Harry Garside: The Man Behind the Fighter

You're tuning into A Wake Up Call, which is your weekly dose of purpose packed with science-backed tools to beat burnout and boost happiness. Hosted by us, Tess Brouwer and seven-time world champion Layne Beachley. We're the founders of Awake Academy. This podcast mixes raw life lessons, expert wisdom, and practical tips to help you stop sleepwalking through life and start living it on your terms. You ready to wake up and thrive? Let's go.

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This episode is airing in Men's Mental Health Week, and Layne and I are so passionate about men's mental health. Unfortunately, nine people a day choose to end their lives. Seven of them are men, and a lot of them are younger, or they're entering into the next stage of their lives at 45 to 55. So bang on, men that we know. So today really is about masculinity and what that truly means to you.

You've experienced it on many different arenas and floors, and the one that really hit me the most — if anyone saw this — is at the Olympics when you cried on national TV, and it wasn't from winning. It wasn't from winning, and you publicly stated that you had let Australia down. What was most poignant for me in that interview was the moment you were asked for Australia to almost forgive you, but that you were going to need a couple of days to come back from this moment. So you asked for some peace and some strength in that moment, and what came was an avalanche of support for you. I'd love to know what that moment was like for you, but I'm going to give you a formal introduction first.

So Harry is Australia's Olympic boxer who won bronze at the Tokyo 2020 games, breaking Australia's 33-year drought in the medal at the Olympics. Gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, gold at the 2023 Pacific Games, nine-time Australian national champion, and competed again at Paris in the 2024 Olympics. Beyond the ring, he's the author of The Good Fight, which is an amazing book, an AIA ambassador and voice of the Let's Talk mental health series, runner-up on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, a qualified plumber, a poet, a great ballet dancer, and one of Australia's most outspoken advocates on vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and breaking down gender stereotypes. It's hard to listen to things about yourself. I can see you getting uncomfortable right now.

And that is the beautiful reason you chose to lead our Men's Mental Health Week. We do go for the success pillars or the CV or the resume — what are those moments? But who are you as a man or human? So who is the real Harry? That's the thing. I think I'm still working it out. I'm coming towards the back end of my 20s. I'm 29 in July, which is pretty exciting. But yeah, I think I'm still very much working it out.

It's quite natural for young people to want approval of the people around them. We're very much just trying to find our way through the world. And when you do something that's a little bit authentic but then it gets shamed, you're like, okay, maybe don't do that again. So we learn these things slowly but surely about how to act. But then in my 20s I've been very conscious of trying to figure out what is actually me and what is something that I learned. And I'm still trying to navigate that, because if you've done something for so long you really struggle to see if it is authentically you or it's just something that you've done for so long so it feels like you.

But I just know that deep down I'm deeply curious. I think about way too much way too often — I call it mental masturbation. I love thinking about it all. It's crazy that we're here. I find it incredible, and I think about it weekly: we're on a spinning rock just making this existence up, and we care about the people we love, and we feel passion, purpose, energy, hate. There's so much moving through our body, and it's incredible to be here and to be in it. I love it.

There's so many little moments throughout my life. I would say overall probably the Reach Foundation entering my life. They're a youth organisation, started by Jim Stynes, AFL footballer and Brownlow Medallist who's sadly not with us anymore, and Paul Currie, a film director. They entered my life when I was 16. They ran a workshop for all the males in my year level. I went to a public school. A lot of my mates were very bogan and boyish, and I was one of the boys, one of the popular kids in the group.

It was like the first day in my life that I got the opportunity to delve inside myself and show my mates some parts of myself that I'd never shown anyone — a bit more vulnerability. There's so many reasons why I felt safe enough to do that that day: the people facilitating it, the activities, and I was 15, 16 years old — a perfect age. Throughout that day I learned a lot about the people in my year level who I thought maybe were a little bit weird, and you realise they've got a lot going on at home and you see them as more of a human rather than that weird kid you often dismiss.

I started as a participant, then I started working with them for like four years, going out to schools myself. Through that process they gave me a beautiful space to build emotional intelligence. It's a stereotype but there's truth to it — young girls and girl groups just have way more capacity for that, whether it's holding space or exploring emotional ideas. It doesn't feel like there's many spaces for young boys to explore that or feel safe enough, and Reach was very much that space where I could. All that I learned in that four or five year period will be with me forever.

It's the hardest part to navigate. The greatest thing about being human is that we are both light and dark, both masculine and feminine inside of us. You don't really get a choice in how you feel sometimes — maybe your hormones are off, maybe you're having a bad week. Something happens out of your control and the internal voice wins. I find myself chaotic, but deep down I can connect with that younger version of myself, and he's such a sweet kid. He's like six or seven. A really good kid.

