September 9, 2020 • 29 mins
Welcome to The Secret Syllabus - with special guest US Soccer legend Abby Wambach!
So, you didn’t get the internship. Or the boy/girl. Or what you were really hoping for. This episode is a lesson in coping with rejection—in all forms—and moving forward.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You become your environment, right, like the people you spend
your time with is going to change you in either
good ways or bad ways. So you have to choose
your environment very wisely. And I think if you can
figure that out early days in college, that will definitely
help you achieve those goals that you set for yourself
a freshman year. Hi everyone, Hey guys, Welcome to the
(00:24):
first episode of The Secret Syllabus. The Secret Syllabus is
a production of The Female Quotient and I Heart Radio
and co produced by The Female Quotient and Wonder Media Network.
Hey everyone, I'm Hannah Ashton and I'm Katie Tracy, and
we're both YouTubers and on our channels we talk a
lot about our experiences as college students. I go to
(00:44):
Belmont University where I'm majoring in entrepreneurship, and I go
to Cornell University where I'm majoring in information science. So
a lot of us listening right now are college students.
I'm sure in some way, COVID has derailed your plans,
has forced you to change your future, and it's probably
making you have an existential life crisis every single day.
(01:06):
We as college students feel that. So Hannah and I
decided to make a podcast so we could tackle everything
that our college curriculum did not cover for us, especially
during this time of uncertainty. There's so much to talk about,
from fostering ally ship, to cultivating a positive body image
to navigating the last semesters of COVID. Yes, and we
(01:27):
know many of you have had to rework your plans,
and Katie and I have also had to do that.
I know for me, I spent two of my college
years in Nashville, and I was planning on going on
this program this semester where I could study in New
York and have an internship, And three weeks before I
was supposed to move, I found out that whole program
got canceled. And so right after learning that my dream
(01:49):
of living in New York and walking the streets to
a super cool and trendy internship was canceled, I to
be honest, cried on FaceTime to my roommate, and I
also felt confused about what my whole semester now would
look like. I totally felt the same. Being an international
student from the Philippines, I really looked at these four
years as an escape away to grow and experience a
(02:10):
whole new, different culture in America and now I'm back
home in the Philippines. Had to evacuate when the whole
COVID situation struck. But I can only imagine what the
seniors are feeling. You know, Graduation is supposed to be
this exciting time to celebrate with all your friends, and
quite frankly, there are many people who are just stuck
in their rooms right now having a very lonely college experience.
(02:33):
And some people on campus I'm sure are just worried
and waiting for their school to evacuate them once again.
So there's just a lot of anxiety going on right now,
and we believe that we can get through this together exactly.
So that's where our first guest comes in. She is
a two time Olympic gold medalist, a FIFA Women's World
(02:55):
Cup champion, and a member of the National Soccer Hall
of Fame, and all while staying true to herself, she
has managed to successfully turn disappointment into fuel, owning the
power of resilience in the face of uncertainty and change.
She's amazing and we're talking about Abyan back. I am
so ready for this podcast episode. What about you, Hannah? Yes,
(03:16):
she is an amazing first guest, and we're so excited
for you guys to take a listen. Welcome, Abby. We
are thrilled to have you on our show. We have
lots to talk about today, but first we'd love for
you to start us off by introducing yourself and what
you've been up to. My name's Aby Wambach. I played
for many years on the US women's national team, and
(03:37):
I've been retired for about five years now, and basically
I am doing the parenting thing. The last five years,
I've had to transition from a playing career into a
totally different career off the field. Yes, I do want
to stay involved and am still involved in the game. However,
my career while I played didn't offer me the kind
(04:00):
of security that you would imagine a professional athlete earning.
In fact, I found myself in early days of my
retirement on an sp stage and I found myself next
to Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. All three of us
were getting this icon award, you know, and I felt
super grateful. I felt like, wow, here we are, we women,
We finally made it. And I was rudely awakened to
(04:22):
as we re walked off that stage. How different our
retirements in fact would be. Kobe and Peyton, their biggest
concerns were where they were going to invest their hundreds
of millions of dollars that they collectively earned, And my
concern was how I was going to be able to
pay my mortgage. That's a real life story, and that
isn't just my story. I realized that night that that's
the story of so many women. So I've been in
(04:44):
search of what I want to do next, and it's
been fun, it's been terrifying. So I'm an entrepreneur, I'm
an investor, I'm a professional sports team co owner, and
a speaker and author and parenting. Parenting is kind of
the biggest these days. We're so excited to get into
your work with gender equality and ally ship, but since
(05:06):
Katie and I are college students, we love to start
with your journey there in college at the University of Florida,
you were doing a lot, to say the least. You
were the SEC Freshman of the Year and SEC Player
of the Year, among many other titles. What pressures did
you feel as a student athlete? Gosh, I mean, the
list is basically endless. When I chose to go to
(05:26):
college at the University of Florida. I went there because
I knew on some level that I was going there
to prepare myself for professional sport. And when you add
the stress and the time constraint of school, I can't
even sugarcoat it. Of like having to go to class
and having to do the work and having homework and
having to study and having to take tests, that adds
(05:48):
an element of For me, it was just time. Right.
So you know, when you go to college, you envision
one thing, but as a college athlete, it's totally different. Right.
