From Olympic Hopeful to CEO: Rebecca Ajulu-Bushell's Journey of Breaking Barriers

Speaker A: When I first walked away from the sport for many different reasons, some about my education, the Olympics fell over my, ah, a level year. And I come from a family of academics. And the idea that I could sacrifice my education for this thing, that felt very hard to do. It felt like this was taking so much from me and my love and joy that I found in the sport and in the water was kind of slipping away. And I thought if I put myself through this and if I get on that podium, I don't think it will be worth the price that I will pay. I don't think it will be worth. I knew that there was a big life out there for me beyond the pool, and I wanted to live it.

Speaker B: On today's episode of Careers Unwrapped, I'm really excited to introduce Rebecca Ajula Bushel. Now, Rebecca is a trailblazer in many fields. Not only was she the first black woman to swim for Great Britain, but she's also made significant strides in the nonprofit sector. Now, as the CEO of 10th Thousand Interns Foundation, I'm sure we'll get on to that. But her work in fostering inclusion has been recognized globally. She's earned spots on Forbes 30 under 30, the Times list of influential leaders. And beyond her impactful work in nonprofits, I know she's also deeply involved in the arts as a trustee of Modern Oxford. So I don't know how we're going to squeeze this all into about half an hour. But hopefully today Rebecca will share some of her unique journey from the swimming pools of international championships to leading transformative initiatives in the workplace and beyond, providing, hopefully, some insights and some advice for the next generation. And welcome, Rebecca.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Yeah, hopefully some insights.

Speaker B: Now, I'm often asked actually what a CEO, uh, or chief executive actually does day to day. So perhaps to help illustrate your role. Now, what's on your to do list at the moment? What tasks or challenges have you got ahead this week, big or small?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good question. Most of the time I say that CEOs just send emails. That's a, uh, core tenant of my job. But I think I was speaking to one of my team about this yesterday and I was saying when you get to senior management in organizations, your job is to decide how everything gets done. And I think as you go down an organization, those who are more junior, your work gets chopped up. It's not your job to decide how all of these mad, concurrent things are going to happen, how risks are monitored, et cetera. But it's My job to exist in chaos and try to mediate that day to day. So this week I'm dealing with the fallout of the US elections and the new administration, single handedly, I might add. Uh, no, I'm kidding. But I am trying to kind of develop comms and change our internal and external language for stakeholders quite quickly as the situation erupts. So that involves meeting with my C suite and thrashing out lines to take, updating decks, making sure that everything has appropriate approvals, checking in with our lawyers. And there are some things that you just have to own as a senior leader because they're too important, they're too high risk, you've got to do it. And then I spent a lot of time dealing with external stakeholders. Had a meeting with the cabinet office this morning speaking to some of our senior stakeholders at Bloomberg, for example, LinkedIn. They're another huge partner of ours. So that is my job. I now have built a team. That means I get to have fun and interesting conversations a lot more of the time. And it's great.

Speaker B: That's a whole mixture of pieces in there. There's being the face of the organization, there's actually making decisions that are both going to affect it in the immediate short term, language being used tomorrow. But also what does this do about strategy going forward? And I think that does start to sum up a bit of the variety of a chief executive role. My kids used to say that they thought that what I did was spin on my chair and do pie charts, which was about the summary of it, if only. Now that's the today. And so I'm going to just take us back to the early days now. Your book, these Heavy Backbones, by the way, for people listening, it is brilliant. Please do get hold of a copy and read it. But it delves into your journey as an elite athlete and it explores themes of race, of identity, of intense pressure, of competitive swimming. But where did that first passion for competitive swimming come from?

Speaker A: I think competitive is probably the operative word there. Uh, which I was from a very, very young age about everything. The first couple of years of my life. I was raised by a single mother and she, I think laid down that kind of fierceness in my bones. Everything was kind of a game to be won. It's definitely my personality. I'd make a competition out of loading the dishwasher. So doing competitive sport felt like a no brainer. I just had so much energy, it had to go somewhere. But I learned to swim in the the Indian Ocean off the coast of Kenya when I was about three or four years old and it felt easier than walking. And it still does. And so I think there's never really, I mean, you'll speak to all elite athletes, or ex elite athletes in my case. And there's never a moment where you decide to opt in to that level of training, to the commitment, to the dedication to what it does to your body. It just happens slowly, slowly and then all at once. And I think it's what it takes to make champions out of children. You can't really give consent when you're 10 years old, but somehow you find yourself in a whole new world, which I did.