Throughout my life I felt I had to be someone else in order to get accepted. Even starting the sport of boxing — which I love — I only started it to be a man, because that's what men are supposed to be: able to fight and protect the people around them with this masculine bravado. I'll never forget this story. We travelled heaps as a family. We drove from Melbourne all the way up to the Northern Territory and we were in an Indigenous community, and I was watching the young people there playing footy, running around, and I felt this disconnect of us in this car. There was a visible disconnect, and I was the same age as that kid, and I couldn't understand the difference between me and him. We're both kids who just wanted to play and run around. It's so crazy how we don't get a choice in where we're raised, who we're raised by, or what we feel we have to become in order to be accepted. I think our 20s, 30s and 40s — whenever you start the journey — is all about unpacking that and becoming who you really are.

That a kid with so much compassion and emotional intelligence and love and kindness becomes a boxer — the greatest contradiction of all time. I call myself a walking contradiction. I do think everyone is that. It's understanding that there's both light and dark in there. What do you become when you step into the ring? Do you have an alter ego? Hell yeah. There's different parts of my personality. There's the conqueror — that's the one I call the boxer. It's that thing inside of me that's powerful, and it's kind of intoxicating, because I feel like I could conquer the world. When I was younger I didn't really know how to navigate it. When I was 16, the week before a fight I would go stay somewhere else because I didn't want to be around my family — I was such an idiot to be around. I knew I needed to be like that. You're about to go into combat, you have to have that dog inside of you to go in there and ferociously inflict pain and beat someone, which is a crazy concept, but it's human. We're animals. When you go to the Coliseum in Rome it's magical — we haven't evolved at all. We don't have lions and cars maybe, but we have different versions of that, different psychological stresses.

It's about putting eyes on it and learning to navigate it, learning to almost love that capacity inside of you, but managing it. Harnessing it. My husband the other day — we've got a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old boy — they were having a fight at home, and Chris was like, right, get outside, get on the trampoline, gave them both boxing gloves and said, if you're going to do it, do it properly. Because we're monkey brains. We need to get it out. There was going to be tears anyway, so at least it was harnessed.

There's this weird bonding act though — when you go through something hard, even if it's against the person, when you go through something together, there's this vulnerable connection. A trauma bond. You always see two males at the pub fighting and then 10 minutes later they're having a beer. Even when you go through a tragedy in your family, your family always connects after. You're putting yourself out there together, being completely vulnerable, not through words but through action — bleeding, putting yourself out there — and you just connect. You see it on the footy field: they're bashing each other up, and then the whistle blows and it's, hey mate, good stuff.

What would his normal response be? It would be comfort, because he is a beautiful man, but we wouldn't be able to go there. Is it almost like a "she'll be right, you'll be right, mate," the pat on the back? Yeah, very much like "this will pass." This is uncomfortable for him, he's feeling it in his body. But I didn't know that at the time, so you think they're being dismissive or not being there for you. But I look back now and it's more like he just didn't have the tools to hold the space. The older I'm getting, the more compassion I have for people like that, because it's not a reflection on them — most humans, if not all, have a heart and are caring. They just don't know what to do with the uncomfortable feeling in their body. It's like when you have kids, you start to have way more compassion for your parents — you didn't have all the answers either.

The Reach Foundation would play a massive role, and boxing for me — around feeling physically safe and physically capable, there's an element of security in that on the physical side, but on the emotional and mental side it would have been the Reach Foundation, having a space there with people who are trained professionals. So twice a week I'm getting an opportunity to watch people hold space, take up space myself, and have people hold that for me. I learned through time that there's places for it. There's something in me that feels like there's a bit of a duty to show the people that I love. I've got thick skin and I love joking. It's such a beautiful part of male culture that they don't know how to go there, so they just take the piss out of it. In a group of mates they will all take the piss out of me, and I'm laughing and joking, but then one-on-one they're like, "Oh, what gratitude app are you using?" They want to know. They're just so scared to be the one to say it. And I love that, because if I can keep living the way I'm living, I don't care if they keep attacking me as a joke. I know deep down there'll be people who, when they're home by themselves, are wanting to know more. I'll take the arrows in my back. I don't mind at all.

But I put myself in my younger self's shoes — a mum that has that postnatal depression, whether she resents or doesn't want to be around me. I'm not sure exactly how the young person would have been feeling, but I do think it internalised a fair bit of not thinking that I was lovable for a long period of time. And it's something that I don't feel like I'm fully through. But I did go to two Olympic games in order to get my mum to love me. I know deep down my mum loves me. She's an incredible woman.