You are basically busy from the time that you wake
up to the time that you go to sleep. So
much of my mindset happened to be around facilitating and
(06:09):
giving myself every opportunity to become this professional athlete. And
so if for all intensive purposes, I think I made
the right choice being that I was able to make
my way as a pro athlete. But I think that
that's a very rare story. So I believe that you
have to give yourself an expectation of work. You gotta work,
(06:30):
You gotta figure out what you want to do long term,
because everybody has to navigate right these new waters of college,
and it's not easy finding really good friends that are
also doing the similar things that you're invested in, whether
it's a teammate or a classmate, or a studymate or
a roommate, whoever you spend your time with. I mean
(06:50):
that that's one of the things that I've learned the
most in my post college career is you become your environment.
Right like the people you spend your time with is
going to change you in either good ways or bad ways.
So you have to choose your environment very wisely. And
I think if you can figure that out early days
in college, that will definitely help you achieve those goals
(07:11):
that you set for yourself a freshman year. And I'm
curious it was the pay gap among male and female
professional athletes ever discussed by your college teammates while you
were still in school. No, I mean interestingly enough, I
first started at the University of Florida, and so that
prolific women's World Cup championship team happened while I was
(07:33):
in college, right, So what that also means is that
there really wasn't professional women's soccer to be played other
than playing on the women's national team and for me
at eighteen, nineteen years old, twenty years old, that didn't
feel like even close to a possibility. I didn't even
have a place to play. There wasn't even the what
(07:55):
was called the wus A. There wasn't even the first
iteration of women's professional soccer. So for me, there was
definitely not even the pay gap talk because there was
nothing to talk about. We have come quite a far
away in a few years. Right, this is twenty years ago,
and I have to really talk mostly about Title nine.
(08:16):
And if you don't know what Title nine is, it
was a law that was enacted in nineteen two that
required publicly funded institutions to give both men and women,
both boys and girls, the same funding, the same opportunity.
The reason why this actually all started is because women
wanted to become doctors and lawyers, and back in the
(08:36):
seventies they weren't really allowed that opportunity. There were so
few women that were allowed into the programming of doctors
and becoming lawyers that they wanted something policy wise to
be able to shape our world so that women could
become doctors and lawyers. Well, because of this law, one
of the most beautiful side effects of it is that
(08:56):
college sports also had to become compliant in giving men
and women the same amount of scholarships. So I am
like literally a direct beneficiary of this beautiful law that
went into into effect in the seventies. And so I
think that it's really indicative of how far we've come
in a short period of time and also indicative of
(09:19):
how far we do need to continue to go. And
I think that we just have to remember and go
back to the beginning of how it started. That's really cool.
I had heard about Title nine, but not in the
sports context. I know also that today you are a
huge advocate for equality. How can we as women in
college start developing these habits to own our worth and,
(09:40):
like you once said, demand what we deserve? Yeah, okay.
So one of the things that I have learned so much,
not just in my retirement, but throughout my career and
now as a parent, we women have, I mean, quite frankly,
all human beings have been conditioned to this idea of
what it means to be a woman. And for me,
(10:03):
one of the most important things that I've done and
I have been able to do throughout my career it's
this idea that we are trying to as women, we
have to see what the world is telling us who
to be and try to break those social norms, so
social constructs that have been created to keep us in place.
(10:25):
And I'm so grateful because I have stood on the
shoulders of giants Mia Hamm, Julie Faudi, women who came
before me that gave me an opportunity and also gave
me a path. There are so many people that have
come before us that have laid path for us, whether
it's bricks or pebbles. And when you are a marginalized group, right,
(10:49):
we have to redefine for ourselves what it means to
be a woman, rather than letting the world tell us
who to be. For me, what really did settle in
early on as a nash an Old team player was
this unifying group of women, these unifying group of badass
women who weren't going to let the world tell us
(11:09):
who to be. Rather, we were going to flip that
script right, and we were going to show with the
way that we played, with the way that we talked,
with the way that we swaggered, we were going to
show that we weren't going to conform to what the
world was telling us and how the world tells us.
So for me, I just think that finding yourself in
a group or in an environment of people who are
(11:32):
like minded thinkers, who are futuristic and progressive thinkers about
where we are now as a society to where we
ought to be. Those are the kind of environments that
I want to find myself in. In your book, wolf Pack,
you discussed the importance of encouraging and empowering women and
calling out each other's winds. What does this look like
practically in our lives. Yeah, so championing each other is
(11:56):
so important and I firmly am a huge believer in
celebrating winds no matter how big or small. We women
are petted against each other and have been from the
beginning of time. And let's break this down into a corporation.
So let's just say Apple. Apples are massive corporation, and
(12:17):
the way that their corporation is run is they have
a board and then they have executives, and they have
probably many of those executives on their board. Now, this
board table is full of people that help Apple understand
their business and help Apple make decisions for future business
and where they want this company to go. But what
(12:39):
is always the case is that the maximum is basically
two women for every one of those tables. In my opinion,
I think that corporations in corporate culture really does dictate society.
Culture that we see, the products that we use, the
campaigns that we are brainwashed by, all of those things
(13:00):
play a role. And what we have to remember is
that those decisions are made by human beings. Right. What
these big corporations do is they have these tables, and
if those tables aren't diverse enough or inclusive enough, then
every single decision that they make at that table is
going to have bias. And for me, I believe that
(13:24):
we have two as women. Understand and remember that there
are let's say hypothetically ten seats at that table. We
need to require that we are at least at five
of them. We need to require it from our corporations,
We need to require it from our institutions, from our churches,
from our colleges. And I understand what it's like to
(13:46):
be a woman and to be let into that room
and be offered a seat at that table. It's happened
to me. I also understand the dynamic between women who
believe that there are only two seats at that table
because historically that's all that's been given. So this dynamic
between women that are pitted against each other and fighting
each other for that seat, that is the way that
(14:09):
power stays in power. It is the fearmongering that they
make us believe that we are only ever going to
get these two seats. And I am here to tell
you that I've been a part of really beautiful situations
where it's not just fully women lead, but it is diverse,
it is inclusive. The kind of broad thinking and the
(14:32):
products and the campaigns that can come out of those
rooms are what I believe our future will hold. But
we have to stop fighting each other, we women, or
we marginalize people. That is the way power stays in
power is to keep all those that they are in
power of afraid of each other. Right. I think the
(14:54):
image you just painted is beautiful, and I remember the
time I also swapped from the scarcity mindset to an
abundant and infinite mindset, and it was life changing. I
think one big fear a lot of us have, though,
is taking risks, perhaps because of failure, rejection, or disappointment.
