Yannick Kwai-Pun

Yannick:

Hey, you're doing a few different things with the brand at the moment right?

BN:

Yeah. The project started when I was running, competing. I started to have very existential thoughts about what I was doing and the purpose of my running.

I felt like I was being, chewed up in this industry. Especially as a sprinter, you are taught not to think. All of my emotion and creativity as a young female sprinter got completely put aside and it was quite tormenting emotionally on my mental health. 

Sports was something that set me free when I was young. That's why I wanted to talk to you, I feel you have an insight on this point.

The BN project exists to explore the paradox of in the pursuit of sport, meaning that it's something that saves you and destroys you at the same time. You live inside this paradox of sports. I feel sports culture misses a huge aspect of communicating on sports culture. We don't show enough of the emotional side, of the destructive effects of sports.

Yannick:

I agree with you. 

BN:

It’s a very fine line because I’m the biggest, proponent and encourager of sport, but I also at the same time hate it with all my guts, you know, this duality exists in the relationship. It saves you, destroys you. 

For me, it liberated me and then it trapped me.

Yannick:

You know what’s interesting about that? I think, like with anything you're truly passionate about, passion works both ways. It’s not just something we feel—we also project our own ideals onto it. A kind of utopian, romantic vision, if that makes sense?

When we’re young—or honestly, at any age—we tend to have this romantic idea that passion is always positive. Like it’s this love story, right? The way movies show it: butterflies, sunshine, lollipops—the whole dreamy package. We think, “Once I find my passion, everything will fall into place.

Passion can become your biggest poison. Your greatest passion can also become your greatest downfall. That’s the beauty—and the danger—of it. You have to walk that road and explore both ends of the spectrum to really understand where your balance lies.

And honestly, the only person who can figure that out is you. I know I’m making sense here. You’ve got to push one extreme until you realize, okay, that’s too far, that’s toxic. But you also have to experience the other side—the kind of blind love for something that pulls you in completely. Only then can you really know how far you can go without losing yourself.

Sometimes things just click—you’re not overthinking, you’re in flow. But passion isn’t one-sided. It only makes sense when you’ve seen both ends of it.

You’ll go through phases where you absolutely love what you do, and others where you can’t stand it. Maybe you're raising kids, maybe you're buried in work—it shifts. The key is learning to embrace both sides. That’s where resilience really lives: in your ability to hold the full picture, not just the highs.

Right now, training sucks. I don’t want to do it—but I know I need to keep a baseline. Other times, I’m obsessed with training, but it takes over everything else. And that’s the moment I have to step back and say, okay, this is getting one-sided.

That’s the work—meeting yourself in the middle. The real game is balance.

BN: 

Ah, this is the perfect definition we have of sports culture. This is the message I’m trying to send through this brand. 

Yannick:

Regardless of your discipline. It’s a mindset. What is culture at the end of the day? It’s made of rituals, words, things that are particular to that certain group of people. 

To me, this brand is shaping sports culture—regardless of the discipline. Everyone has their own rituals, their own reasons for showing up. And that’s the beauty of it: this brand lets people transcend what they do.

Too often, people get stuck in identity—“I am this.” But really, it’s “I do, therefore I am.” That’s how I see it.

Especially if you’ve been doing something for a long time—like running, for example—you start to identify as a runner. And that’s fine, until you go too far in that direction. Because if, for any reason, you lose running… who are you then?

BN: 

Who am I? 

That’s exactly what we’re building here. When I was younger and competing as a sprinter, I couldn’t relate to anything I saw in the sports culture space. Nothing felt visually or emotionally aligned. The landscape’s shifted a lot now, but 8 to 10 years ago, when this project began, it was a different story.

Back then—around 2015, 2016—no one was really talking about the struggle in sport. The suffering, the burnout, the moments of doubt. It felt like we weren’t even allowed to say we weren’t enjoying it.

I remember thinking, I don’t like this. I’m hating this. So why am I still doing it?

And that hit hard, because sport was the thing that had once set me free. As a little immigrant girl, dark-skinned, trying to find my place in Australia—sport was where I felt seen, accepted. So to fall out of love with it? That was painful.

Yannick: 

With age, you start to gain perspective. Did you truly love the sport itself—or did you love what it gave you?

BN:

But aren’t those the same? Don't you love something because of what it brings you?

Yannick:

That’s the thing—I don’t think there’s a definitive answer. It’s one of those questions where the only honest response is: it depends. Because ideally, who you are now won’t be who you are in ten years.

As you grow, your priorities shift. There comes a point where you might look at something you once loved and think, I don’t feel the same anymore.

A lot of people hit that crisis moment—especially in performance-driven spaces. They realize they can’t keep up the way they used to, their performance drops, and suddenly they’re asking, What now?

And that’s when the doubts creep in: Did I waste all that time? Who am I without this? And if you haven’t built anything beyond that one identity, things can start to fall apart.

BN:

Yeah, I never felt like it was a waste of time but I felt a deep void. Like I had no idea who I was. 

Yannick:

What I’m trying to say is—if we’d grown up like other kids, doing a mix of activities, exploring different interests—we’d probably have more to fall back on. More ways to express ourselves outside of just one thing.