Science has proven that in the first six years of your life you're a narcissist — everything going on around you is happening to you, and you're trying to figure out where you fit and why is this happening to me. Then your brain waves flip at seven and you have the capacity to analyse, to judge, to criticise, to wrap stories around experiences. So those first years are incredibly pivotal. And if that story doesn't get challenged, it becomes your life story. The beautiful thing about someone like you is you're challenging that narrative — through compassion and love and reflection, you realise my mum was going through a hard time, it had nothing to do with me. Yet in the first six years it has everything to do with you. I don't fit in here, I don't belong, my own mother doesn't want me — and that creates some sort of character that you now find a way to adapt to. It's normal, it's been proven in all of us.

I had that when I was adopted as a baby. Never breastfed, never held — wasn't held for the first six weeks. So I have a visceral reaction to affection in the early years of my life. It took a woman who cared for me 18 months for me to hold her hand. I was very ambivalent: don't come near me, don't touch me. I never took the time to process it until I became older and wiser — why was I like that, and did it happen to me or did it happen for me? Your world titles were based off self-worth to be loved. I reflect on that person and I have compassion for myself at that young age, because I didn't even know myself, I didn't know where I came from, I didn't know my mother. So I projected this persona that was so not who I was. I say I won seven world titles — five in fear and two in love. The two I won in love were process-driven, because I was in love with just doing the things. That's the place to be. It's so effortless. The minute they become outcome-driven — proving worth, trying to prove I was worthy of love. So self-worth drives us to do remarkable things, and also pretty destructive things — destroy ourselves, our relationships, all the things that make us whole.

I feel you, because I did my best to blow up my marriage a couple of times too, because I didn't feel like I was worthy of that depth of love, that depth of support, that depth of compassion — because I'd never given it to myself. So I thought, it's uncomfortable giving it to me, so I'm just going to blow up everything outside of me. I nearly blew up my marriage, and I'm very fortunate that my husband has the patience and the understanding and the forgiveness. He's done a lot of work on himself, so he understands the power of sabotage is really uncovering something deep within someone else. It would have been very easy for him to go, this is too hard. But he didn't. Now I reflect back and go, my god, I was doing everything I could to ruin this.

It's a matter of parking it, because the stories you tell yourself become your truth over time, and it's okay to notice that. That's the beauty — noticing it: I'm blowing this up because I'm scared that it's going to actually make me whole. There's this level of annoyance inside myself: I'm so self-aware and have been for a long time. But it doesn't really matter how self-aware you are if you can't action the things you know you need to do. Every time I don't do it, you beat yourself up more, and then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You do something you don't want to do to feel better, and then you feel shame and guilt for the action you just did. So I'm aware I can talk until the cows come home about all these things, but until I action what I know, it doesn't mean a thing.

And Layne and I love each other so much because we feel like we're a bit of the outliers, like we don't really belong anywhere except for each other. I asked my mum about it and she's like, "Of course I wanted you, you wanted to be here, but it wasn't harmonious." And I was like, okay, what do I do with that now? I took it to my therapist, a psychotherapist, so you've got to feel it in your body. I was talking to her about how I don't feel like I belong because I was conceived... and she just said, I have to end this session, I can't work with you. You need to feel this before I can work with you on it. You can talk and talk your way around all of this, but until you're ready to feel that — I felt lost, abandoned. When the divorce broke out, I thought it was my fault, like I blew the family up because I was born and then everyone separated. I had this deep sense that I messed everything up. So how can I be loved? And my default to that was: when things go bad, I blow it up and I leave.

And now with my husband, it's a control thing, right? You want to be the one that gets out before you see me. So I said to my husband when we first started dating, which is an exercise I'm going to ask you to do with your new partner: what are your straws? What are the moments that I need to watch out for that something deep is going on? I said to him, I run, and if I run, I need you to catch me, come for me, block the door — give me a bit of space, but then come and find me. And he's like, okay, well, I'm going to challenge you: you're not allowed to run. I want you to sit in this discomfort with me and just tell me how you feel in that moment. It was the best thing for us, because I was like, here's my wound, this is how I've intellectualised it, but this is what I do when I'm not comfortable with it — will you sit with me in that discomfort? And he's like, I'm there with you. That's a beautiful adult relationship.

