Unilever executive Kristina Yallin, running on a trail near her home in Oakville, says playing sports while growing up helped her learn to push past adversity.Jessica Lee/The Globe and Mail
Kristina Yallin might not be playing as much basketball these days, but she still likes to get her blood pumping on the regular.
When the senior finance director at Unilever Canada in Toronto isn’t leading her team of 30 employees or running after her two young children, she’s lacing up and hitting the road.
Training for marathons and half-marathons is a way to keep active while still staying on top of a jam-packed schedule, says Ms. Yallin. It also fills the gap left open after nearly two decades playing team sports as a young girl and into her varsity years as a basketball team captain and all-star at the University of Guelph.
“It was a huge part of me for the first 20-something years of my life,” she says. “It was so ingrained and a constant.”
Ms. Yallin says sport taught her how to push past adversity, work hard and lean on team members, skills that have benefitted her in her career. A late bloomer in adolescence and usually the smallest and shortest member on her team, she still remembers how her coaches taught her to use her body’s size to her advantage. She also remembers her father’s advice – words that meant so much to her at the time and still resonate today in the workplace.
“My dad would say, ‘You’re not the fastest, the tallest and the most athletic, but what can you control? You can control how hard you work. You can control how smart you are and how good of a teammate you are,’” she says. “Those are the things that just continued to push me forward.”
More likely to drop out
Ms. Yallin says she feels fortunate to have had such support for her youthful athletic endeavours. But that’s not always the way when girls play sports.
According to data from non-profit organization Canadian Women & Sport, there is a dramatic drop in girls playing sports as their bodies change during puberty, with one in three girls leaving sport by their late teen years. By comparison, only one in 10 teenaged boys leave sports during that time. Girls may quit in response to social or cultural pressures, and they are more likely to experience low confidence, negative body image and feeling they aren’t good enough to play.
Dropping out can have far-reaching consequences. Numerous studies have shown that sport is correlated with higher self-esteem and other positive impacts long-term. This is an area of research that Nicole LaVoi, director of The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, has been exploring for years. She’s the lead consulting partner on a new online coaching tool called Body Confident Sport that aims to give coaches the tools to help athletes feel more confident in their bodies.
Dr. LaVoi says that sport can benefit women in a career context, especially when it comes to leadership and advancement.
“There’s a direct relationship between women playing sports and learning skills around confidence, leadership, communication, teamwork and all the things we know can help them succeed in male-dominated workplaces and industries,” she says. “So if we want women to be competitive in the most lucrative, visible, high profile jobs – which is also good for our society and economy – then sport is the way to do it.”
Renee McKenzie, executive vice-president and chief information officer at technology company OpenText in Waterloo, Ont., says sport made her the person she is today. A passionate and skilled basketball player in high school, at Dalhousie University and on Nova Scotia’s provincial team, Ms. McKenzie says she started out as a nine-year-old sitting timidly at the end of the bench. With the support of her parents and coaches, she soon grew to love how sports made her feel, and says sports helped her develop attributes like tenacity, teamwork and discipline.
“I didn’t want to be on the bench watching. I wanted to score the basket, set the team up for success and call the last-minute play. I wanted to be that person,” Ms. McKenzie says. “By the time I reached high school and into university, I was. Would I have gotten there anyway? I don’t know. But I can tell you sport certainly helped chisel those competencies over the years.”
Building body confidence
Other women in leadership have had similar experiences. Ernst & Young research shows the important role sport plays at every stage of professional women’s lives, right up to entering C-suite leadership positions. Researchers found that 94 per cent of women in top executive roles have played sports, gaining confidence, determination and the ability to thrive on competition along the way.
Whether this result is causation or correlation is less clear. Other research seems to indicate there’s a circular aspect to sport and confidence. Girls who are more confident in their bodies are more likely to play sports, which then leads to more confidence.
Conversely, poor body image can have a detrimental impact on women’s self-esteem and careers. While working on Body Confident Sport, Dr. LaVoi and her team spoke to women and girls around the world about how they felt about their bodies, and she says that a lack of body confidence was practically universal.
That seemed to be the case back in early October when the website launched. As a room full of female journalists and social media influencers from around the world took their seats at Nike headquarters in New York for the official launch, tennis pro Venus Williams took the stage as Dr. LaVoi looked on. Ms. Williams admitted to having experienced body shaming from coaches in the past, something that had an impact on her for years.
Over a hundred heads nodded; then everyone in the room was given an opportunity to talk about sport and feeling comfortable in their own bodies, and how to have more body positive conversations today. (Dr. LaVoi notes one great tip that came out of the conversation: Never say, “Hey, you look great! Have you lost weight?” In fact, keep body comments out of the office entirely.)
For Ms. Yallin, years of good coaching that focused more on what her body could do rather than how it looked have paid off. She says it not only boosted her confidence level at work, but affected how she manages her staff. Just like on her basketball teams, she leans on the strengths of each employee, whether they are better at technical tasks or excel at keeping morale up.
“Just [figuring] out other people’s strengths in that team environment is something I definitely use in my day-to-day,” she says. “And I know that if I’m willing to put in the work, practice and lean on others, we can accomplish some really great things.”
The Globe and Mail
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