Oct 4, 2021
Today’s guest is Victoria Garrick. Victoria is a former Division I volleyball player, TED Talk speaker, podcast host, and mental health advocate. She was a four-year starter at USC, where she won a PAC-12 Championship and finished her career with the top five most digs in program history.
Today she has well over a million followers on her social media platforms, hosts the “Real Pod” podcast, has a TED talk that has been viewed over 370,000 times, and founded a mental health nonprofit, “The Hidden Opponent.”
What is really inspiring about Victoria is that her entire platform has been built from sharing her story. You may think that her incredibly successful collegiate career would guarantee happiness for Victoria. But like so many, the external accolades didn’t quite fulfill her internally and the immense pressure started to impact her mental health. During her sophomore year, Victoria found herself heavily depressed, anxious, battling an eating disorder, and experiencing body dysmorphia. She finally reached a breaking point where she decided to go to therapy and unpack what was at the root of all of this. After this, Victoria bounced back and returned to finish her junior and senior seasons and the rest is history. She has been on an absolute tear ever since to share her journey to help those that are experiencing similar struggles.
Today our discussion on the pod encapsulates it all. Victoria will walk you through what rock bottom looked like for her, how she healed and got to where she is today. She shares what she felt were the contributing factors that caused her mental health demise and what helped her feel empowered again when she began her transformation. We chat about Victoria’s struggles with body image, why so many people face difficulties with this, and how to overcome it. Victoria talks about her relationship with food today and how she deals with competition in her current line of work. She talks about what inspired her to start sharing her story and what she would change if she was in charge of youth sports and more!
Connect with Victoria by clicking here
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