What advice do you have for those of us who
may feel this way because it means fearing off from
(15:16):
a safer and more traditional path. Yeah, this is a
big one for women, the perfection phenomena that women feel
we have to embody right. And it's not just in
work right, it's in every element. The thing that really
did amplify my life is making mistakes and then turning
(15:38):
them on its head. As an athlete, I was able
to kind of massage the idea, the mindset of making
failure my fuel so early on in my life that
I never really looked at mistakes as the end. I mean,
everything good in my life has come from a specific
moment that I can point right back to and go, gosh,
(16:00):
remember how far I've come, Remember what I learned from that,
Remember what that felt like. That was horrible, That was
like the worst thing I've feel like I've ever done
or experienced. But look at what I was able to do.
Because success is not about how many mountaintops you climb.
It's about how far you come from the moments of
learning from the times where you feel like you are
(16:22):
a failure. I know some of the most successful people
that have ever lived, and one of the most common
denominators between all of these people is that they don't
think twice about making mistakes. They don't then worry or
not take that next risk. They learn from it, but
they're not going to not live or not act or
not participate in that next thing, because that's when you
(16:45):
miss it all. And I'm just telling every woman out
there that we don't have to be perfect, and when
we see another woman fall down, it is our job.
It is our responsibility to reach over and say, you
know what, don't worry about it, that's yourself often let's go.
As an entrepreneur, I love the quote make failure your
fuel because I see that in business because if something fails,
(17:08):
you know not to do that again, and you know
how to change it and listen to your customer and
fuel forward. So yeah, it's like it's evidence for me,
it's not. It's not something to shy away from. It's
something to turn towards and actually use as more information
to inform you about what to do next or your
next decision. Were there any specific lessons you learned about
(17:30):
failure from soccer that you've taken onto your new life
as an author, speaker and now mother. Yeah, you know,
I think that being an athlete, like I said, it
just gives you this constant stream of failures as an athlete.
It is never my job to be perfect the whole time.
In terms of minutes that I played versus goals that
(17:51):
I've scored, I would say it's like well below one person.
So when you look at it from like a statistical perspective,
and then do you think you're of, well, what the
heck was I doing? The other of the time. It
wasn't all failure, but a lot of it was. It
was trial, it was error. There are ways for you
to statistically figure out what is necessarily a failure to you,
(18:15):
what are those points where you did find success um
and then understand that there's going to be the whole
range of things that you're going to consider your failure.
And I'm telling every person right now that's listening to
this that the things that I look back on my
life and I am most proud of, they're not actually
(18:36):
the times when I was raising the flag or when
I was getting a gold medal wrapped around my neck.
There are actually the times when I realized that those
failures were worth it. I think sports is a really
great metaphor is like you are constantly given in yourself
this opportunity to develop the muscle of dealing with failure
(18:58):
and dealing with all of the emotions that are wrapped
up in it. And so I think that for women especially,
we have to to work on individually. And also one
of the things that our national team was so good
about is to talk about them. I was actually doing
this interview with me and Am a couple of years ago,
and I was I was telling the host. I said, well,
(19:20):
you know, I was never the fastest player, and she
just stopped me and she said listen. And by the way, Mia,
stop me, not not the host. She's like, Abby, Like,
I appreciate your honesty there. She's like, but here's the thing,
Like you saw your lack of speed as a weakness
or part of your game that was a failure, she said,
But if you didn't have that kind of trait, then
(19:44):
I wouldn't have been able to be successful in my speed.
So the way that that looks in opposition to each
other is that we made one really beautiful unit, a
forward unit that scored goals. But if you were also fast,
then you wouldn't probably have been strong. And I needed
to have a strong, tall player who could head be
(20:06):
the ball, who could hold off defenders and who could
put herself in the box to score goals when I
would send crosses in. And I think that that's really important, right,
like we all can't be good at everything, and honoring
our weaknesses just as we honor our strengths sometimes, and
I think every time in a team environment can be good.