There's this premise in the movie King Arthur with Charlie Hunnam — he can wield a sword, but every time he wields it, it takes him back to the deepest, most traumatic memory of his psyche. I really connect to that, because I feel incapable of deeply feeling or seeing what I need to see and feel what I need to feel. So I can't wield the sword, and the sword has all the power. The only way out is through. We were feeling beings before we were thinking beings, so why do we think our way through all of our problems? Feel your way through. Your biggest growth area is your relationship and allowing yourself to be seen.

The most interesting thing about postnatal is the mother's ability to connect with the baby — connection through the eyes. Normally you look at the left eye to gain connection, she's feeding and looking into your eyes, but mothers with postnatal can't really connect in that way. So my mum would come home stressed, working multiple jobs, same as my dad while raising kids, and I would analyse my mum's face and gauge how she's feeling energetically and I would adapt. My brothers were burning the house down; I wasn't like that. I was like, don't annoy mum. And that's the reason why I'm successful at boxing — that's all boxing is. You get inside a ring and you pick up on little cues, that twitch of the muscle, that slight thing in their eye. It's all subconscious. That's all I did with my mum, so I'm good at it. I analyse people's faces, because I can see when someone's not saying something they truly believe, or they're playing a character. I feel it in my body. It's annoying to constantly have that when you're in conversation. Survival. Safety. I need to be aware.

It really does start with the ability to be seen, warts and all. There's no greater love you can have for yourself than accepting light and shade, but then letting someone else take that with you. What a gift she is to your growth. There's this weird thing — I'm quite spiritual, but when life was going so well, I hadn't had anyone challenge me for ages, and I think I said out loud, "Geez, I'm happy with where my life's at"... and the universe just goes, have this. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. I'm still very much going through it. I am guilty of creating emotions that I much prefer because they're predictable, whether through addiction or doing something a little bit reckless that makes me feel bad — but I'm in control of that feeling, rather than feeling the depth of connection, love, even pain if they weren't to love me. I'd rather create my own emotion through control.

There's a lot of men that listen to this podcast, and a lot of them are training religiously, working on their physical armour so that they're ready for the war. What advice would you give to the men listening, or the wives listening who need the men to do the work, on how they open up slowly? It's such a hard reality, because every human is different. The way I attack my life isn't how my brothers or my dad navigate it. I've always expressed myself through a word. From a young age I've always had girlfriends, always connected to the girl group, then I felt I had to be more like the boys because I wanted my brothers' acceptance. But I always had girl best friends because they would go there more often — they're the conversations I wanted to have. So I'm aware a lot of men don't feel comfortable in that space. But if you feel called to do something, do it.

There is so much power in taking back a little bit of ownership, because there's so many things outside of our control, especially when you move into adulthood — we have to pay bills, we have all these stresses. The more we can consciously take back a little bit of control, whether that be waking up at a certain time and holding our word in that, being very integral, and then doing something relatively hard, whether it's a training session or even just getting up and going for a walk, moving our body. We're animals. There's a beautiful essence when we're moving — forward motion has always made me come back to my body and out of my head, because I can recognise a lot of men in my life are in their head.

Our word is the only thing we've got in this world. The more we can consciously say we're going to do something and follow through and be reliable with ourself, the more people have trust in us. And there's a lot of men who just deeply desire to be seen. They get seen through doing acts of service or things in the background that often get overlooked. I've always felt that with my dad. He's a beautiful man. Every time I'd go back down to Melbourne when I was 20, he would always have the spare car free, clean, and full of fuel. That was his beautiful way of just showing, hey, I thought of you in advance. And all he ever wanted was, hey, thanks heaps, Dad. When I was young, I just overlooked it. Men just really want to be seen for some of the things they do, and there's a lot of men who try really hard and maybe just get overlooked. So take back ownership, move your body, and just be open to sitting in the softness. You don't have to dive straight in head first, but at least be open to it. Especially if you've got a young boy navigating their own emotions — if they had a dad who was open to that as well, you're always going to be better off.

There's something beautiful around how we experience reality in our head. A lot of what we see is based on our past experiences shaping what we're seeing. And memories aren't real. I try to wonder — say someone who really means something to me, my parents or brothers — what they're feeling or seeing in this moment. Usually it's just their own stuff. I might take something personally in the moment, but the more I reflect on it in the coming week, you realise that wasn't what I thought it was, that was just them navigating their own stuff. That beautiful empathy of, they're also human going through their own stuff. The one thing that creates the disconnect is judgment, because we're looking at them going, you're only saying that because — and we're creating layers of judgment that prevent us from just going, "Thank you, I hear you. Thanks for filling up the car."

