BURNERS STORY
Owning the Journey
Sara Barwick
Seeking guidance while taking ownership of her own journey.
Good support shouldn't tell you where your journey has to go. It should help you become increasingly confident in choosing for yourself.
Sara and I first met at Hurley in 2022.
She was struggling with her paddling at the time, but there was something noticeable about her.
She kept trying.
What started with some encouragement developed into regular coaching, conversations and eventually a relationship that became about much more than simply improving freestyle skills.
Sara wanted support.
But she didn't want somebody else's journey.
Finding her own direction
Over time our sessions changed.
Sara increasingly arrived with her own ideas, questions and things she wanted to explore. Coaching became somewhere to bounce those ideas around, challenge her thinking and help her decide what mattered to her.
Her confidence grew too.
Not just confidence to perform a move, but confidence to trust her instincts and make decisions about where she wanted paddling to take her. That's a distinction Sara herself makes when she talks about learning to believe in herself and trust those instincts.
And gradually, the journey became bigger.
Giving something back
Sara became involved with Essex Freestyle and then the Thames Valley Freestyle League.
She started shadowing coaching, supporting other paddlers and exploring a role she hadn't originally imagined for herself.
She was still developing as a paddler.
Now she was developing as a coach too.
None of that required a predetermined destination.
It came from being willing to explore opportunities, seek help when it was useful, and increasingly take responsibility for deciding what came next.
The journey belongs to Sara.