Speaker B: And so a lot of the ones who don't make it in elite sport, are they the ones who, rather than you say they're just the ones who opt out as opposed to just keep going?

Speaker A: I think sport is such a complex arena and there are loads of reasons why people don't make it to the top. I think that it's interesting when you look at athletes and you think about what they're doing, especially when you're performing at an international, you've got media, press, you've got pressure from parents, people who've sacrificed everything for you to be on that podium or behind those starting blocks. And so it's not just talent and hard work. There's another secret ingredient, which is number one, I guess, how much can you withstand the pressure? Can you win the psychological game as well as the physical one, but also how much advantage have you had? Where do you come from? Are, ah, there enough resources in your country to kind of get you to the point that you need to be at? And so absolutely, some people say, no, I'm not getting up at 4 in the morning. Which I don't know why I didn't say that. But for whatever reason, I decided that getting up at 4 in the morning for 10 years was a good idea. But a lot of people, you know, it is a dream that cannot become a reality because of the inequalities that exist in every space and every institution in the world.

Speaker B: And what do you think, therefore, were the defining moments in your early career that meant that you did make it to elite competition, you did make it to, to the podium?

Speaker A: That's such a good question. I grew up in Kenya and then in South Africa for a couple of years after that. And I think being a young black kid in a predominantly white sport, it helped. Growing up in Africa and swimming, surrounded by people who looked like me, who also swam, who didn't allow that myth to take hold of my psyche that black people can't swim because our bones are heavier. That's why my book is called these Heavy Black Bones. And so I grew up with the idea that someone who looked like me swimming was completely normal. And it wasn't until I got to the UK at the age of 13 that I realized that for the rest of my career I would be one of the only people on Paul's side who looked like I did. So I think that was a really positive platform and starting point to my career. I think that built confidence in a way that probably nothing else could have done. And I became world number one when I was 15 and I think that changed everything almost overnight. And suddenly I was, you know, Olympic hopeful and I started swimming for Great Britain. And so the number of eyes on me, the number of stakeholders involved in my success, the number of people who wanted to use my body to achieve their own goals and ambitions, it just kind of multiplied. And that was probably the other most defining point of my career at this moment. Where I became. It wasn't just about how fast I could swim. It was about proving people wrong and swimming against history and also being the first, which is a hard and complex thing to do.

Speaker B: And you've written very powerfully about the pressures of representation and on a sort of day to day basis, how did they actually manifest and how did you face those pressures?

Speaker A: I think it's a sliding scale. Right. Like I am, um, a light skinned black woman. I've been fortunate enough to have an amazing education and I'm definitely separated from where my mum came from and um, my dad came from by that education. And it meant that navigating the world, it wasn't always overt racism, it wasn't always kind of aggressive language that happened. Sure. I mean I was at school in 2007, we didn't have the lexicon we do now to talk about race. It was a lot more parochial. Some of the things that were said to me and about me, they're completely unacceptable and wouldn't be said now by kids of any age. But also it was the press and the media that kind of perpetrated those narratives. I remember reading this one article and it said she speaks with a cut glass British accent. And I thought have a British passport. You know, I was born here, like how else do you think I'm gonna speak? And you don't realize the kind of undertone of racism that that stuff has, that others people that says, you're not like us, you look different, you're not from here. And so I think on the day to day it was just always feeling like it didn't fit in. Which when you were 15, 16 year old, and also when you're a 15, 16 year old girl, it's like the worst thing in the world, right? And so it kind of existed on many different levels. It was with my classmates and wanting to have straight hair, which mine wasn't. When I got out of the pool, it was like up, uh, here. But it was also on the front page of major newspapers. And so it was like a very strange kind of situation to be in, especially as a 15 year old.