We had Dr Lael Stone on, and she gave us the advice to ask someone, "How old are you right now?" When someone is spiralling or has something going on, you simply ask for that clarity, and they're like, oh, I'm six and you've just told me I can't play with the Barbie dolls. It's often way more simple than we think. I'm eight and you've just told me I can't have ice cream for dinner. Curiosity is one of the greatest things, because every young person is naturally curious — we then slowly but surely get it taught out of us. Curiosity moves you away from critique of yourself and other people, towards "hey, why do you act like this" — there's play in that. It's a really nice place to live. You don't see people doing something weird like, why are they doing that?

I noticed this with the boys — we have a four-year-old and he loves dancing, and one of them said, "Oh, don't let him go and do that." And I was like, why? Why can't he go and do dance class? In fact, I might put him into ballet now because you said that. It's funny what society puts around us. And that's what I want to say to you, Harry: thank you for being the model that you are, that I can feel that curiosity in you — I want to do poetry, I want to do ballet, I want to box. I want to experience the full self-expression of who you are unashamedly. When you start putting yourself out there publicly, you just get way more arrows. I had this weird thought: when people are shaming me, I wonder if internally there's something inside them that they've locked away. It might not be that they want to do ballet or wear a dress or paint their nails — it might be they want to go see Hairspray the musical, but they're too scared to tell their community because they want to fit in. So then they have someone out there going, I don't give a damn, I'm just here trying to enjoy my life as best I can — and they see the freedom of that and feel a little bit attacked, because they've pushed it down so far. Any male listening to this: if there's something you want to do that's just a little bit weird, that's just your thing — life is so short. Go find someone that supports it.

LB, can I ask you — you came in and said you're the matriarch of this discussion. You understand Harry on a level I don't: putting yourself in the arena, performing on the world stage, the relentless pursuit of success. What is an observation of Harry you've seen in yourself, and something you can help him with as the athlete liaison officer? I was at the London Olympic Games as an athlete liaison officer. The deep reflection, the investment in deepening your understanding of yourself, can at times be all-consuming and overwhelming, and by doing that you're blocking out the knowing. There's an element of desperation in you that just wants to know, wants to have it figured out. But here's the thing: you never will. I'm still figuring it out. If you could have the courage and the patience to sit in the not-knowing, that's where the deepest amount of growth and evolution will come for you.

You are a naturally curious, gregarious, open and willing student of life. That's a beautiful thing to have, but it needs to be contained, not restrained. Contain it into moments and experiences that's going to help you get the most out of that experience, but if you're bringing it to every experience, it's going to prevent you from connecting as well. So harness it in a way that supports you, not sabotages you. My advice for you would be to let it go — stop holding on and trust in the process. Let go to hold on. As you've experienced, when you commit to doing something, the universe will literally say, how committed are you? It's going to test you.

I went through this process where I had to learn to forgive myself, because my natural reaction to failure was self-beating — I would call myself all sorts of things you wouldn't call someone you love. I went, okay, I forgive, I'm okay — and then the next day I fell off my bike, went over the handlebars, and ended up in hospital, and I called my therapist on the way. He's like, so how are you feeling right now? And I literally was saying, I'm an idiot, I can't believe I'm such an idiot. He's like, oh really? So how committed are you? So I learned that my natural response to disappointment is to giggle, because giggling diffuses the anger and the fear, it releases the guilt and the shame, and it connects you with your inner child. I get back into my heart. Wow, that must have looked really stupid. Learn to giggle. She refers to me as the punch in the face; I'm the warm hug.

To close: Einstein didn't solve the theories writing the equations. It was when he walked away into deep rest, stillness, sat under the tree, and then the apple fell. So allow the apple to fall. I have the 36 questions to fall in love with someone — I'll link it in the show notes, and I want you to do this with this new lady as a growth exercise. Number 37 is one I accidentally invented: staring into each other's eyes for four minutes — but you do that at the start, so it's question one. Do you accept the challenge? Harry, thank you for joining us today. We arranged this on Friday and you're here on Monday, so that shows you are ready to go into the next layer of work, and we will be here with you. Dream Team, what an incredible episode. If this resonated with you or a man in your life or a kid, please share it on, and share the beauty of Harry's wisdom and letting go to hold on, because it is a gift of the universe. We'll see you next week. Toodles.

A gentle reminder that Awake Academy is not a licensed mental health service, and this podcast is not a substitute for personalised mental health advice, assessment, diagnosis or treatment. What we share here is general in nature and designed to offer reflection, insight and practical tools for everyday life. Therapy can be life-changing, and we deeply encourage you to speak to your GP about your mental health and well-being options.