Motivational speaker Iona Holloway may have brought the grey skies and rain from her home town of Glasgow to Bermuda this week, but the warmth of her message to the island’s young sportswomen more than compensated for the weather on Thursday.

Holloway, 36, and a former Syracuse University field hockey player, was invited by WeSpeak, a non-profit organisation dedicated to empowering women and girls to communicate with confidence, authenticity and impact, to speak to the next generation of Bermuda sportswomen about the muscle she believes athletes neglect most — the mind.

“I moved from Scotland to the US when I was 20 years old and we trained really hard,” Holloway said.

“We trained our bodies and very obviously that was the focus. We were athletes and we were training to win, but there was no focus on training what I’ve come to believe is your strongest muscle, which is your mind.

“I finished my athletic career knowing that I’d never reached my full potential and it wasn’t because I didn’t train hard; I trained harder than anyone, but there's another side to it and that is how we speak to ourselves and how we are motivating ourselves.

“There is a place in high-performance sports for feeling not good enough and needing to work harder or keep pushing, but there’s a fine line where we also have to take care of ourselves as people and as human beings.

“I think there's a big gap there especially with young women who have the pressures of body image, how you look and the pressure of having friends who are partying and having fun while you are training.”

While those pressures are somewhat offset by the ability of technology to offer unprecedented access to coaching and insight into how elite athletes train, Holloway argues that the sheer volume of competing voices can be paralysing.

“I think about how much pressure I feel as a woman who has done a lot of personal development work on myself and I think about young women and it’s terrifying,” she said.

“Research is easier to access but that can also be really overwhelming because the thing with sports is there is no one way to motivate and there’s no one tool that works for person’s mindset. There's general principles that broadly apply to everyone but we’re all a little bit different.”

Holloway was keen in her talk to give the enthralled young women in the audience the tools to overcome self-doubt and build inner belief but she knows that it is in private, unstructured moments that a young athlete’s relationship with herself is at most risk of unravelling.

“The hardest place for me in sport was the car drive home, because that is when the thoughts would spiral about what I could have done better and the moment where I should have performed and did not,” she said.

“I hope the girls here leave with a set of tools that enable them to catch themselves in a healthy way when the fine line of high-performance sports has you doubting yourself or when you’re not sure that you can push beyond that.

“I talk a lot about bravery and I believe that to succeed you’ve got to have your heart on fire and your head in the fridge.”

A new mother, Holloway brought her young daughter to Bermuda this week and has transitioned away from elite sportsperson to author, life coach and public speaker. She has written three books and she says that her “new life” provides just as much of a thrill than her time on the hockey pitch.

“Speaking to a group like this gives me the same buzz that I used to get from sport and that is why I love it,” she said.

“If you love sport and competing, I want you to understand that this feeling that you have access to — the chance to step up and perform — is finite. So get everything out of it that you can as there is a time limit.”