Aidan Walsh

See, to be quite honest, when I stepped away, I said to myself, I wasn't getting involved in sport at all.

I was doing my Masters in Sport and Exercise Psychology, but I said to myself, you know what, I'm done with sport.

I would love to sort of help within the mental health area, within the general population.

And even when I did step away at first, I actually started to do a bit of work in the gym, just a local gym, and I wasn't having sport related, it was more general health, because I really wanted to help.

I wanted to get away from elite sports and work with the general public, because...

there's a lot of people struggling out there, and there's a lot of people who are suffering, and you need to be able to help, and I think, and it would be wrong of me just to dedicate myself to elite sports, where it's like, how can you help people on a general basis, that aren't having those service providers, who don't get the opportunity to speak to people, how can you get into gyms and actually talk to people, whether it be young or old, sometimes older people in gyms, and I've noticed it's like,

their spouses died or you know and they're lonely and sometimes people just love someone to talk to and I think that's a powerful thing so I would love to do more of that and I'm a bit busy now but I would love to do more of that away from sport trying to help and trying to sort of trying to use the skills away from sport to help people within the general population because there's so many people struggling out there that's why you see so much drinking drugs and alcohol

Yeah, that's exactly, you're 100%.

No, do you know what?

I just think for, like, any young individual out there, I think it's so, so important to ask for help if you're struggling.

And I get it.

Like, we all come from different backgrounds.

A lot of people don't, like, may not need the help.

I wish, going back to that 12-year-old me, that I had the courage to speak out and ask for some type of help or someone hadn't noticed certain things back then.

So I think if you're a young person, to speak of strength, I always say that.

It's massive.

And going back to...

the strongest people that I know didn't look strong didn't come across strong and in fact they were actually soft compassionate and warm and those were the best people that I've met in life because I don't think we need to be bravado or we don't need to be out there you know I think kindness and compassion

I think that can be the way forward and you can do that in elite sports.

You don't need to be macho and you don't need to be bulked up.