Speaker B: Um, and it sounds like you therefore exist in this sort of intersection between your sporting identity and yourself. And how much did you feel that you were able to just be yourself versus the athlete representing a country or team, almost the product that people wanted to be. How did you keep a balance between who you were and who others wanted you to be?

Speaker A: Oh, I don't think you do. I think that I had to go on a really long, I mean, I hate using the term, um, but journey after I quit swimming to kind of really like reconcile with myself. Who am I beyond being the swimmer? When I quit swimming, I lost my identity and my first big identity. Uh, that was my first job, that was my first career. And I think you're always an athlete first at that level. Even if you're a child, you are treated like an adult because you are an athlete and you have a job to do and what your body can do, that is the most important thing. And everything else comes second. And I know that some of that narrative is changing now. We're seeing elite athletes talk about mental health, about the pressures of stardom plus physical performance way more. But 10, 12 years ago, when I was competing at that level, you were an athlete first and then everything else. And so beyond being a world class swimmer, I was also the first black woman to swim for Great Britain. And so I was kind of forced to confront my racial identity at a point in time when I didn't really have that much understanding of what that meant and what that would mean for me, especially being mixed race. And I'd grown up in a pretty white world, despite having been raised in Africa. So it was hugely confusing and complex. And I don't think anyone knows who they are when they're that age anyway. And I think you're not doing kids stuff, right? Like it is work. We train 40 hours a week on top of doing our GCSEs. I mean, I'm Barely post maths. I was just swimming all the time. And so it was a job after that. It was a job to kind of put myself back together.

Speaker B: And, um, you then retired before London 2012, when there would have been a reasonably strong expectation from those around you that you'd have been competing and competing strongly at the London Olympics. And the book shows, I think, what a personal, deeply personal decision that was shaped by multiple factors. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, with time having passed, how do you reflect on that decision now?

Speaker A: I'd be lying if I said that, you know, of course you always think about the gold medal, right? Like the gold medal at the Olympics. That's the thing. And when I first walked away from the sport for many different reasons, some about my education, the Olympics fell over my A level year. And I come from a family of academics and the idea that I could sacrifice my education for this thing, that felt very hard to do, but also because it felt like this was taking so much from me and my love and joy that I found in the sport and in the water was kind of slipping away. And I thought, if I put myself through this and if I get on that podium, I don't think it will be worth the price that I will pay. I don't think it will be worth. I knew that there was a big life out there for me beyond the pool and I wanted to live it. And so I quit. And I quit before 2012 and I walked away from it. And it was so hard because I was terrified for so long after that that the best thing I was ever going to do and the best thing I was ever going to feel in my life had already happened to me. And I was 17 years old. So I don't have any regrets about it. Of course I think about the Olympic gold medal from time to time.

Speaker B: Every four years or so.

Speaker A: Every four years, when actually, funnily enough, they are considering bringing the 50 meters of all disciplines. So I was a 50 as breaststroke sprinter to the LA Olympics. And it's complicated because for each Olympics you've got like a specific amount of time. So if you bring in new events, you have to drop events, et cetera. But they changed the schedule from time to time, hence the break dancing the last Olympics. And don't think they'll be having that at la. But I thought my mom said, she's like, yeah, they're going to do the 50 breaststroke at the LA Olympics. And I was like, come back.

Speaker B: So when you walked away from that with everything that it had meant to you up to that point in time. And with probably so many thoughts still going around your head, when you made that decision, you soon then after went in a very different direction and you went to university, to Oxford, to study fine art. I mean, how different was your life in the first year of university from your last year of swimming?

Speaker A: It was really, really hard to explain. My relationship with time was completely kind of. It was just a complete mess. I stopped swimming. And you don't really think about the practicalities of stopping sport at that level. One day you're going to the pool and you're training for about six to eight hours. That's two and a half hours in the morning, it's an hour of weight training and then it's two hours in the even. And then the next day you're just not anymore. And so your day like doubles in length, which is completely insane. You know, I'd get home from M school and I'd be like, what do people do with all this time? How could you ever not do your homework? I don't understand that. You just get bored enough to do it. You know, it's just the days went on forever and ever. And then I went to university and I think it felt a little bit like this shot at redemption. I wanted to feel successful in another arena, hence Oxford. And I worked really bloody hard my last year of school to do that, especially because swimming had taken away quite a lot of time from my education over the years. But it was again, it was a whole new world.

Speaker B: And the particular subject you chose to study there, fine art, where had the motivation or the foundations? What were the sources for that? From the swimming pool to the easel?

Speaker A: You know, I was always creative and I was like a very strange child. And I would kind of sit and make and play and paint. And, you know, I was very. I had a little art room, I think, when I was younger, and I'd always be in there kind of painting. And I studied art all the way through school and I loved it. And it was such an escape from the kind of clinical, methodical, you know, very length after length feel of swimming. This was this place where I could be completely free and time didn't have the same meaning. And so actually it was one of my big rebellions. I was going to study politics and economics and the very, very last minute I turned around and I said to my parents, you know what? I'm going to study art. And to their credit, they said, okay, good luck. And, um, it has served me not at all As a degree. No, I'm kidding. It was such a great thing to do for myself I think after being so regimented for so long. And the art course at Oxford is very mixed. So there's theory, there's a lot of philosophy, studied medical anatomy in your first year to kind of learn how to draw, you know, original principles. Leonardo da Vinci and. And then you also get time in the studio and so I started as a painter and I moved into photography and then eventually made films.

Speaker B: And I've got to ask, actually the degree you didn't do, politics, economics is often from Oxford. A, uh, springboard into politics. Is that on your radar in the future?

Speaker A: I think that was my sliding doors moment. I get asked this a lot in private conversations and I can't say that I haven't thought about it. And the answer, true and honest answer is I don't know. But I am glad mad that I didn't study PPA University.

Speaker B: I'll just say that there's plenty of time and looking around at the moment, some people might say a real need in the future for uh, some fresh thought in that area. So you had this elite athletics career, then you went through the mental process of retiring and most people don't actually go through that process, they do it once in their life, maybe in their 50s or 60s or something like that. And you went through your first retirement as a teenager, then you went uh, off to the spires of Oxford and now you're CEO, uh, at the 10,000 Interns Foundation. I think just give us a brief summary of what that foundation is and its heritage.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So the 10,000 Interns foundation is a registered charity in the UK and we've been around since 2020, since the re eruption of the BLM movement after the death of George Floyd. And our mission is, or it was founded on a very simple yet incredibly ambitious mission which was to challenge the underrepresentation of black talent in the workplace. Because we are not there, we do not have a seat at the table and we know that talent is everywhere and opportunity is the thing that's missing from the equation. So the co founders of this organization, who are all a little bit mad, they won't mind me saying that they said we're going to create 10,000 paid internship opportunities in the next five years and this is year number five and we are going to do just that. So we've created 10,000 paid internship opportunities with over a thousand organizations and we are now working with our unique data set, supporting our alumni through to leadership. But Also influencing and educating UK industry on how we can kind of more meaningfully widen the funnel and widen the kind of open the door basically. We know that diversity is not just about race and no one experiences minoritized status in isolation. Like I'm black woman, young person in leadership. I'm also, my mum's from Broncorn, I was born in Warrington. Like I'm not from London. And so we all have this mosaic of experience and heritage and I think what we believe is that opportunity should be distributed as equally as talent is

Speaker B: and paint a picture perhaps of some of the range of internships, the range of sectors of length or period of internship, what's going on out there on the ground?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we create very simply, we say a minimum of six weeks and a minimum of a local living wage. Ah, they have to be paid, they have to be meaningful internships. No one is getting coffee. We started in the city, so working with investment management and financial services firms and we are now over, I think 35 plus sectors all over the UK. Everyone from the NHS, Goldman Sachs, BBC, Nike, Lululemon is on our program. We also have recently started to create internships in the art space. It's very close to my heart. We started with the Royal Academy, the Science museum back in 2022 and we now have interns at um, arts institutions all over the country, not just London. So we have incredible insight to the ways that industries are engaging with issues of diversity, of social justice. But it's not just about diversity, it's about inclusion and culture. How much difference can your business tolerate is going to have a direct impact on your productivity, your competitiveness and also how you manage risk. If you have enough people with different perspectives in a room, you're going to ask all the right questions to ensure that you avoid things that are going to provide hurdles to futurity, profit, et cetera, et cetera. So it is not just the right thing to do from a moral perspective, it's the right thing to do from a kind of business imperative.

