“Perseverance, empowerment, and silliness.”

Nina Ballantyne hesitates slightly when listing her three words. She acknowledges they don’t all fit neatly into the same grammatical category—”they’re not all quite neat”—but she lands on them anyway. Perseverance makes sense for a physical practice. Empowerment tracks with overcoming barriers and building capability. But silliness?

That third word sits there like someone doing a handstand in the middle of a serious conversation.

Here’s what’s surprising: silliness isn’t the outlier in this list. It’s the through-line.

Ballantyne describes herself as someone who was “a proper nerd at school” where her identity centered on getting good marks. The shift to parkour meant encountering something she wasn’t immediately good at—and discovering unexpected freedom in that experience. She describes it as genuinely joyful: “oh suck at this isn’t this great like it’s real nice.”

This isn’t about lowering standards or celebrating mediocrity. It’s about what becomes possible when the primary relationship to movement isn’t dominated by assessment and achievement. When Ballantyne talks about outdoor training, she mentions “the kind of joy and silliness of doing it all outside.” The joy and the silliness aren’t separate things—they’re connected. The permission to be silly creates space for genuine play, which creates conditions for the kind of perseverance that doesn’t burn you out.

Richard Marshall, an older practitioner Ballantyne discusses in the episode, pushes against the assumption that parkour must be about challenge for everyone. He describes his professional life as high-pressure litigation work and explicitly states:

For me, actually, what is so important to me about parkour is the space that allows me for play, which is not possible in so many other parts of my life.

This reveals something about how serious physical practices actually function. We tend to assume that if movement matters—if it’s genuinely important to someone—then the approach must be serious, disciplined, grinding. But that’s not what keeps most people practicing over years. Marshall isn’t less committed to his practice because he prioritizes play over challenge. If anything, that priority is what sustains decades of engagement.

What Ballantyne names as “empowerment” partly comes from this reorientation: the liberation “to not care what other people think” and specifically “not caring anymore about being bad at stuff in particular.” This directly challenges the cultural scripts around physical competence, especially in public space where bodies are already scrutinized. The empowerment isn’t just about being able to do difficult movements—it’s about the freedom to be visibly learning, visibly failing, visibly silly.

Which brings us back to perseverance. The kind that keeps someone training for years isn’t usually the grit-your-teeth, never-quit variety we celebrate in motivational contexts. It’s more often the kind that comes from actually enjoying what you’re doing, even—especially—when you’re not good at it yet. Ballantyne has kept coming back to parkour despite not having “the biggest jumps in the world” and taking “many months off training altogether” at various points. That’s perseverance, but it’s perseverance sustained by permission to be silly rather than despite it.

The three words aren’t a random collection. They’re describing a practice where being willing to look foolish in public, to not optimize every session, to prioritize play over performance—that’s not opposed to serious commitment. That’s what makes serious commitment actually sustainable.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Empowering with Nina Ballantyne,” published March 12, 2025.