Through all your success, how do you remain you? It's
(20:29):
so easy to say, don't attach yourself to the titles, awards, labels,
but in practice it's hard. So how do you, being
so accomplished, reconcile these with your identity. That's a really
good question. Midway through my professional career, one of my
favorite coaches of all time, Pia Sundaga. She was hired
as our national team coach. Now, up until this point,
(20:51):
I had only been coached by women who, for all
intensive purposes, did well. But we're trying to be the
male version I think of themselves. And so here walked
in Psudahaga from Sweden. She's a foreigner, a woman who
is herself and literally every environment you can imagine doesn't
matter how high class or professional she is. Who she
(21:16):
is and our first meeting, she pulled out her guitar
and started playing to us a Bob Dylan song. These
times are changing now. At first, all of US national
team players are like looking around and looking at each other, like,
what is wrong with this lady? She doesn't understand what
the US does, Like we're professional and we expect to
be put in these environments and and kick ass and
(21:39):
YadA YadA YadA. Well as the song kind of evolved,
all of us started to lean in because she knew right,
she knew that we were all looking at her with
crazy eyes, yet she still kept playing. The thing that
is so important to me is seeing another woman step
into her own self, into her own power was one
(22:01):
of the most powerful things and transformative things for me
to see. And I think until I accepted who I
was fully, I was never going to be the leader
that I knew that I could be. And that is
the thing I think that is missing so much right
now in our world is women stepping into their full
(22:21):
humanity as a woman, with all of their femininity and
their masculinity. We as women have to believe in ourselves
more than anybody else. I know some of the most
successful women in the world, and that for sure is
one of the most important elements to be able to
break through some of these male dominated spaces. But I
(22:44):
think that being an owning truly who you are no
matter what. Now, if somebody is saying something racist or
sexist or whatever in a meeting, how are you standing
up for the voiceless? What are you doing to diffuse
that situation. I think we've learned so much over the
(23:04):
last couple of months. I know I have in terms
of the race conversation, and I think that women especially
have a unique ability to be able to step into themselves.
Right now with the pandemic, we have to believe in ourselves. Truly.
I'm lucky because I was able to learn those lessons
(23:25):
many years ago, and it has taken me a long time,
because to know to be yourself is one thing, to
actually be yourself is another. Now for our final question.
When you retired from soccer, you had a really powerful
farewell message. You said, forget me. When I first heard this,
it caught me by surprise because most people want to
(23:45):
be remembered, but you wanted the opposite. I want our
listeners to hear this firsthand from you, So can you
please share with us what legacy you wish to leave behind. Yeah,
I mean it's interesting because when you think about it
from your ego, my goal was always about leaving the
game better than I found it. That was my dream,
(24:06):
and I knew that that was going to be a
tall order because as my career progressed. Mia was on
my team at the beginning of my career and we
had thousands and thousands of fans, and then when Mia left,
so did many of our fans. But we were able
to rebuild our women's national team in the popularity through
hard work and championships and YadA YadA. For me that campaign,
(24:31):
I had to break free from some of the ego
as a pro athlete, and by the way, I have
a healthy ego on my shoulders. I wanted to win
championships and I wanted to be the best player that
I possibly could be. But that's such an arbitrary you know,
awards and such like being Player of the Year, Like
who's choosing that? By what methods and by what standards?
(24:51):
Like there are so many people that could be deserving
a Player of the awards And for me, I felt like,
and I feel like, you know, when people stop talking
about me, then it feels like there is progress, and
there is movement right when people stopped and by the way,
nobody really stopped talking about mia Ham. But when the
flash the light starts to shine on somebody else, then
(25:15):
you know that that's progress because it's more fans, more
people getting invested in involved. It's not about how many
people were coming to the games when I was playing,
or how many championships we were able to win. It
was generationally how I was able to build upon a
culture that was there before I stepped foot into the
women's national team organization. As you get older in your career,
(25:39):
you will have to fight your ego a little bit
to want to stay a relevant or be on top.
And with that fight comes a truer, more beautiful version,
which is an openness. Okay, what are some of these
younger people wanting? What are they saying? And then helping
them take over in a way that will solidify your legacy,
(26:05):
solidify your role not just as a person going through
and checking the box, but like actually making the space
or the company or the environment that you help build.
How are are you helping that younger generation make it
even better? One of the things that I get so
frustrated about now is people saying, oh, you know, the
(26:26):
millennials or the gen zars like the next generation, they
want more, they expect more than we ever did. But
the reality is here, we are here. I am doing
everything that I possibly can to make the world, the job,
the space a little bit better for the person who
comes next. Right, So when Alex Morgan showed up on
(26:47):
the scene and she started expecting more than I did
when I was her age, it is the old person's
ego that's like jealous that she's got it so easy.
So for me, I look at Alex and I'm like, hell, yes,
you bet or expect more because I want that next
person who comes behind you to say I want more.
We deserve more, because that is how we leave the
(27:09):
game or the thing better than we found it. Amazing advice.
I'm fired up. Thank you so much, Abby for being
on the Secret Syllabus. We know your legacy will live
on with our listeners and it was of course such
an honor to interview you. Everyone can go be a
wolf pup and follow Abbey on Instagram at Abbey I'm back,
and of course go purchase wolf Pack to read it
(27:29):
for yourself. Thank you so much. Thanks you guys for
having me have a great one. Okay, Katie, I don't
know about you, but I feel like I got a
lot out of that interview. It's such an important reminder
that now more than ever, we need to be gentle
on ourselves because rejection is bound to happen, whether it's
from a partner, a friend, a job, or an internship.
And we can't change that. But as we learned from Abby,
(27:52):
we can change what we do with that rejection. We
can let it hold us back or we can use
it to propel us forward. And I think Abby is
such a great example bowl of the power that rejection
can hold and why it can be and should be
seen as an opportunity not a threat. And as a
woman especially, I think we need to be empowering and
reminding each other that we are more than capable of
(28:14):
getting through anything if we believe that we can all
succeed together, and we can absolutely I love it. Well,
Thanks guys for listening to our first episode, and a
huge thanks to Abby Wamback for taking the time to
come on the show and share her powerful insights. And
we are your host Katie here you can find me
at a Loha Katie x on Instagram and I'm Hannah.
(28:36):
You can find me at Miss Hannah Ashton on Instagram.