Speaker B: And what sort of proportion of the internships moving into employed roles, long term employment from that start point?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. So 70% of our interns convert to full time employment, which is incredible. And 30% of them are retained by their host organization, which isn't part of the promise at all. I will say that the equalities act of 2010 delineates these protected characteristics, Blackness and black heritage being one of them. But our program isn't about ring fencing or about contracting organizations or Fulfilling a quota. It's about saying, why don't you let this pipeline into your process? These people that might be invisible to you or you're finding them hard to reach, consider them in the same way that you would consider your quote unquote, traditional talent. And, and I mean I shouldn't say that people are surprised because it shouldn't come as any surprise, but our interns are considered as good, if not better than the traditional talent in their organizations. Once they get in and do the job, they just need the door to be opened wide enough for them to access the same opportunities.

Speaker B: So if a young person, a, uh, career starter, uh, is listening to this and they're interested, I think actually this could really suit me. And also I've got the drive, I want to achieve something. What, what process are they going to go through with the foundation and what support are they going to get along the way?

Speaker A: Yeah, really important that everyone knows how to actually get involved. So if you are 18 plus and you go to a UK university or you have a confirmed place at a UK university or you have graduated from a UK university in the last three years, you are eligible for the 10,000 Black Interns program provided you identify as Black or black heritage and you don't have to be a UK national because we do have partnerships with various visa support institutions and a, ah, lot of our organisations offer visas. So you are able to work in the UK as well. You apply to our program and you pick three different work streams or industry sectors. So you could say I'm interested in media, communications and hr and you write a short covering letter for each one of those, about 200 words and you send us one CV and then we match you with various organizations and you go through the interview process and the foundation supports you all the way. So we have pre application training, we have pre interview training and we also have pre internship training. And then you become part of our alumni, which is a network of almost 10,000 people who support each other, are supported by organizations and have an annual calendar of events that will help you advance in your career and whatever direction you want to go in and also overcome that imposter syndrome. And that sense of feeling like despite entering this place, it's still not quite made for me. And how you navigate that I think is as important as getting through the door in the first place.

Speaker B: So your role in leading this program, now how would your team describe you as a leader? If I escorted you from the room and asked them for their honest viewpoint, how do they see you as Leader, do you believe?

Speaker A: They see me as exacting and they see me as compassionate but not cuddly. And I think that my team would tell you that I would do anything that they will do and I will run at the brick wall, I will scrub the toilet with a toothbrush and I will protect them from the fact that we are a frontline organization, from the decisions that our board make that they might not understand. But also, I think my style of leadership is not, I think it's not traditional charity leadership. I definitely bring with me the kind of resilience of being an elite athlete. I definitely bring with me a level of work ethic that is a little bit nuts, probably. And I don't necessarily ask people to meet me at that level. But as a leader, whatever you demonstrate trickles down to your organization. So we are fast paced and that is probably my fault. But it is also one of the reasons that we have been as successful as we have. We've built the fastest growing pipeline of black talent in the UK in just five years. So I'm now defending my team, saying that I'm a maniac. No, I'm not. My team are unbelievable. And the best thing about building a team and being in post since almost the beginning of this organization is that all of these people, I've been involved in their hiring processes and their development and so better say nice things about me.

Speaker B: I was going to then, ah, ask you what your swimming experience, your athletic experience had brought to the role, but I think you've painted a picture of that already. I get a comment sometimes from some of my closer team. I'll do something or say something. I go, oh yeah, you could tell you used to be in the army. And I go, really? Because I don't think you're saying that in a positive way. And also that was so long ago. But intense experiences form part of your character for life, I think. So the strength that you brought to your swimming and the strength that was required and the focus and the attitude and the pace to rise to the level you did, that's never gonna leave you. It's a question of how you use it in different contexts and different roles in your future.

