By Devanshi Rathi
“If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough” is a quote that Sara Isakovic lives by. The 2013 psychology graduate from UC Berkeley started her swimming career even before she was born. One might wonder - how is that even possible? Well, she had it in her genes as her mother was a swimmer, and she gave Sara and her twin brother their first swim lessons.
Isakovic talks about her early days in the sport. She traveled all around the world - Malaysia, Indonesia, etc., so she had the privilege to swim all the time in hotel pools. Some of her earliest memories were of her swimming as a little girl in Indonesia, pretending she was like a mermaid. When Isakovic was around 6-7 years of age, she recalled that she went to the pool around 3-4 times a week just to learn the basic techniques involved in swimming. It wasn’t until she was around 10-12 years old when she started dreaming about being a champion athlete in her sport one day. This was also a time when she decided that she wanted to go to the Olympics.
Isakovic’s father was a pilot so her family traveled quite a bit and she changed a number of schools. The Slovenian shifted to the Middle East in Dubai. She stayed here for five years before returning to Slovenia in 2002. During this time period, Isakovic’s mother took over her training, and she mentions that her swimming continued no matter where she might have been in the world.
Sara’s drive as an athlete came from her desire to win and visualizing that victory. She says that she understood the importance of psychology at a very early age. Her mother had told her when she was young to visualize before races, an advice that she took seriously and developed a great interest towards. She believes that champions aren’t born, and it is all about how the mind can affect her body function to reach the best levels possible. She practices meditation and observes all her thoughts and how they affect her body. Moreover, she visualized at least 300 times before her silver medal and record-breaking race at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. She proclaims that this was the decisive factor of why she won the medal. In fact, she was so intense in her mental training that she imagined her victory in Beijing two years before it happened for real!
Going back in time, Sara decided to come to the United States to study because it was the leading place to balance top-notch athletics with the highest quality of academics. Her so-called “recruitment” process to Cal was established due to her two National teammates, who were also on the Cal Men’s swim team at that time. During the 2007 Melbourne World Championships, she was introduced to the Women’s Swim Team Coach at Berkeley, Teri McKeever, who was also there "down under" as a coach. After the two of them met, coach Teri followed Isakovic’s career from 2007-08. Sara didn’t really look for any other schools. So in 2008, just 3 days after her brilliant silver medal finish at Beijing, Sara was off westward and into Golden Bear territory.
Sara says that her time at Cal gave her the chance to explore a broad and well-rounded educational and swimming experience. Despite her best swimming results coming before she came to Berkeley, she loved the moments of being on a big team and feeling like she belonged to the school. Moreover, she says of coach Teri that her leadership was extraordinary and made it possible for the girls to develop into “lovely humans ready for life.”
As with other student-athletes, Sara found herself having to manage her hectic routine. However, when asked how she did it, Sara exclaimed that she found a love for her major in the classroom and continued her passion in the pool. Psychology classes were extremely interesting for her and she never found it difficult because she just enjoyed her dual roles so much. Besides, coach Teri’s grinding both in and out of the pool, demanding excellence in each of the two parts of her life at Cal, made it easier for Sara to take on the challenge of being a swimming athlete and student at UC Berkeley.
When talking about finding a passion outside of swimming, Sara says that this was important since she knew that swimming careers don’t last long, and she couldn’t just live based on that. Since she enjoyed her neuropsychology class the most, Sara went to San Diego and worked as a research intern at UC San Diego upon graduating from Cal to study brain mechanisms of resilience in 2013. Her subjects were US Navy Seals and Olympic athletes. She was trying to find out what made these people resilient and spent a year and a few months doing research. This was followed by her moving to Dubai and undertaking a master’s degree in performance psychology, which is the psychology of optimal performance. She pursued an online program from the National University and said that it was useful for her to build a career in psychology after she retired from competitive swimming around that time.
Sara lived in Dubai for three years and worked as an intern in the psychology department at Emirates airlines. She wrote her master’s thesis on aviation psychology - mindfulness training for pilots and how to enhance their performance in stressful times. This led her to prepare a whole program for pilots. Her stint at Dubai was followed by a move to Norway, where she trained Norwegian girls who were rowing over the Atlantic. She also worked with a startup, which, unfortunately, didn’t turn out to be the best bet. Thereafter, she shifted back to her home country, Slovenia. Here, she thought about combining all her work into a book on mindfulness, which is a five-week training plan for young swimmers to make their lives easier and free of anxiety but full of motivation and confidence.
Sara says that the most important lessons that she has learned from her job as a mindfulness trainer is that her best method is application, and she can’t learn as much from books as what she can from live demos with her clients. She talks about her own positive and kind nature coming from her parents’ teachings and her own respect for what everyone does. She doesn’t believe that she has achieved more than anyone in the world and feels that staying herself keeps her the happiest. She has empathy for others and loves helping people through her actions. Achievement is all about learning more for her. Life gives her an opportunity to explore and just go for it.
Coming back to her greatest moments at Cal, the three-time Olympian says that these were mostly spending time with the team. Well, besides those breathtaking moments on top of the Campanile, which led her to see the Golden Gate Bridge! She also jokes by saying that her time at the NCAA’s were even more exciting than those at the Olympics! She talks about how her journey in the US allowed her to continue her studies along with experiencing swimming as a team sport that wasn’t available in Slovenia. She also couldn’t forget winning three National titles for the Cal team in four years, which made her happier than ever. Moreover, she can’t thank coach Teri enough for her leadership.
Now, as she moves along through her career in the field of performance psychology, she advises people to be more daring. She says that people should give opportunities to themselves to go and try. Fear is the one little enemy that is in the way and makes people scared. She encourages one to try and let that fear go away and see what’s possible. Even if things don’t work out, one can still learn a lot. She herself faced challenges in 2007 just months before her Olympic race of her career, where every single day she battled her mind to stay positive. Ultimately, she was able to accomplish her dreams of winning the Olympic medal.
Inspired by the book Ultimate Confidence by Marisa Peer, Sara Isakovic says that if given a chance to go back in time and change anything in her life, she wouldn’t alter anything. She believes that everything happens to make you grow and guide you to a new direction if you’re going in the wrong one. She is the master of her life, but still can’t control everything, so she has to be patient. Now, the one thing that can only be left to be truly said is that Sara Isakovic is a Golden Bear for life!
