> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Too Small to Win: How Anna Hemmings Turned a Coach's Verdict Into Six World Titles - URL: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/blog/too-small-to-win-how-anna-hemmings-turned-a-coachs-verdict-into-six-world-titles/ - Published: 2026-09-12T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-12T15:59:59.000Z - Description: Told she was too small to be a great kayaker, Anna Hemmings won six world titles. On The BEYOND Podcast she explains what her mind did that her body couldn't. - Author: Elliott King - Tags: insight, Anna Hemmings ![Anna Hemmings smiling mid-answer on the yellow sofa of The BEYOND Podcast set, in a purple top and pink trousers](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/09/01-anna-hemmings-beyond-set-4.jpg) Anna Hemmings on The BEYOND Podcast. The most dangerous sentence in any career is delivered kindly, by someone you respect, and it sounds like advice. For Anna Hemmings it arrived when she was a teenager paddling every hour she could, from a coach who could see how badly she wanted it: you are not built right for this, and you might want to go and do something else. Most people would have taken it as information. She took it as a job description. On this episode of [The BEYOND Podcast](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/how-a-six-time-world-champion-performs-under-pressure-anna-hemmings/), Aleksandra King sits down with [Anna Hemmings MBE](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/anna-hemmings-mbe), Britain's most successful female marathon kayaker: six world titles, three European titles, two Olympic Games, and a two-year illness in the middle of it all that she says taught her the most useful lesson of her life. Her story matters because what separated her from equally talented rivals was never physical, and she can explain exactly what it was. ### A Leaflet, a River and a Nine-Year-Old Who Wanted to Race ![Wide shot of Anna Hemmings and Aleksandra King in conversation across the coffee table on The BEYOND Podcast set](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/09/02-two-shot-anna-hemmings-aleksandra-king-6.jpg) Anna Hemmings with host Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast. Nobody plans to become a marathon kayaker. Hemmings' mum picked up a "come and try kayaking" leaflet one summer holiday, mostly, her daughter suspects, to get the children out of the house. The club happened to be down the road on the River Thames, and it happened to be one of the best in the country: social, fiercely competitive, "about making these boats go faster". She was nine, her brother came too, and the first week was all sunshine and falling in. What the club revealed was a temperament. Plenty of children are frightened of competition, and Hemmings sees it in her own kids now: what if I come last, what will people say. She was the other kind. "I just want to get on the start line and race. I just want to show you how fast I can go. I wasn't afraid of losing." Aleksandra names the pattern on the spot: ultra-successful people look at the world through a lens that serves their craft. Hemmings agrees, with the caveat that becomes the theme of the conversation. The lens can be built. ### The Psychologist Her Mum Went Looking For At sixteen, in the mid-1990s, Hemmings started working with a sports psychologist. Aleksandra assumes it came with the territory of being a rising national athlete. It did not. "That was someone my mum went to seek," Hemmings says. Nothing was wrong; her mother simply asked what else they could do to reach the highest level, at a time when sport psychology "wasn't a thing". The lessons from those sessions are the ones she still teaches. Fear, she learned, comes from the outcome, which is out of your control, makes you anxious, and points your attention at the thing you do not want. So she trained herself to set the goal, then live in the process. "There's no point thinking about I want to win, I want to win. I can't control that. But what I can control is focusing on my race plan." Sit on the start line at a World Championships, she says, and everyone has trained hard and everyone has talent. "It's what happens up here on race day that makes a difference." ### Too Small, Not Strong Enough, Go and Do Something Else The Olympic discipline in kayaking is the 500-metre sprint, and sprinters are big. As a young paddler Hemmings was told, by coaches she looked up to, that she was too small and not strong enough, that endurance might suit her but she would never be strong on the sprint. "I was actually told maybe you might want to go do something else," she says. It was, as Aleksandra puts it, enough to crush a dream right there. It did not, and the reason is a single line from her mother. "Yeah, whatever. Just you go prove him wrong." Hemmings did something more precise than defiance: she separated what she could not change from what she could. "I can't change my height, but I can get stronger." She threw herself into weight training with one mission, and eventually she was, in her words, the strongest girl in the British team in the gym. ![Anna Hemmings gesturing as she makes a point on The BEYOND Podcast, microphone in front of her](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/09/03-anna-hemmings-making-a-point-10.jpg) Anna Hemmings on The BEYOND Podcast. The verdict left something behind, though. A belief took root that she was not good at the sprint finish, the moment in a two-and-a-half-hour marathon when a pack goes for the line together, like the end of a road cycling stage. She lost those finishes regularly early on, and then the evidence got serious: her first two World Championships ended in silver, both lost on a sprint finish. ### Not Good at Sprint Finishes, Yet What she did with that belief is the most useful part of the episode for anyone who has ever said *I'm not a natural leader* or *I'm not a salesperson*. She questioned it. "Is that true? And quite often it's not true," she says; and if it is true, is it helpful? So she rewrote it in an increment she could actually believe: not "I'm brilliant at sprint finishes", which the evidence would have laughed at, but "I'm not good at sprint finishes yet". Then she built the evidence. "I won three of my six world titles on a sprint finish," she tells Aleksandra. That habit was tested hardest by something no coach said. At the peak of her career, already a three-time world champion, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and told by a doctor she would never compete again. On the episode she mentions it only in passing, as "an illness that took me out of my sport for two years", but she credits it with the discovery that recovery is not the opposite of high performance but part of it. She came back in 2005 to regain her world and European titles, won two more world championships, and raced her second Olympics in Beijing. ### The Founder Who Forgot Her Own Lesson Retirement replayed the story. Building a business as a speaker and training consultant, Hemmings found herself doing the invoicing, the sales, the marketing and the delivery, the self-sufficiency she had unlearned as an athlete. "No one gets to the top on their own," she says; five of her six world titles came in a single kayak, but she never reached a start line without a team. It took her a while to hire a PA, and when she did her reaction was immediate: "Why have I taken so long to do this?" That is where she is now, fifteen years into a second career as a high performance and resilience specialist, keynote speaker and leadership coach, and someone who still catches herself listening to a podcast on the walk to the gym because she "never gave myself a chance to pause". The girl who was told she was not built for it turned out to be built for something better: the ability to change what she believed on purpose. ### Actionable Takeaways for Ambitious Professionals - **Split every verdict into fixed and buildable.** Hemmings could not change her height, so she changed her strength. When someone tells you what you lack, find the part of it that training can move and go there. - **Rewrite limiting beliefs in believable steps.** Jumping from "I can't" to "I'm brilliant" fails because you will not believe it. "Not yet" and "becoming better" are claims you can act on, and the evidence follows. - **Find your support before you need it.** Her mother sought out a sports psychologist when nothing was wrong. Build the team while things are working, not after they break. Listen to the full conversation on the [Aleksandra King YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp80BWA%5FyWQ), and browse more episodes of [The BEYOND Podcast](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/episodes/)– including Aleksandra's conversation with adventurer [Alex Staniforth](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/what-surviving-2-everest-disasters-reveals-about-mental-health-alex-staniforth/) on what surviving two Everest disasters reveals about mental health.