens, but it doesn't happen to you. And he looked at me and he's like, I don't put myself out there like you do. And I was like, wow, that was like some wise counsel there, to be like Priscilla, what are you expecting? You put yourself out there so openly.

Helena Bourdillon: It does. Putting yourself out there comes with a whole different spectrum of potential imposter syndromes and decision paralysis and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's high-stakes sector is an additional level. It kind of doesn't sum it up. An additional spectrum of stress upon everyday stress that we're all dealing with anyway.

Priscilla McKinney: Right. I love it. Okay. Before we go, I want to hear a little bit from you about Light Beams for Helena. So tell me about that project and I'll definitely put this in the show notes. And I just don't want to wrap without talking about that for a minute.

Helena Bourdillon: Thank you, that's really special. This is one of the things I'm actually really proudest of. A film director got in touch with me at the start of covid and we were all a little like that. And he kept getting in contact, I think he had to contact me five times before I finally said okay. And then the idea kept getting delayed and delayed.

We eventually in November 2022, we ended up in Mexico in a beautiful cenote, a couple of cenotes, and we filmed Light Beams for Helena. And it is about my story from the depths of depression to finding free diving and how while I was already on the road to recovery, free diving cracked me open and found my inner child and my inner joy through that. And I suppose my work from there has become helping other people find that space in themselves, which is that joyful and that blossoming, really.

And it's a really beautiful film. The first time I saw it, I panicked completely because I was like, it's too beautiful. The message isn't going to come across. And then I calmed down and just realized it's a beautiful film. It is a little bit emotional at times, but I also think it's very positive and very empowering as well. It's only 10 minutes long too.

Priscilla McKinney: Well, it's mesmerizing. And it is a winner of Five Point Film Festival. I mean, you know, if you're lucky enough to go to places like Telluride Mountain Film Festival, good on you, then you would have seen this film. I'm a big fan of Crested Butte. So all these lovely film festivals that people got to see it at. But yeah, I'll definitely put that in the show notes.

Well, now, what's the thing you would say to your younger self? Now having gone through this journey, because you know, as I shared with you, I'm like, when you said that, I would like to have said to myself, you know, you can go to this depth but with intelligence and with calm. Like you can do this. What would you have said to your younger self?

Helena Bourdillon: It's kind of similar to what I say in the talk. I find people get really overwhelmed when you throw lots of stuff at them and go, help yourself. So I think I'd say to her, look, you're struggling. It is hard. I wasn't aware of what had happened at that time. I was in, you know, my depression was getting worse and worse. Life was really tough and I felt completely isolated.

So I think the first thing I would say is you're not alone. It will get better. And here's one single tool that I encourage you to just keep trying because it could change everything for you. It really can.

Priscilla McKinney: Good stuff. You need to reach out to her. It's Helena Bourdillon. It's B-O-U-R-D-I-L-L-O-N. Look her up online. Go look at the link and watch this beautiful, beautiful film. Helena, thank you so much. We'll give a big shout out to Patrick for connecting us, but thank you so much for sharing your story and your expertise. I do hope it's helped someone today. It certainly helped me.

Helena Bourdillon: I hope so. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Priscilla McKinney: From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing!