
Johanna Griggs is an accomplished former athlete, media personality and mother. When she’s not juggling different hats, she’s also making time for passion projects and the people that she loves. We want to know all the secrets to her success and how someone so busy and accomplished makes the most out of every minute.
You’ve had a very successful career, both in swimming and media – what do you think drove you to achieve such high levels of success?
In the pool – and even in my life afterwards – I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by great teams. You’d think that swimming is a solo sport, but the reality is that there are so many people supporting you and giving you feedback and advice about how to make yourself better, so it’s quite a social activity. In that way, I think I was driven by the desire to do well, but also by the competition. This meant I had to be quite disciplined and reactive to feedback I was getting, and that is still relevant in all other aspects of everyday life.
I think that being an athlete prepares you to know how to get the most out of yourself, the most out of whatever project you’re doing, and the most out of your time.
Once you’d finished with swimming, what inspired you to get into media? It was quite a natural progression for me because I was offered a number of media opportunities on the back of my swimming career, and because I’m someone who doesn’t like doing anything by halves, I really wanted to learn from the ground up. [Channel] Seven promised to train and invest in me, so that’s who I went with. [When it came to learning about the industry,] I was prepared to put the hours in, be disciplined and manage my time to learn. I was able to follow directions and take feedback. These were important lessons I learnt from swimming; that you take what works, leave behind what doesn’t, and keep going and building from there. In sport, you have good days and bad days; days where you put in every iota of effort and energy and things don’t work out, and it’s the same in media. The ability to let go of the bad days but use the learnings to ask yourself “how I can improve?” and ask the people around you to show you a better way to do something, is very important. It’s something that I’ve taken from swimming and applied to my life in media.