Olympic champion rower Grace Prendergast is ready for a new chapter, having put down her oars for the last time in her professional sporting career to pursue a life outside of sport.

Speaking from her home in south-west London, where she moved late last year, Grace says launching herself into this new phase of her life is both “exciting” and “terrifying”. 

Grace, 30, won gold in the coxless pair alongside Kerri Gowler at the Tokyo Games in 2021  - her second Olympics - as well as claiming silver in the eights. She won her first of 15 national titles in 2011 and finished her career at the top of her game, coming first in the Women’s Pair in the 2022 World Rowing Championships.

As we’re halfway through January already, how are your 2023 resolutions progressing?

I read on Forbes that instead of putting pressure on ourselves to achieve various resolutions, it’s far better to review the year just past, and decide on what good habits we’ve developed that we would like to keep.

I’m by no means an expert in this area, but here are some of the habits I developed last year which I hope you find useful or inspiring.

1. Learning a new skill. I started volunteering with NZBWN last year without any prior experience in social media. Writing social media posts for an organisation is very different to when it is your own personal feed. It was scary and tricky at the start, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I plan on taking pottery classes this year.

The Power of Regret - How Looking Backwards Moves us Forward, by Daniel H. Pink

It was lovely to meet up once more in Ozone with proper coffee and Eggs Benedict and chat with like-minded kiwi women about Regret.

Daniel Pink’s new book written during lockdown and published in 2022 was a slow burn but once ignited, burned brightly. 

The book is divided neatly into 3 parts, and the findings are based mostly on the results of the World Regret Survey and the American Regret Project.   

The first part of the book unpicks what regret is and we get a sense of some common themes the world over feels regret about.