Speaker A: I think, yes. How do you civilianify yourself again after the great institutions that shaped us? I know my team, actually, they're always like, can you stop using war metaphors? And I'm like, right, guys, it's the board meeting, we're going once more under the breach. They're like, we're not going to war. And I'm like, well, you know, just be ready. Who knows what could happen?

Speaker B: What inspires you now? What are the sort of. The people or the things or the ambitions that give you the inspiration to keep having the sort of drive or to set your own ambitions for the future?

Speaker A: It's something I've been reflecting on a lot over the last year. I turned 30 last year and. And I have done so much in those three decades of my life and I've done so much in so many different spaces. And I remember making the Times list last year, and then my book came out and got shortlisted for Sports Book of the Year. And I got to the end of 2024 and I was knackered and really had to ask that question, like, what? You know, now that you've got all the lists and the awards and the honors and the whatever. And that's not why I do it either. It was really about, I guess my social impact compass comes from my parents. My mom' humanitarian aid worker. You know, she spent her whole life fighting to ensure a more just allocation of resources. My father was a freedom fighter who was in prison when I was born during the apartheid. And so that feels like it's part of my DNA. And yet you do get to a certain point where you've given so much and you've done all the things, and then you think, am I just gonna carry on doing the things? So, uh, I'm asking that question of myself a lot. I think people and the team that I work with and their willingness and desire to follow me into especially this current political climate is a huge demotivating factor. I bumped into two interns a couple of months ago. It was a Sunday, and I was walking home, I'd just taken myself for dinner, and they were like, excuse me, excuse me. And I was like, okay, okay. These two young black guys came over. We're in Hackney. And they said, I grew up there and pointed to the council estate, the tower block next to us. And now I work at Golman. And you changed my life and my family's life. And it's a complicated thing. You know, we're putting people into institutions that maybe aren't ready to include them. How do I feel about that? I have to reconcile that every single day. And yet we are directly impacting and changing the trajectory of people's lives. And I think the function of freedom is to free others. And so I guess the desire to keep doing what I can and to recognize that every conversation, interaction, action is inherently political. This is my fight right now. We're not changing the whole world. We're unkinking a very small part of the hose pipe. And once I've done what I can here, I'll hopefully go on and do it somewhere else, or maybe I'll sleep. I don't know.

Speaker B: I think. And, um, obviously through both my work as well as through these conversations, I'm lucky enough to meet a lot of people from a huge variety of different careers and directions and stages in their life and. And what you've achieved by the time you're 30 is unusual. It's very unusual because most people are sort of. They've got their motor going in their mid-20s, the late 20s, they're sort of heading in a direction. And I think that it's been fascinating for somebody who hasn't experienced the world of elite sport as you have to get a better understanding, I think, of how that gives you a platform for what you're going to do in the future, but also becomes part of your DNA of who you are as well. And I think a lot of the retired sports people I've spoken to, it's been the end of their main part of their life because they've retired, you know, in their late 30s or something like that. And that has been the core of it. And so, if anything, the, the timing of which you got out has given so much to where you're going to go now and who you are now and the work that you do now. And I feel a lot of empathy with your senior team colleagues in terms of. Or at least I think sometimes my team would say the same thing as well in that particular area. And I certainly didn't have the background that you did. But, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really interesting to get a little bit inside the psyche of starting professional sports, so. So very young elite swimming at that age. To understand more about the decision about stepping away, about the need for you to not just concentrate on yourself, but also think about your role in terms of representation when you're at such a young age. And the final thing I would say is that anybody who's listened to this, the 10,000 Interns foundation and the program is fantastic. So if you know somebody who you think should approach them, then just do so. Very easy to find them. Get in touch, speak to the people there. Rebecca, thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy having you on. Um, Chris Umbrella, such a pleasure.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Mark.

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