Elizabeth Lindsay grew up playing soccer, but when her family moved to a new city, there was no girls’ soccer team. Lindsay said the boys were “terrible to her” and refused to let her play on their team. So, at the age of nine, Lindsay made a presentation to the City Council explaining why she should be allowed to play on the boys’ team.
“And I won,” Lindsay said. “They let me play.”
The following year, Lindsey recruited three more girls to play soccer with her on the boys’ team, and eventually, they split and the girls got their own team. Because she dealt with those boys and grew up never being told more than she was told yes, Lindsey developed a thick skin that came in handy as head of brand and real estate at Wasserman, a global sports marketing and talent management agency. Lindsay recalled one former CEO getting so angry at her that he threw a book at her head, but she’d dealt with worse—a group of nine-year-old boys who spent the entire summer trying to make her life miserable.
“I’m 54 years old and I still think about those boys,” Lindsay said Monday. I spoke in luckPowerful Women Summit 2024 in Laguna Niguel, California, during a panel sponsored by Deloitte, “How Investing in Women’s Sports Enhances Women’s Leadership.”
All four panelists said their experiences playing youth sports during childhood were key characteristics that gave them an advantage at work. Deloitte 2023 reconnaissance of Women and Executive Leaders found that 85% of 1,100 women surveyed said that the skills they developed in athletics were key to their professional success. The percentage among women in leadership roles rose to 91%, and 93% among women earning more than $100,000.
Lindsay was joined by Deloitte President Lara Abrash, Ilona Amann, CMO at Athleta, and Sarah Robb O’Hagan, CEO of health and fitness company Exos.
According to Abrash, sports is about learning failure and coming back from it. Abrash pointed out that many children today receive a prize, but when you fail, you want a bigger and better prize. “You want to learn from him.”
Likewise, Aman said sports taught her what it felt like to lose.
“I hated the feeling of losing more than I loved the feeling of winning,” Iona Amann said. “I always wanted to find a solution to something, because the sting of losing was so terrible, it stuck with me for so long, versus the endorphins of winning in the moment that went away so quickly.”
Rob O’Hagan said she was forced to play sports as a child in New Zealand and it was pretty terrible.
“We were really bad,” she said. “But we had a great team experience.”
In fact, learning how to play on a team, execute a strategy, lift each other up, and come back from inexplicable failure all emerge after years of sports. Lindsay said she learned the resilience, perseverance, self-reliance and self-confidence that she relies on today. She can tell when those around her at work have grown up exercising.
“They are team players. They are coachable; they take direction. They follow the rules,” she said.
It boils down to grit, Abrash said, which she defined as that hard part of your elbow that builds up. “You can’t teach someone grit. They’re not born with grit,” she said. “So these experiences, especially for women who are often told they can’t do something, actually teach them that they can do something.” what.”
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