A Different Way Forward
I’m Deb Covey-Barnett. I grew up as the new kid in small towns across western Canada — ultra-competitive, sore loser, always the first one on the playground and last to leave. Sport was where I found my people. My Dad’s answer to every setback was the same: Go figure it out. That voice carried me a long way … all the way to Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium as a 2x Olympian in field hockey, with a Masters in Sport Psychology and 45+ years of coaching behind me.
But the season that shaped this work the most wasn’t the Olympics. It was everything that came after.
I’ve been married 30 years. Raised two kids across four countries and two hemispheres. I’ve sat at the kitchen table wondering why nothing I used to do was working anymore. I’ve navigated perimenopause without a roadmap, pushed through menopause the way I’d pushed through everything else — and learned the hard way that pushing wasn’t the answer this time. I’ve stood in an empty house after launching young adults into the world and felt that strange, hollow ache of now what?
There were seasons I lost my rhythm completely. Where my body felt foreign. Where the discipline and drive that had always been my superpower suddenly felt like it was working against me. I had to unlearn the athlete’s instinct to push harder … and learn something new. How to slow down. How to listen. How to rebuild trust with a body that was asking me to show up differently than I ever had before.
And you know where I got some of my best training for the work I do now? Not the stadium. Not the textbooks. It was raising my own sporty kids. Navigating the car rides to training when nobody wanted to talk. Sitting across from my husband at the dinner table figuring out what this next chapter was supposed to look like.
You see … the principles I used to train at the highest level of sport — they’re not just for athletes. They’re available to every woman.
Not in a way that pushes harder or demands more. But in a way that teaches you to listen, respond, and rebuild trust with your body, rediscover your voice, and move forward with clarity, confidence, and peace.