The Secret Syllabus is a production of The Female Quotient
and I Heart Radio and co produced by the Female
Quotient and Wonder Media Network. The f Q is committed
to advancing equality and elevating women from college campuses to
the corner office. You can find out more at www
(28:56):
dot the Female Quotient dot com. See after Class five
You become your environment, right, like the people you spend
your time with is going to change you in either
good ways or bad ways. So you have to choose
your environment very wisely. And I think if you can
figure that out early days in college, that will definitely
help you achieve those goals that you set for yourself
a freshman year. Hi everyone, Hey guys, Welcome to the
(00:24):
first episode of The Secret Syllabus. The Secret Syllabus is
a production of The Female Quotient and I Heart Radio
and co produced by The Female Quotient and Wonder Media Network.
Hey everyone, I'm Hannah Ashton and I'm Katie Tracy, and
we're both YouTubers and on our channels we talk a
lot about our experiences as college students. I go to
(00:44):
Belmont University where I'm majoring in entrepreneurship, and I go
to Cornell University where I'm majoring in information science. So
a lot of us listening right now are college students.
I'm sure in some way, COVID has derailed your plans,
has forced you to change your future, and it's probably
making you have an existential life crisis every single day.
(01:06):
We as college students feel that. So Hannah and I
decided to make a podcast so we could tackle everything
that our college curriculum did not cover for us, especially
during this time of uncertainty. There's so much to talk about,
from fostering ally ship, to cultivating a positive body image
to navigating the last semesters of COVID. Yes, and we
(01:27):
know many of you have had to rework your plans,
and Katie and I have also had to do that.
I know for me, I spent two of my college
years in Nashville, and I was planning on going on
this program this semester where I could study in New
York and have an internship, And three weeks before I
was supposed to move, I found out that whole program
got canceled. And so right after learning that my dream
(01:49):
of living in New York and walking the streets to
a super cool and trendy internship was canceled, I to
be honest, cried on FaceTime to my roommate, and I
also felt confused about what my whole semester now would
look like. I totally felt the same. Being an international
student from the Philippines, I really looked at these four
years as an escape away to grow and experience a
(02:10):
whole new, different culture in America and now I'm back
home in the Philippines. Had to evacuate when the whole
COVID situation struck. But I can only imagine what the
seniors are feeling. You know, Graduation is supposed to be
this exciting time to celebrate with all your friends, and
quite frankly, there are many people who are just stuck
in their rooms right now having a very lonely college experience.
(02:33):
And some people on campus I'm sure are just worried
and waiting for their school to evacuate them once again.
So there's just a lot of anxiety going on right now,
and we believe that we can get through this together exactly.
So that's where our first guest comes in. She is
a two time Olympic gold medalist, a FIFA Women's World
(02:55):
Cup champion, and a member of the National Soccer Hall
of Fame, and all while staying true to herself, she
has managed to successfully turn disappointment into fuel, owning the
power of resilience in the face of uncertainty and change.
She's amazing and we're talking about Abyan back. I am
so ready for this podcast episode. What about you, Hannah? Yes,
(03:16):
she is an amazing first guest, and we're so excited
for you guys to take a listen. Welcome, Abby. We
are thrilled to have you on our show. We have
lots to talk about today, but first we'd love for
you to start us off by introducing yourself and what
you've been up to. My name's Aby Wambach. I played
for many years on the US women's national team, and
(03:37):
I've been retired for about five years now, and basically
I am doing the parenting thing. The last five years,
I've had to transition from a playing career into a
totally different career off the field. Yes, I do want
to stay involved and am still involved in the game. However,
my career while I played didn't offer me the kind
(04:00):
of security that you would imagine a professional athlete earning.
In fact, I found myself in early days of my
retirement on an sp stage and I found myself next
to Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. All three of us
were getting this icon award, you know, and I felt
super grateful. I felt like, wow, here we are, we women,
We finally made it. And I was rudely awakened to
(04:22):
as we re walked off that stage. How different our
retirements in fact would be. Kobe and Peyton, their biggest
concerns were where they were going to invest their hundreds
of millions of dollars that they collectively earned, And my
concern was how I was going to be able to
pay my mortgage. That's a real life story, and that
isn't just my story. I realized that night that that's
the story of so many women. So I've been in
(04:44):
search of what I want to do next, and it's
been fun, it's been terrifying. So I'm an entrepreneur, I'm
an investor, I'm a professional sports team co owner, and
a speaker and author and parenting. Parenting is kind of
the biggest these days. We're so excited to get into
your work with gender equality and ally ship, but since
(05:06):
Katie and I are college students, we love to start
with your journey there in college at the University of Florida,
you were doing a lot, to say the least. You
were the SEC Freshman of the Year and SEC Player
of the Year, among many other titles. What pressures did
you feel as a student athlete? Gosh, I mean, the
list is basically endless. When I chose to go to
(05:26):
college at the University of Florida. I went there because
I knew on some level that I was going there
to prepare myself for professional sport. And when you add
the stress and the time constraint of school, I can't
even sugarcoat it. Of like having to go to class
and having to do the work and having homework and
having to study and having to take tests, that adds
(05:48):
an element of For me, it was just time. Right.
So you know, when you go to college, you envision
one thing, but as a college athlete, it's totally different. Right.
You are basically busy from the time that you wake
up to the time that you go to sleep. So
much of my mindset happened to be around facilitating and
(06:09):
giving myself every opportunity to become this professional athlete. And
so if for all intensive purposes, I think I made
the right choice being that I was able to make
my way as a pro athlete. But I think that
that's a very rare story. So I believe that you
have to give yourself an expectation of work. You gotta work,
(06:30):
You gotta figure out what you want to do long term,
because everybody has to navigate right these new waters of college,
and it's not easy finding really good friends that are
also doing the similar things that you're invested in, whether
it's a teammate or a classmate, or a studymate or
a roommate, whoever you spend your time with. I mean
(06:50):
that that's one of the things that I've learned the
most in my post college career is you become your environment.
