Angela Ruggiero

When business entrepreneur Angela Ruggiero was nine years old, she was cut from a boy’s hockey team, despite believing she was as good as the rest of the squad. Years later, the four-time Olympic medalist became the first female to play a non-goalie position on a men’s professional hockey team. Angela played fearlessly on the ice, but she was anything but fearless, as she said in our conversation.

“Everyone’s terrified underneath everything, even when you think somebody has thick skin, everyone’s terrified they’re going to fail,” she shared. “That’s just a human emotion. But if you are confident in your preparation, confident in following what you’ve always done in life to be ready, you will overcome your fear and succeed.”

Angela overcame the fears and disappointment she felt and turned her joy in playing hockey into the longest career of any man or woman in a USA Hockey jersey and, when she finally hung up her skates to attend Harvard Business School, laid claim to being only the fourth woman inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Angela studied the business of sports and became fascinated by the application of data analytics to business problems—and especially to the shifting demographics of sports entertainment in the digital age. This led her to co-found the Sports Innovation Lab, a data-driven market research firm that allowed the industry to unlock insights on their fans and how technology was changing fan behavior.

In this episode, she offers several experience-tested ways for “controlling the controllables” to ensure you and your team never leave the “field of play” without having given 100 percent.

•  5:00   How to treat your business like an athlete treats their body.

• 13:00  How to turn discomfort into growth.

• 22:00  Angela’s leadership ingredients.

• 24:00  How to be vulnerable in a corporate environment.

• 30:00  The key to confidence in the workplace.

Resources:

• Learn more about Sports Innovation Lab.

• Angela’s podcast: The Fluid Fan