Watching the Olympics on TV gives me inspiration to work hard to do my best, no matter the adversity. Federica Brignone an alpine skiing champion at 35, has shown me that there are thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat that come hand-in-hand with usually more defeats than victories.

As a peak performance coach who assists athletes to win, I believe defeats, and sometimes injuries, teach us more, that is, if we are willing to put them on a feedback loop to find out what worked and what did not during our past performances, so we can improve the next time around. After all, what is the biggest room in the world, even for Olympians? I bet you’re scratching your head on this one! Well, it’s the “room for improvement.”

However, the improvement in performance is not solely to better your technique or to learn how to perform in competition to compensate for an injury, such as wrestling with a labrum tear or heart palpitations. These just address the needs of the physical body, and not the other components of a person in mind and spirit that help create the milieu to enter the “Zone” automatically. This is where everything seems simpler, freer, easier, more focused, more concentrated, and more relaxed, so you can just let go and work within yourself harmoniously without feeling you’re in a pressure cooker.

I know this from my own experience and wrote about it in Chapter 3 in my book, Wrestling Through Adversity. My story as a neophyte hypno-coach began in the fall of 1997 when I presented my first workshop on the mat to a group of 50 male high school wrestling coaches, alongside Kurt Angle, Olympic Wrestling Champion. The main focus of my talk was to show coaches how they can teach their student-athletes to be mentally tough—a subject I had written about in my wrestling column “Getting the Edge.”

When I first arrived at the workshop I felt somewhat intimidated because the coaches were skeptical of my credentials, for I never wrestled, and I was a woman and a nurse, not a psychologist. However, I overcame it when I used my own Mindful Toughness ® skillsets, such as self-hypnosis, mental rehearsal, and positive self-talk that gave me confidence when I stepped onto the mat for my talk.

With the first hand-drawn graphic, I introduced a metaphor I called the “Humpty Dumpty Syndrome” (see the figure below) that depicts the cross-section of a hard-boiled egg—an egg being a symbol of hope and purity—that represents the holistic sport of wrestling in mind, body, and spirit. To the coaches, I explained that the eggshell in the graphic is the body that holds the physical skills. The egg white is the mind that holds mental skills, and the yolk is the spirit that holds the soul-energy and core beliefs.

I further explained that the trinity of mind, body, and spirit in combination and in harmony is key in assisting wrestlers to focus and win from within, but if used separately, such as physical skills alone, they could cause injury or loss as in the case of Humpty Dumpty. And we all know what happened to him when he fell off the wall, cracked open, and no one could put him back together again!

What’s important to note here is that the reception by the coaches of this “foreign” holistic concept and others I presented was lukewarm at best, until Kurt, an experienced champion who practiced mind-body techniques, commented that the coaches should listen intently to me because he used them to become a Gold Medalist.

I think Federica Brignone’s gold medal win in the Super-G demonstrated this concept beautifully because she learned what Kurt did years prior when he doubled over in pain from injuries and won. This is because last year in March, Federica won the downhill, Giant slalom, and overall titles and had her sights on Olympic Gold this year. However, everything changed in April when she crashed during the Italian championships and had multiple fractures and a torn ACL.

Although she did not speak of it often, she admitted later that her recovery was really hard for her with much pain, but she knew she had to accept her injuries and the results that followed that later built up her resolve to win. Federica did not know as recently as November 2025 if she could ever ski again but managed to return to the World Cup on January 20, 2026.

As she looks back on her career with a new perspective, she now sees the problem before her accident was the intense pressure she had to endure to win. Ironically, it was the power to overcome this adversity that helped free her of its grip. Her main emotions when she finally arrived at the Olympics that she believed to be a miracle were filled with gratitude and happiness for the chance to compete after all she had been through during her recovery and the delight to compete on her own turf in Italy.

Practice on the slopes was difficult at first, but she saw progress each day and found herself gaining confidence and getting better. Her plan for the Super-G race was to do her best, to burst through the gate, to stay consistent, to make intelligent tactical decisions, and to let her skis “go” on the snow.

On the gnarly, foggy, and slippery slope that felled 11 of the first 25 skiers on competition day, Brignone took a wild ride down a treacherous course that included a series of jumps with turns. Although she nearly missed several gates and almost hit the snow twice, she recovered each time, staying on course. Everyone watching her peak performance was shocked and stunned that she made the contest look really easy to win, especially because of her comeback in 10 months.

In the past, although always a positive person, Brignone would strive to push herself to make things happen to accomplish her goals, but she admitted that sometimes she tried too hard while bending to the pressure to win, thus sabotaging her efforts.

This time around at the 2026 Olympics in her home country, Federica showed us how to balance within ourselves by pushing through her turns, by minding her tactics mentally, and by holding onto spirit with belief in herself to become a Super-G Gold medal winner. To say the least, she was ecstatic, but no one could have predicted not even Federica what would happen next a few days later when she participated in the Giant slalom race.

At this event the hometown crowd showed up with love, waving the Italian flag, and jumping and dancing in the snow. Brignone won the first run by more than a third of a second and held together in the second run to beat Sweden’s and Norway’s star skiers.

After her gold medal run, her colleagues raved about her saying that she is the kindest and most genuine athlete on tour who deserves her wins because she came back from injury. Two of them bowed down on their knees at the finish line to honor her and her mental strength.

Truly Federica is an inspiration for all of us to wrestle through adversity with gratitude, happiness, love in our hearts, and focus on what we have to do to win on the slope in mind body, and spirit, rather than caving into pressure. Columnist Barry Svrluga summed it up nicely by saying: “If you can show up, do it. Who knows what kind of performances 80 percent of a body and a fully free mind could possibly summon?”