Right like the people you spend your time with is
going to change you in either good ways or bad ways.
So you have to choose your environment very wisely. And
I think if you can figure that out early days
in college, that will definitely help you achieve those goals
(07:11):
that you set for yourself a freshman year. And I'm
curious it was the pay gap among male and female
professional athletes ever discussed by your college teammates while you
were still in school. No, I mean interestingly enough, I
first started at the University of Florida, and so that
prolific women's World Cup championship team happened while I was
(07:33):
in college, right, So what that also means is that
there really wasn't professional women's soccer to be played other
than playing on the women's national team and for me
at eighteen, nineteen years old, twenty years old, that didn't
feel like even close to a possibility. I didn't even
have a place to play. There wasn't even the what
(07:55):
was called the wus A. There wasn't even the first
iteration of women's professional soccer. So for me, there was
definitely not even the pay gap talk because there was
nothing to talk about. We have come quite a far
away in a few years. Right, this is twenty years ago,
and I have to really talk mostly about Title nine.
(08:16):
And if you don't know what Title nine is, it
was a law that was enacted in nineteen two that
required publicly funded institutions to give both men and women,
both boys and girls, the same funding, the same opportunity.
The reason why this actually all started is because women
wanted to become doctors and lawyers, and back in the
(08:36):
seventies they weren't really allowed that opportunity. There were so
few women that were allowed into the programming of doctors
and becoming lawyers that they wanted something policy wise to
be able to shape our world so that women could
become doctors and lawyers. Well, because of this law, one
of the most beautiful side effects of it is that
(08:56):
college sports also had to become compliant in giving men
and women the same amount of scholarships. So I am
like literally a direct beneficiary of this beautiful law that
went into into effect in the seventies. And so I
think that it's really indicative of how far we've come
in a short period of time and also indicative of
(09:19):
how far we do need to continue to go. And
I think that we just have to remember and go
back to the beginning of how it started. That's really cool.
I had heard about Title nine, but not in the
sports context. I know also that today you are a
huge advocate for equality. How can we as women in
college start developing these habits to own our worth and,
(09:40):
like you once said, demand what we deserve? Yeah, okay.
So one of the things that I have learned so much,
not just in my retirement, but throughout my career and
now as a parent, we women have, I mean, quite frankly,
all human beings have been conditioned to this idea of
what it means to be a woman. And for me,
(10:03):
one of the most important things that I've done and
I have been able to do throughout my career it's
this idea that we are trying to as women, we
have to see what the world is telling us who
to be and try to break those social norms, so
social constructs that have been created to keep us in place.
(10:25):
And I'm so grateful because I have stood on the
shoulders of giants Mia Hamm, Julie Faudi, women who came
before me that gave me an opportunity and also gave
me a path. There are so many people that have
come before us that have laid path for us, whether
it's bricks or pebbles. And when you are a marginalized group, right,
(10:49):
we have to redefine for ourselves what it means to
be a woman, rather than letting the world tell us
who to be. For me, what really did settle in
early on as a nash an Old team player was
this unifying group of women, these unifying group of badass
women who weren't going to let the world tell us
(11:09):
who to be. Rather, we were going to flip that
script right, and we were going to show with the
way that we played, with the way that we talked,
with the way that we swaggered, we were going to
show that we weren't going to conform to what the
world was telling us and how the world tells us.
So for me, I just think that finding yourself in
a group or in an environment of people who are
(11:32):
like minded thinkers, who are futuristic and progressive thinkers about
where we are now as a society to where we
ought to be. Those are the kind of environments that
I want to find myself in. In your book, wolf Pack,
you discussed the importance of encouraging and empowering women and
calling out each other's winds. What does this look like
practically in our lives. Yeah, so championing each other is
(11:56):
so important and I firmly am a huge believer in
celebrating winds no matter how big or small. We women
are petted against each other and have been from the
beginning of time. And let's break this down into a corporation.
So let's just say Apple. Apples are massive corporation, and
(12:17):
the way that their corporation is run is they have
a board and then they have executives, and they have
probably many of those executives on their board. Now, this
board table is full of people that help Apple understand
their business and help Apple make decisions for future business
and where they want this company to go. But what
(12:39):
is always the case is that the maximum is basically
two women for every one of those tables. In my opinion,
I think that corporations in corporate culture really does dictate society.
Culture that we see, the products that we use, the
campaigns that we are brainwashed by, all of those things
(13:00):
play a role. And what we have to remember is
that those decisions are made by human beings. Right. What
these big corporations do is they have these tables, and
if those tables aren't diverse enough or inclusive enough, then
every single decision that they make at that table is
going to have bias. And for me, I believe that
(13:24):
we have two as women. Understand and remember that there
are let's say hypothetically ten seats at that table. We
need to require that we are at least at five
of them. We need to require it from our corporations,
We need to require it from our institutions, from our churches,
from our colleges. And I understand what it's like to
(13:46):
be a woman and to be let into that room
and be offered a seat at that table. It's happened
to me. I also understand the dynamic between women who
believe that there are only two seats at that table
because historically that's all that's been given. So this dynamic
between women that are pitted against each other and fighting
each other for that seat, that is the way that
(14:09):
power stays in power. It is the fearmongering that they
make us believe that we are only ever going to
get these two seats. And I am here to tell
you that I've been a part of really beautiful situations
where it's not just fully women lead, but it is diverse,
it is inclusive. The kind of broad thinking and the
(14:32):
products and the campaigns that can come out of those
rooms are what I believe our future will hold. But
we have to stop fighting each other, we women, or
we marginalize people. That is the way power stays in
power is to keep all those that they are in
power of afraid of each other. Right. I think the
(14:54):
image you just painted is beautiful, and I remember the
time I also swapped from the scarcity mindset to an
abundant and infinite mindset, and it was life changing. I
think one big fear a lot of us have, though,
is taking risks, perhaps because of failure, rejection, or disappointment.
