The Science of Happiness · PRX and Greater Good Science Center

How To Do Hard Things

·19 min·1 clip

Abby Wambach shares how her DUI mugshot on ESPN led her to live out loud and embrace honesty.

Abby Wambach played for the US women's national soccer team for 15 years, winning two Olympic gold medals and the FIFA World Best Player of the Year award, the highest individual honor in the sport. Despite that extraordinary level of achievement, she describes returning to her hotel room after the FIFA award and looking in the mirror hoping to find something different, something worthy, something that would make her feel more lovable or beloved. Nothing had changed. That moment of recognition that external achievement would not deliver the inner peace she sought became a turning point. Wambach reveals that toward the end of her career she was using prescription pain medication to get on the field, and that she reached rock bottom with both alcohol and pills. She is nine years sober at the time of this recording and describes sobriety as the most life-altering and beautiful experience of her life. Her book We Can Do Hard Things, also the name of the podcast she co-hosts with her wife journalist Glennon Doyle and Doyle's sister Amanda Doyle, is centered on the argument that the hardest things people face, rather than the achievements they accumulate, are where genuine growth and meaning come from. Keltner and Wambach discuss the culture of athletics and how it conditions athletes to find identity in performance while suppressing the emotional honesty required to actually know themselves. Wambach talks about how winning the biggest award in the world and standing in front of a mirror afterward afraid that you still are not enough represents a structural problem with how achievement is framed, not a personal failure. The episode is framed as an exploration of how hard things, including addiction, recovery, and the confrontation with one's own limitations, become the foundation of a more authentic and happy life rather than obstacles to it.

As heard by us

A candid episode about achievement, shame, and learning to face hard things with other people.

How To Do Hard Things is strongest when Abby describes the gap between achievement and worth. She remembers chasing excellence, gold medals, championships, even the FIFA World's Best Player award, and then looking in the mirror afterward and feeling unchanged.

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Why you'd press play

If winning still leaves you wondering why you do not feel okay, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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