The brain craves certainty.
Human nature prompts us to seek patterns and consistency, which feed psychological safety and, ultimately, our sense of control.
According to Jonah Oliver, one of Australia’s leading sport performance psychologists, uncertainty is the hardest human emotion—tougher to navigate than pain, anger, grief, and even loss.
“There’s a reason that seven-year-old kid shakes the present under the Christmas tree,” says Oliver. “We just can’t stand the idea of not knowing what’s in the box” (Way of Champions Podcast, 2023).
What, then, when the Brazilian Rowing Confederation (CBR) unexpectedly drops a single page statement cancelling the 2025 World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals (WRBSF) that were scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro in October?
What, then, when World Rowing responds to the letter, citing its surprise and clarifying that CBR’s announcement was made unilaterally and without consultation with World Rowing? Or, when two weeks later, World Rowing issues a follow-up statement formally announcing the cancellation of the 2025 WRBSF at the intended location in Brazil?
How does that impact the Beach Sprint athlete who’s been working all year to make gains, or aiming for the national team and a chance to compete with the best?
How does that impact their focus and motivation in training?
And how does it weigh on their mind?
How Dreams Find Their Spark
For the first time this summer, USRowing hosted four two-day Beach Sprint Identification Camps at various locations. The format included both classroom and beach orientations, as well as an opportunity to time trial and head-to-head race in true beach sprint style.
With one of the camps an easy ride from my hometown, I happily raised a hand to help out as an increasingly seasoned and well-travelled boat handler for US club and national teams. After the knockout rounds on Day 2, I asked one of the participants about his race. Lean, lanky, and outsized by a field of older competitors, the young athlete’s face lit up. Joy was immediate and unmistakable as he recounted how he felt at the turn buoy and what it was like to weather the ocean’s unrelenting current and characteristic chop.
I believe dreams were born on the beach that day—dreams that will be quietly nurtured by some and boldly pursued by others. Here’s one thing about dreams that often gets missed by the crowd: they’re sparked in unexpected, sometimes unlikely moments. The dreams of champions? Those are then cared for and tended to, year after year after year.
Imagine that: nurturing a dream like a champion—cultivating the physical ability, mental acuity, and devotion of heart that’s all part of it—and then waking up one day to opportunity seemingly haphazardly gone.
Oddly, in a post-COVID world, it’s a familiar plot.
What Keeps Us Going When the End Goal’s Unclear
News of Rio’s cancellation hit the rowing circuit roughly five weeks before the USRowing Beach Sprint Trials. Athletes attended selection camp and then lined up to race with little more than a single sentence confirming that World Rowing was “actively seeking” an alternative host to stage the event.
Competition has a unique way of sparking motivation and focusing the mind in the moment. The challenging part often surfaces during the weeks of hard training beforehand when the body is tired and the mind has more time for worry and fear. Malachi Anderson, four-time US National Team athlete and three-time silver medalist at Beach Sprint Worlds spoke of this:
“I was mainly very concerned that I wouldn’t get to show myself how much I improved and how much the work I did was making me faster,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to have that chance anymore.”
Emotions manifest in many ways during times of uncertainty and potential (or actual) loss, with the heart and mind not always in synch. We might feel apathetic or deflated—along the spectrum of sadness; frustrated or resolute—along the spectrum of anger; or anxious, helpless or overwhelmed—along the spectrum of fear.
What helped guide Anderson, who ultimately secured a spot on his fourth US National Team with an outstanding performance in the men’s solo? And what skills and beliefs did his teammate, World Champion coxswain, Coral Kasden, lean on during this time?
Let’s learn!
Mental Skills for Navigating Uncertainty and Change
1. Channeling hope, autonomy, and choice
“I chose to believe that it’s not over until it’s over,” said Kasden, with pure conviction, regarding her initial response to the news.
“I genuinely believed that World Rowing was going to try to make this happen for its athletes. And I’d rather have hope to hold onto instead of just getting tossed to and fro in the waves. I’ve done that too often earlier in my career, so I think I just chose to believe,” she shared.
I wish you could hear Kasden voice, and the emphasis and passion behind hope and choice.
What she speaks of are both assets and real skills. Autonomy is a core pillar of motivation, and exercising personal choice is fundamental to building confidence, strengthening self-efficacy, and driving real growth.
Hope relates, too.