What advice do you have for those of us who
may feel this way because it means fearing off from
(15:16):
a safer and more traditional path. Yeah, this is a
big one for women, the perfection phenomena that women feel
we have to embody right. And it's not just in
work right, it's in every element. The thing that really
did amplify my life is making mistakes and then turning
(15:38):
them on its head. As an athlete, I was able
to kind of massage the idea, the mindset of making
failure my fuel so early on in my life that
I never really looked at mistakes as the end. I mean,
everything good in my life has come from a specific
moment that I can point right back to and go, gosh,
(16:00):
remember how far I've come, Remember what I learned from that,
Remember what that felt like. That was horrible, That was
like the worst thing I've feel like I've ever done
or experienced. But look at what I was able to do.
Because success is not about how many mountaintops you climb.
It's about how far you come from the moments of
learning from the times where you feel like you are
(16:22):
a failure. I know some of the most successful people
that have ever lived, and one of the most common
denominators between all of these people is that they don't
think twice about making mistakes. They don't then worry or
not take that next risk. They learn from it, but
they're not going to not live or not act or
not participate in that next thing, because that's when you
(16:45):
miss it all. And I'm just telling every woman out
there that we don't have to be perfect, and when
we see another woman fall down, it is our job.
It is our responsibility to reach over and say, you
know what, don't worry about it, that's yourself often let's go.
As an entrepreneur, I love the quote make failure your
fuel because I see that in business because if something fails,
(17:08):
you know not to do that again, and you know
how to change it and listen to your customer and
fuel forward. So yeah, it's like it's evidence for me,
it's not. It's not something to shy away from. It's
something to turn towards and actually use as more information
to inform you about what to do next or your
next decision. Were there any specific lessons you learned about
(17:30):
failure from soccer that you've taken onto your new life
as an author, speaker and now mother. Yeah, you know,
I think that being an athlete, like I said, it
just gives you this constant stream of failures as an athlete.
It is never my job to be perfect the whole time.
In terms of minutes that I played versus goals that
(17:51):
I've scored, I would say it's like well below one person.
So when you look at it from like a statistical perspective,
and then do you think you're of, well, what the
heck was I doing? The other of the time. It
wasn't all failure, but a lot of it was. It
was trial, it was error. There are ways for you
to statistically figure out what is necessarily a failure to you,
(18:15):
what are those points where you did find success um
and then understand that there's going to be the whole
range of things that you're going to consider your failure.
And I'm telling every person right now that's listening to
this that the things that I look back on my
life and I am most proud of, they're not actually
(18:36):
the times when I was raising the flag or when
I was getting a gold medal wrapped around my neck.
There are actually the times when I realized that those
failures were worth it. I think sports is a really
great metaphor is like you are constantly given in yourself
this opportunity to develop the muscle of dealing with failure
(18:58):
and dealing with all of the emotions that are wrapped
up in it. And so I think that for women especially,
we have to to work on individually. And also one
of the things that our national team was so good
about is to talk about them. I was actually doing
this interview with me and Am a couple of years ago,
and I was I was telling the host. I said, well,
(19:20):
you know, I was never the fastest player, and she
just stopped me and she said listen. And by the way, Mia,
stop me, not not the host. She's like, Abby, Like,
I appreciate your honesty there. She's like, but here's the thing,
Like you saw your lack of speed as a weakness
or part of your game that was a failure, she said,
But if you didn't have that kind of trait, then
(19:44):
I wouldn't have been able to be successful in my speed.
So the way that that looks in opposition to each
other is that we made one really beautiful unit, a
forward unit that scored goals. But if you were also fast,
then you wouldn't probably have been strong. And I needed
to have a strong, tall player who could head be
(20:06):
the ball, who could hold off defenders and who could
put herself in the box to score goals when I
would send crosses in. And I think that that's really important, right,
like we all can't be good at everything, and honoring
our weaknesses just as we honor our strengths sometimes, and
I think every time in a team environment can be good.
Through all your success, how do you remain you? It's
(20:29):
so easy to say, don't attach yourself to the titles, awards, labels,
but in practice it's hard. So how do you, being
so accomplished, reconcile these with your identity. That's a really
good question. Midway through my professional career, one of my
favorite coaches of all time, Pia Sundaga. She was hired
as our national team coach. Now, up until this point,
(20:51):
I had only been coached by women who, for all
intensive purposes, did well. But we're trying to be the
male version I think of themselves. And so here walked
in Psudahaga from Sweden. She's a foreigner, a woman who
is herself and literally every environment you can imagine doesn't
matter how high class or professional she is. Who she
(21:16):
is and our first meeting, she pulled out her guitar
and started playing to us a Bob Dylan song. These
times are changing now. At first, all of US national
team players are like looking around and looking at each other, like,
what is wrong with this lady? She doesn't understand what
the US does, Like we're professional and we expect to
be put in these environments and and kick ass and
(21:39):
YadA YadA YadA. Well as the song kind of evolved,
all of us started to lean in because she knew right,
she knew that we were all looking at her with
crazy eyes, yet she still kept playing. The thing that
is so important to me is seeing another woman step
into her own self, into her own power was one
(22:01):
of the most powerful things and transformative things for me
to see. And I think until I accepted who I
was fully, I was never going to be the leader
that I knew that I could be. And that is
the thing I think that is missing so much right
now in our world is women stepping into their full
(22:21):
humanity as a woman, with all of their femininity and
their masculinity. We as women have to believe in ourselves
more than anybody else. I know some of the most
successful women in the world, and that for sure is
one of the most important elements to be able to
break through some of these male dominated spaces. But I
(22:44):
think that being an owning truly who you are no
matter what. Now, if somebody is saying something racist or
sexist or whatever in a meeting, how are you standing
up for the voiceless? What are you doing to diffuse
that situation. I think we've learned so much over the
(23:04):
last couple of months. I know I have in terms
of the race conversation, and I think that women especially
have a unique ability to be able to step into themselves.
