Meet Jeremy Golden

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeremy Golden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeremy, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I never knew I was resilient until I had a friend tell me how resilient I was. Up until that point, I just looked at challenges as things that were there and just something else to overcome. It wasn’t until depression hit me square in the face and I was faced with multiple challenges that I realized how resilient I was.

My lowest point came in 2021 when my mental and physical health both began failing at the same time. Due to a debilitating hip injury, I lost the ability to not only coach, but to live life the way I wanted to live. That, along with other factors in my life, put me in a deep depression that I thought was going to break me. With a lot of help, and what I realized after hip surgery was a newfound belief in myself and my ability to bounce back from adversity, I was able to overcome one of the hardest moments in my life. So I believe my resilience has come from years of overcoming adversity and challenges and realizing that I’m strong enough to battle back from things.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I walked on to my college football team at The University of Tulsa without any prior playing experience. I was undersized and lacked the necessary athleticism to compete at the Division I level, so strength and conditioning was the only way I was able to close the gap and give myself any competitive advantage. It was during that time that I saw how important a great Strength and Conditioning Coach could be to not only a team, but an individual and that is when my interest in the profession began to pique.

I worked as a collegiate and professional Strength and Conditioning Coach until 2023. Some of my stops included the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA, Cornell University, Santa Clara University where I was the Director of Sports Performance, the University of Virginia where I was the Director of Women’s Basketball Performance and the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where I was the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Men’s and Women’s Ice Hockey. In the summer of 2023, I shifted out of the collegiate sector and took a position as the Director of Fitness at Tehama Golf Club in Carmel, CA. I oversee the day-to-day operations of the Fitness Center and train the membership, with a focus on improving performance in golf as well as overall athletic performance. This is a job where no day is the same. The challenges of training individual clients provides you with unique challenges every single day. However, the goal always remains to give them the best possible experience and make sure they are seeing improvement and taking steps to reach their personal goals.

Currently, my focus is working with the individual athlete, with an emphasis on golfers. However, after working with so many sports during my career such as soccer, tennis, rowing, hockey, football and basketball, my skill set is dynamic and well-rounded. My website, golden-performance.com is a starting point for a business that will cater to the needs of the elite athlete.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Three qualities that I have been developed that have been the most impactful in my journey have been the ability to communicate effectively, adaptability and grit. No one quality stands out as more important than the other. But they all have had a place in my journey.

Having worked with such a diverse group of people, being able to communicate and adapt my communication to the people I’m working with have become an important skill set for me.

Adaptability is something everyone needs to develop. The world we live in is non-linear and we need to be able to pivot and adjust our course at any point in times. The ones who are the most adaptable, especially in these ever-changing times are the ones who I believe stand the test of time.

Grit is something we all have to have. It’s the ability to fight through adversity and any negativity that will ultimately come your way. Grit is a never give up attitude that comes with a constant belief in yourself.

My best advice to anyone early in their journey is to know what you want and go after it with everything. To put yourself out there, be willing to learn and understand that there will be peaks and valleys. An old saying in football was that if you weren’t getting your a** kicked, you weren’t playing the game right. You’re going to get beat up and knocked around. But keep coming back and believing in yourself and the path you’re on. But be ready to negotiate a lot of twists and turns and understand that there will always be pivot points and you’ll need to be ready to adjust and adapt at any time. Staying open to new ideas and new things will be very important.

What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?

My biggest grown in the last year has been finding a new level of belief in myself. When I left the collegiate setting, I took a chance on myself and on a vision I had for the next phase of my career. I took a risk and, initially felt very alone and uncomfortable in what my new role would be and how it would look. It was new and scary. Part of me had felt like I had abandoned who I was and what I had worked so hard for. It wasn’t until I was visiting one of my best friends, who also happens to be my trainer and is someone who has pushed me to a level I never thought I would get physically as well as professionally, reminded me that leaving my current life to go after what has always been my passion wasn’t giving up. It was the exact opposite. She reminded me that I was about to take things to a completely different level. When things get hard, I always look back on that conversation as a hinge moment for me, as a moment that I knew I was doing the right thing by betting on myself.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

N/A

Suggest a Story: BoldJourney is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems,
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
Resilience
Where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is often the x-factor that differentiates between mild and wild success. The stories of

Productivity
Beating Burnout

Often the key to having massive impact is the ability to keep going when others

Leadership Development
Finding Your Why

Not knowing why you are going wherever it is that you are going sounds silly,