Having competed at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games representing Malaysia in marathon swimming, Ms Gan is no stranger to a challenge.

After starting as a pool swimmer, she moved to open water swimming because it “was just more interesting.”

“I loved the environment and swimming outdoors, being in a pack. It’s very different to a confined pool race where you’re swimming straight up and down a line in a very controlled environment,” she said.

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“It’s very, very controlled. So, I was looking for a change.”

Right around the same time, Ms Gan was looking for a change within her law career as well and drew parallels between her two vastly different careers.

“I was working as a lawyer in a corporate practice within a broader firm, which focused more on litigation in the Western Australian market. So, I was doing a very transactional work, a lot of M&A mining kind of stuff,” she said.

“And it was at the point where I started focusing on the Olympics and wanting to go into open water swimming, that I realised my skill set was actually better suited to litigation. And I liked the idea of having an opponent, having strategy, which is a bit different to the transactional work that you would do in a corporate practice area.

“I didn’t not like the corporate work, I could certainly do it, but I was at that point in [both careers] that I started thinking, well, what is it that I like? What is it that I have a skill set for? And I drew parallels between my open water swimming career and litigation, which is ultimately where I’ve ended up here at Clifford Chance.” 

Everybody’s version of success is different

Ms Gan said she tried to make her TED talk on role models decidedly more “realistic” than your standard motivational speech, because whilst people saw her as a role model, she wanted to emphasise that no one should “blindly follow” and aspire to be exactly like anyone but themselves.

“I really wanted to focus on a more realistic topic, something less glazed over with the Olympic golden shimmer that usually follows these kinds of success stories,” she said.  

“Ultimately the message was that a role model should help you achieve your own success in your own life, and that we should pick and choose different traits from our role models without blindly following them.

“Everybody’s version of success is different, and so it should be. So my version of success and what I think is successful is not going to be the same for someone [else].

“Role models in particular, aren’t one dimensional, and they shouldn’t be used as such.”

Picking the right role models

Ms Gan added that young lawyers aspiring to be the types of lawyers they see in the papers, or at big law firms, can be “potentially damaging” for them and that instead, those just starting out in their career should aim to incorporate promising attributes and qualities into the way they live their life.

“Law is so multifaceted and there’s so many different aspects of being a good lawyer as well as a good person,” she said.

“[We need to make sure] we’re not pigeonholing ourselves into a certain type of person that we idolise and want to be, it’s more about the traits of that person and picking and choosing those traits and recognising why they’re important to us and why we might want to be like that.

“You might identify with a role model, but it’s really important to understand that they are their own person, you’re your own person, and you can take from role models what you want to help benefit yourself.

“It can be inspiring to try and be like that person or to identify with certain things and bring that into your own life. But I think it can also go the other way.”

Ms Gan added that whilst identifying with role models can be positive, it’s important to be open-minded about which traits you can bring into your own life – and is something she puts into practice in her own life.

“I certainly see people in different areas of the law who have an ability to balance a lot of different commitments and they might not all be in litigation, they might in fact not even be in private practice, and that is something that I still really idolize,” she said.

“I will have identified other role models or other people, whether it’s in the industry or even outside of the industry, that I can identify with and hope to look to their attributes and incorporate that into my own life.

“It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach. If you’re not a hundred per cent like them, it doesn’t mean that you’ve failed.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Heidi Gan, click below: