A Reflection by Afreina Noor

The evening was made possible through a wonderful three-way partnership between Unsinkable, BDC, and GoodLife Fitness, with us working diligently behind the scenes for almost a year to bring it together.

I won't go into the details of the event itself. I think the title says enough.

What I do want to talk about is what these four incredible humans — an athlete, a basketball player turned comedian, entrepreneurs, all leaders in their respective fields — shared about the very human experience of trying, failing, succeeding, doubting, believing, and doing it all over again.

Here's something I've been thinking about since that evening: Sometimes the advice we hear sounds trite precisely because we've heard it a thousand times before. But if people from completely different walks of life keep arriving at the same conclusions, through their own experiences, failures, and hard-earned lessons, maybe there's a reason we keep hearing it.

Keesa Koomalsingh addressed fear head-on: "Take risks. Be afraid. Do it anyway".

Hassan Phills, who brought his comedic edge to an otherwise deeply vulnerable conversation, offered: "Be delusional".

And I loved that.

Because what is ambition, really, if not a little delusion? The audacity to dream something that doesn't exist yet. To believe in yourself when the odds of failure are considerably higher than the odds of success. To be so ridiculously, goofily in love with what you believe in that you pursue it anyway.

Hassan later described success as "The ability to dream".

There is something incredibly freeing about that definition. Success isn't necessarily the destination. Sometimes it's retaining the capacity to imagine a different future, even after life has given you plenty of reasons to stop imagining.

But ambition and self-belief are only part of the story. What happens when the pressure gets too much?

Thomas Cumberbatch said something that stopped me in my tracks: "I'm a soul before I'm a body".

Both Thomas and Keesa spoke about how deeply their spirituality and faith ground them.

It was a reminder that high performance doesn't have to mean making our achievements the centre of our identity. There has to be something underneath it all. Something that remains when the titles, accomplishments, applause, and external validation are stripped away.

And somewhere in that conversation, Hassan dropped another one-line banger: "authenticity is my -tism".

Amen to that.

Megan Rafuse brought another perspective to what success costs us, and what it's actually worth. She shared a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that she carried in her pocket for years and now keeps on her office wall. "To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”

I keep coming back to that idea. We spend so much of our lives measuring success through what we accumulate, accomplish, build, or become. But what about what we leave behind in other people? The lives we've made a little easier? The people who felt seen, supported, or believed in because we happened to cross their path?

Thomas captured something similar when he spoke about "Living in the avenue of my purpUS".

Not purpose as a solitary pursuit, but purpUS. Because none of this is really just about us. What is the point of moving forward if we aren't creating room for others to move forward with us?

And then came the advice I wish I could bottle up and hand to everyone.

From Keesa: "Give yourself grace. It is everyone's first time living!"

From Megan: "Ask for help, people want to champion you, and just do it anyway"

From Hassan: "Curiosity, and pretending not knowing what you're talking about, embracing that kind of weaponized incompetence, but for yourself"

I thought Hassan's was a fascinating twist on a concept we usually understand negatively.

What if we allowed ourselves the freedom of not knowing? Of asking the supposedly obvious questions, being beginners, experimenting, and not having to demonstrate competence every second of our lives? How much more could we learn if we weren't so preoccupied with looking like we already knew?

And finally, the one that has stayed with me this whole month, from Thomas:

"Love thyself before knowing thyself"

This one was my biggest takeaway of the evening.

We're so often told that we need to know ourselves before we can love ourselves. That self-love comes after self-awareness, after we've identified our strengths, confronted our flaws, done the work, and figured out who we are.

Thomas turned that idea around.

What if loving yourself is what gives you the courage to know yourself in the first place?

What if self-love isn't the reward for becoming someone you're proud of, but the fuel that allows you to explore who you are — including the parts you're still figuring out?

I've been sitting with that thought ever since.

I went into the evening as a moderator, there to ask questions, hold space, and help four people tell their stories. I left with a few more questions about my own.

And perhaps that's what I love most about storytelling. You never quite know which part of someone else's story is going to find its way into yours.

Thank you to Keesa Koomalsingh, Hassan Phills, Megan Rafuse, and Thomas Cumberbatch for your generosity, vulnerability, humour, and wisdom. And to the teams at Unsinkable, BDC, and GoodLife Fitness for making space for a conversation that went well beyond the usual definitions of high performance.

Here's to being afraid, being delusional, asking for help, dreaming bigger, and loving ourselves enough to keep discovering who we are.