Bringing Your A Game with Emma Murray | #Perspectives with Sharon Pearson
I'm always open to meeting new people and I love hearing their stories, but it takes me a long time to trust. I don't just let anyone in. While I know thousands of people, there's a really small handful are in my inner circle and know all my stuff.
So it was unusual to click fast with the phenomenal Emma Murray, one of Australia’s leading mindfulness practitioners and high performance mind coaches. We met the way modern women have in the last couple of months—the ubiquitous Zoom meeting—and two hours later, I was in awe and craving more of her conversation and perspectives.
Put simply, Emma is a force of nature. There are not enough women in the world whose eyes twinkle when they talk about what they do. She is profoundly talented and skilled.
Some of you may have already heard of Emma. If you haven't, you're in for a ride. She's a mother of four with a long marriage forging a new world after moving to Queensland from Melbourne. That's a thumbnail of her personal life, and her professional one is just as rich.
She's built her formidable reputation in what has traditionally been a man's world, the inner sanctum of male dominated sports including AFL and motor racing. Her knowledge and insights were an integral part of the Richmond Football Club's premiership success in 2017 and 2019 (a job she'll go back to when the AFL 2020 season restarts). She works with drivers in a space where her words may help keep them alive in the metallic storm of car racing. And several Olympic athletes have her on speed dial.
She's also a sought-after keynote speaker and laughs recalling what was said to her after she spoke at a particularly testosterone-fuelled major sports club: "I was worried about you coming, we haven’t had a female in this space but you sort of present like a guy."
A former national level netballer, Emma knows how to survive when the going gets tough. But her knowledge and inner grit were put to the test in the toughest way in 2016 when her second child, son Will, dived into shallow water and sustained a spinal cord injury that left him with no feeling or movement from the chest and shoulders down.
"Life got turned upside down in that moment and not just Will's life but ours. It's like being thrown into a hurricane," Emma told me during our 'Bringing Your A Game with Emma Murray' Perspectives podcast, launched on May 6.