28th November 2025
Written by Rachelle Rogers
I spent twelve years as an elite athlete and the further along my path I got, the deeper my self-worth became entangled in my pursuit of mastery. I believed that once I “made it,” I would finally become enough. If you go back and ask 19-year-old me what “making it” meant, she probably would have said something along the lines of being ranked in the top 30 in the world. To her that was ‘making it’ because those are the Alpine Skiers we see on TV, the ones whose names every aspiring Alpine Skier knows. But the thing is, I never “made it”.
However what I discovered long after retiring from sport, is that my self-worth was waiting for me elsewhere. It did not lie in the pursuit of mastery in Alpine Skiing. Instead, it lay in the pursuit of proficiency in my current career as an airline pilot. By shifting my focus to achieving proficiency, I would discover that I am already enough. I always have been.
The Impact of Performance Pressure
Looking back, I can now see that my teenage years were shaped heavily by performance pressure. As a young athlete, I felt an overwhelming need to prove myself and to justify my place as an emerging talent on the British Ski Team. It has taken me years and a great deal of self-compassion to understand why I felt that way.
When I was around in my mid-teens, which is a pivotal age in Alpine Skiing, I experienced emotional abuse from a coach. I won’t specify when because that part doesn’t matter. What matters is acknowledging the impact it had; one I have only recently come to understand. It broke my confidence. It bended my belief systems and tricked me into believing that my worth had to be validated externally. It wrapped achievement and my sense of self so tightly together that I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
For years, I carried my broken confidence and superficial sense of self into every training run and every competition, where I feared I may fall short of the standards I held myself to. Yet now, I can finally understand how deeply that experience shaped my relationship with pressure and how profoundly different things feel now because I navigate pressure from a grounded sense of self-worth.
Mastery: The Endless Chase
As an athlete, mastery felt like the only acceptable destination. Better, faster, stronger. It was a treadmill I could never step off. Even when I achieved my goals, the satisfaction was fleeting. The five minutes I got to stand on a podium after a win or a top 3 finish didn’t even feel like a sense of accomplishment. It felt like a given. That it ‘should’ be happening to me. Conversely when I didn’t achieve my goals, the disappointment was long lasting and the failure just hung over me.
In both situations, there was always the next thing waiting for me to go after. I never took a moment to truly feel what accomplishment felt like or how a failure is only a blip in the bigger picture of my sporting career. I constantly compared myself to others. I feared failure and I hated seeing a “bad” result next to my name on my online athlete profile. My self-worth lived in outcomes in the form of national team status, rankings and being selected for events. It was an unsustainable belief system.
Proficiency: The Perspective Shift
Stepping away from sport and into aviation required some significant changes. The good elements of the athlete needed nurturing (resiliency, work ethic, professionalism, etc.) and the limiting beliefs needed re-educating (not being good enough, self-worth, identity). Becoming an airline pilot has taught me something transformative: I didn’t need to be the best anymore, I just needed to be proficient. In aviation, proficiency is what we aspire to. It is a standard driven by feedback data from performance analysis of the pilot population as a whole, not scrutinising individuals like we do in the sporting world. Proficiency in the flight deck means being competent, consistent and safe on any given day. A First Officer with 500 hours can be just as proficient as a Captain with 15,000 hours. Proficiency is not about greatness, it’s about steadiness. It’s not about stand out performances, it’s about dependable task execution that can be adapted to any circumstances a pilot may face. This shift granted me liberation from any standards I set myself because the standards are prescribed. Proficiency gives permission to be human in a way that chasing mastery as an athlete could not.
I can pinpoint the exact moment the shift landed for me. In the summer of 2022, I was declared temporarily unfit to fly. This is something that happens in aviation more often than people might think. In my case, it meant I was off work for just over three months. When pilots are away that long a structured return-to-work process is required. The first part of that process was scheduled with only two days notice. This meant I had very little time to prepare and get my head back in the game. I had to walk in exactly as I was. I had to know I was enough. And I was. In fact to my surprise, I didn’t just perform, I performed to a high standard.
As I processed what happened, I came to realise it was the first time in my adult life that I had succeeded without over-preparing and without fear or pressure. Instead I had this quiet confidence that I was enough. I realised this was the beginning of a new way of being. One built on self-worth from the feeling of enoughness. Since then, the proficiency mindset has grown roots in everything I do and I truly believe it has a place in the world of elite sport, where the burden of expectation can easily drown self-worth.
This mindset has carried me through one of the most significant assessments of my career; the last assessment in the assessment process of becoming a Captain . Instead of letting perceived pressure overpower me; I rooted myself in who I am and reminded myself that my worth doesn’t hinge on a single outcome. Adopting this approach instilled in me something I felt I never felt as an athlete: peace and presence.
What I Wish My Younger Self Knew
If I could go back and sit beside my teenage self, I would tell her about proficiency. I would tell her that the pursuit of mastery can swallow her whole. That chasing perfection is often a mask for fearing failure. That worthiness is not something you earn through achievement, but through grounding within oneself.
In elite sport, the expectations are enormous. There is always something we are striving to achieve and with that we feel pressures around performance and being enough. Whether it’s trying to be selected for an event, the event itself or general pressure every time we compete because our outcomes, our results, are so visible. It is so easy to feel that you must be extraordinary in order to deserve belonging in the elite sporting world. But proficiency reframes that. Proficiency can invite athletes to own their performance with compassion and facilitate them to see the bigger picture. Proficiency reduces the perceived importance of each event by softening the spikes of insecurity and self-judgment. It grounds performance in self-worth rather than fear.
