My childhood reads like a textbook case of early athletic specialisation.

Father: professional basketball coach and general manager.
Environment: front-row seats at professional games, discipline drilled in from a young age.

The pathway was clear, anticipated, inevitable.

"Everything around me was basketball. School didn't matter because I wasn't interested in it. I was going to be as good as Michael Jordan."

When you build your sense of self around one pursuit, psychologists call it "identity foreclosure", a premature commitment without exploring alternatives. For me, basketball was the pursuit. It wasn’t one that my parents pressured me to pursue; it’s the one I believed in.

Research shows that 20% of elite athletes experience clinically significant depression during career transitions.

The transition from sporting excellence to corporate life is rarely straightforward. When I made the move to Australia, there was pressure to think about the future, which eventually led me to the business world. But when I entered, I brought with me the mindset of an elite athlete: the drive, the hunger for achievement, the expectation of excellence.

I was still wired to be elite. Athletes are conditioned for immediate feedback, clear metrics, and physical expression. But corporate environments don't always reward the same intensity that creates champions on the court.

"The corporate world is about numbers and ticking boxes, and I don't work that logically."

As someone who is very emotionally driven and often told I’m “too deep”, communication has usually been a challenge. How can I convey my feelings to someone, rather than just what makes cognitive sense? Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman's research shows that social rejection activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

Basketball was my outlet because I just had to show up physically. I could use the anger and frustration from being misunderstood into shots on the court. But what happens when that disappears?

I believe this conversation touches on something many of us can relate to: feeling out of place in environments that don't align with how we naturally see and navigate the world.

But this episode isn't just about career transitions. It's about the deeper wounds we carry, like my core belief of feeling "misunderstood" and "unheard" throughout my life. It's about how trauma and challenging experiences can strip away the identities we've carefully constructed, leaving us questioning who we are when the thing that defined us is no longer the centre of our world.

This is part one of my story. The next episode will centre on a moment that shattered everything I knew.

Paul x

If you'd like to connect with me, you can find me on Instagram @paulelderkin_