“Hope is more than a feel-good emotion,” explains the VIA Institute on Character. “It is an action-oriented strength involving agency, the motivation and confidence that goals can be reached, and also that many effective pathways can be devised to get to that desired future” (VIA Institute on Character, n.d.).
One key to note here is that “that desired future” might not unfold on your timeline. In fact, as someone who didn’t make their first national team until age 34, I’ll add that it rarely does—a point that Kasden gets too.
“Our success never happens on our timeline,” she says. “The opportunities that are presented to us never happen on our timeline.”
The takeaway: channel hope, exercise choice, and ground yourself in patience, adaptability, and perhaps a little faith.
2. Zooming out and using perspective
Zooming out can include reframing the current context in light of the bigger picture or widening the lens to help you see silver linings or new possibilities ahead.
“What we have to do as athletes is constantly find ways to move forward or sideways—maybe even backwards sometimes—just to give ourselves the chance to reorient in a different direction,” says Kasden. “And maybe that takes us the long, detour route to our goal, but we don’t have to stop dreaming just because something we wanted didn’t happen this year.”
“That is such a hard thing to wrestle with,” she continues. “There’s this idea that: ‘If I don’t get there now, I’m going to miss out.’”
In mental skills coaching and several mindset theories and frameworks, what Kasden is referring to is fear- or scarcity-based thinking, which stands in contrast to growth- or abundance-based thinking.
There’s more than one way forward
Reflecting on my own career as a lightweight in the flatwater discipline, I know the juxtaposition—and both mentalities—well. Several of my past coaches focused solely on the development and success of the lightweight double sculls, as it was the only Olympic-class lightweight event at the time.
One problem with this approach is that it feeds athletes the idea that if they fall off the trajectory of this particular path, the doors close, with no worthwhile routes left to follow. This mindset risks leaving athletes feeling lesser than, and it ignores the objective reality that other meaningful and exciting opportunities abound.
How do we effectively zoom out, reorient, and embrace abundance-based thinking?
As with hope, it starts with activation and action. Proven strategies include:
- Journaling to prompt deep thinking and fuel self-awareness and reflection
- Calling on curiosity and powerful questions to clarify how a short-term pivot might fit into the bigger vision
- Leaning on trusted support, who, as Kasden points out, can help you decide your next move or tell you about opportunities that you might not even have known existed.
3. Grounding in the present moment
Lastly, there’s nothing like the power of grounding in the present moment to support you through uncertainty and change. In the words of Ram Dass: Be here now—a strategy Anderson fully embraced and artfully applied.
Remember: Anderson’s initial response to Remo Basil’s cancellation was concern about losing the chance to put his coastal-specific work to the test. He wanted to know that it meant something, even if the goalpost had moved. Fortunately, he had other events on the calendar including a championship race in Costa Rica to help him stay present.
“I was just trying to tell myself that it was about what I could accomplish in the moment,” he said. “If those were my only races—Trials and Costa Rica—I was going to prove to myself there [at those events] that the work I did in Dartmouth in April… the work that I did in throughout the winter with Marc in Cincinnati on the erg all the time… all of that work meant something because I was showing myself what I could accomplish.”
And accomplish he did. Anderson’s work earned him a podium finish in Costa Rica and a ticket to this year’s World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals—which, yes, have been officially rescheduled to take place in November, in new host city: Antalya, Turkey. The news was met with enthusiasm and widespread applause.
The Ultimate Answer—and the Ultimate Test
When we enter the arena of sport, we sign-up for uncertainty. It’s part of the job, part of the privilege, and part of what makes championship moments soul-touching and great.
And yet, our brains still crave certainty. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s what we’re designed to do. So how, as athletes, do we reconcile the two?
We control the controllables, and find strength in the discipline of presence and hope. We move forward with perspective and choice. Because we didn’t sign-up for easy. We signed-up for tests of resilience and learning and growth.
References
VIA Institute on Character. (n.d.). Hope | Character Strength. VIA Institute on Character. Retrieved August 21, 2025, from https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths/hope
Way of Champions Podcast. (2023, August 5). Jonah Oliver: Performance psychologist on helping athletes unlock their best when it counts most [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3sjqI5sUkM
Acknowledgements
This article was first published on Row360 and can be found here.
Photo credit: USRowing and row2k.com. Full gallery from 2025 Beach Sprint Trials found here.
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