To have any doubt in your body is the biggest weakness an athlete can have. There are times when I physically can't get myself to go for a skill because I'm thinking, 'My knee hurts really bad.'
Shawn JohnsonRead
Gymnastics has made me strong. I feel like it broke me down to my lowest point, but at the same time, it has given me the greatest strength anyone could ask for.
Interpretation
Gymnastics taught me resilience through challenges, leading to personal strength.
In this quote, Shawn Johnson reflects on her journey through gymnastics, acknowledging the struggles and hardships she faced which brought her to a breaking point. Despite these challenges, she recognizes that they ultimately contributed to her strength and personal growth, highlighting the transformative power of perseverance and adversity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
To have any doubt in your body is the biggest weakness an athlete can have. There are times when I physically can't get myself to go for a skill because I'm thinking, 'My knee hurts really bad.'
Retiring was scary and it was tough to give up gymnastics, but so many great opportunities have come from it that I never expected.
There is only one 'retirement plan' for terrorists.
I have come up at the end of a dive, and the boat was not where I left it. I had to take care of a buddy who did panic. But I was confident the boat would come back.
I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.
I would say that I'm a nonviolent soldier. In place of weapons of violence, you have to use your mind, your heart, your sense of humor, every faculty available to you...because no one has the right to take the life of another human being.
...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.
I think it is selfish for me to try to frame Me Too as something that I own. It is bigger than me and bigger than Alyssa Milano. Neither one of us should be centered in this work. This is about survivors.
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