Right now with the pandemic, we have to believe in ourselves. Truly.
I'm lucky because I was able to learn those lessons
(23:25):
many years ago, and it has taken me a long time,
because to know to be yourself is one thing, to
actually be yourself is another. Now for our final question.
When you retired from soccer, you had a really powerful
farewell message. You said, forget me. When I first heard this,
it caught me by surprise because most people want to
(23:45):
be remembered, but you wanted the opposite. I want our
listeners to hear this firsthand from you, So can you
please share with us what legacy you wish to leave behind. Yeah,
I mean it's interesting because when you think about it
from your ego, my goal was always about leaving the
game better than I found it. That was my dream,
(24:06):
and I knew that that was going to be a
tall order because as my career progressed. Mia was on
my team at the beginning of my career and we
had thousands and thousands of fans, and then when Mia left,
so did many of our fans. But we were able
to rebuild our women's national team in the popularity through
hard work and championships and YadA YadA. For me that campaign,
(24:31):
I had to break free from some of the ego
as a pro athlete, and by the way, I have
a healthy ego on my shoulders. I wanted to win
championships and I wanted to be the best player that
I possibly could be. But that's such an arbitrary you know,
awards and such like being Player of the Year, Like
who's choosing that? By what methods and by what standards?
(24:51):
Like there are so many people that could be deserving
a Player of the awards And for me, I felt like,
and I feel like, you know, when people stop talking
about me, then it feels like there is progress, and
there is movement right when people stopped and by the way,
nobody really stopped talking about mia Ham. But when the
flash the light starts to shine on somebody else, then
(25:15):
you know that that's progress because it's more fans, more
people getting invested in involved. It's not about how many
people were coming to the games when I was playing,
or how many championships we were able to win. It
was generationally how I was able to build upon a
culture that was there before I stepped foot into the
women's national team organization. As you get older in your career,
(25:39):
you will have to fight your ego a little bit
to want to stay a relevant or be on top.
And with that fight comes a truer, more beautiful version,
which is an openness. Okay, what are some of these
younger people wanting? What are they saying? And then helping
them take over in a way that will solidify your legacy,
(26:05):
solidify your role not just as a person going through
and checking the box, but like actually making the space
or the company or the environment that you help build.
How are are you helping that younger generation make it
even better? One of the things that I get so
frustrated about now is people saying, oh, you know, the
(26:26):
millennials or the gen zars like the next generation, they
want more, they expect more than we ever did. But
the reality is here, we are here. I am doing
everything that I possibly can to make the world, the job,
the space a little bit better for the person who
comes next. Right, So when Alex Morgan showed up on
(26:47):
the scene and she started expecting more than I did
when I was her age, it is the old person's
ego that's like jealous that she's got it so easy.
So for me, I look at Alex and I'm like, hell, yes,
you bet or expect more because I want that next
person who comes behind you to say I want more.
We deserve more, because that is how we leave the
(27:09):
game or the thing better than we found it. Amazing advice.
I'm fired up. Thank you so much, Abby for being
on the Secret Syllabus. We know your legacy will live
on with our listeners and it was of course such
an honor to interview you. Everyone can go be a
wolf pup and follow Abbey on Instagram at Abbey I'm back,
and of course go purchase wolf Pack to read it
(27:29):
for yourself. Thank you so much. Thanks you guys for
having me have a great one. Okay, Katie, I don't
know about you, but I feel like I got a
lot out of that interview. It's such an important reminder
that now more than ever, we need to be gentle
on ourselves because rejection is bound to happen, whether it's
from a partner, a friend, a job, or an internship.
And we can't change that. But as we learned from Abby,
(27:52):
we can change what we do with that rejection. We
can let it hold us back or we can use
it to propel us forward. And I think Abby is
such a great example bowl of the power that rejection
can hold and why it can be and should be
seen as an opportunity not a threat. And as a
woman especially, I think we need to be empowering and
reminding each other that we are more than capable of
(28:14):
getting through anything if we believe that we can all
succeed together, and we can absolutely I love it. Well,
Thanks guys for listening to our first episode, and a
huge thanks to Abby Wamback for taking the time to
come on the show and share her powerful insights. And
we are your host Katie here you can find me
at a Loha Katie x on Instagram and I'm Hannah.
(28:36):
You can find me at Miss Hannah Ashton on Instagram.
The Secret Syllabus is a production of The Female Quotient
and I Heart Radio and co produced by the Female
Quotient and Wonder Media Network. The f Q is committed
to advancing equality and elevating women from college campuses to
the corner office. You can find out more at www
(28:56):
dot the Female Quotient dot com. See after Class five
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