But when you put everything into a single pursuit… the day it’s gone, it can feel like there’s nothing left.

BN:

I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier—how passion isn’t always healthy. That really stuck with me.

Can you share a bit about your own journey? What led you to make such a radical shift in your life?

Yannick:

Regardless of what you do—let’s call it a life purpose—when passion becomes your profession, the lines start to blur. In sport, it becomes your job. For me, it was cooking. The passion fused into the work. Work became life. Life became work.

Cooking gave me the same feeling sport gave you—it was liberating. I actually started out in sport too. I used to play basketball seriously, but an injury changed everything. I had two potential paths in front of me, and life forced me down one.

My life has been shaped by constant change. I moved from Mauritius to Madagascar when I was seven. We left everything behind. From that moment on, something in me shifted—I lost my footing. Sport became my anchor. Basketball gave me structure. And cooking… that was always there, in the background. I grew up around it.

But when I got injured—badly—I lost sport. I fell on my leg, my knee locked straight, and that was it. Career over. It’s never been the same since. I’ve made peace with it—or at least I tell myself I have. The truth is, I was angry. I said, fuck sport, and I threw myself into cooking.

That anger, that frustration—it became my fuel. I poured everything into it. It got me out of the hole I was in. And it worked… for a while. Because frustration is a powerful source of energy. But it only takes you so far.

When you’re trying to escape frustration, that moment of “liberation” you feel—it’s just contrast. It’s not real liberation. You’re not free. You’re just… no longer stuck. That feeling might last four or five years. But if you don’t deal with the root of the frustration, if you don’t rediscover the joy in what you’re doing, you’ll burn out.

Audio TC 18:02 (ask for audio mp3 if you want it)

There’s a fine line between not being frustrated and truly feeling free.

It’s like cold therapy. You step into a freezing 3-degree plunge, and then into a sauna. The heat doesn’t feel hot—it feels relieving. But it’s not that the sauna changed. It’s just the contrast playing tricks on your body. Without the cold, the heat would feel intense. But in that moment, it just feels like comfort.

 

BN:

So would you say that transition—from basketball to cooking—was born out of pain?

Like basketball, in a way, broke you. It gave you so much, but it also took a lot from you. It hurt you, maybe even stole something from you. And then suddenly, in this new world—this other industry—you started to feel a little bit of light again. A bit of joy.

Yannick

Exactly. I started to get good at it because I poured all my frustration into it. I didn’t see it as an option—I needed it to work. In my head, there was no plan B. I was all in. It was the only thing I knew.

When you enter a new space as an outsider, there’s this deep urge to prove yourself. At least, that’s how it was for me.

Basketball had been my way of integrating. As a foreigner, I stood out—I didn’t look like anyone else, didn’t sound like them either. I wasn’t Black, I wasn’t white. I was this kid who came from another country, who didn’t fit in. I was the outsider.

But then you play basketball. You start winning. You get invited in. You’re no longer just the kid from somewhere else—you’re part of the winning team. You’re accepted. You’re visible. You belong.

And when that was taken away… that sense of identity, of belonging, just disappeared.

So when I stepped into cooking, I felt that same outsider energy all over again. I remember when I first started—a guy looked at me and said, “You’re not in a Chinese restaurant here.” And for two months, I got harassed like that. Straight up. That lit something in me. It sparked this need to prove myself. To show I belonged, again.

I think about that a lot now—how people find passion. Some people fall into it naturally, through curiosity or joy. Others, like me, find it through resistance. Through someone saying you can’t.

So then what is the passion really about? Is it the craft itself—or is it the feeling of proving people wrong? And once you’ve poured so much of yourself into it, you start to love pieces of it. But it’s hard to tell where that love came from.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as pure passion—something you love 100%. Because, like you said, there are always parts you hate, and parts you love. That’s just the nature of it.

BN:

That’s the duality of passion. 

And that’s what I’d want to pass on to young athletes: it’s okay to feel both love and hate for what you do. That tension is real—and normal. But you can’t live in the hate. You have to find joy in the process, too. Otherwise, it burns you out.

Yannick:

I still love cooking. But after 20 years, I moved past that phase of needing to prove a point. I didn’t need to keep fighting to be seen. I didn’t feel the urge to stay in the same rooms or circles just to say, look, I belong here.

It’s the same with sport. Sometimes you need a mindset shift—either pour that energy into something new, or find a different lens through which to reconnect with what used to fulfill you.

I had to ask myself that same question: Do I still love the craft itself?
And yes—I do. I love the act of creating. I love having an idea in my head and bringing it to life.

As a kid, that was a huge frustration for me—having ideas I couldn’t express. Cooking gave me a way to do that. It gave me a language.

That’s where true passion lives. It’s not about timelines or outcomes. It’s the drive that says, even if this feels impossible, I want to try. You just have to get it out. That’s the core of it.

But now, with more years behind me and more perspective, I’ve realized something else: I’m no longer interested in performing.
And cooking—like sport—is performance. It’s a stage. It’s being seen.

At some point, you get tired of performng.

And you start to ask yourself… What am I doing this for now?

Then I started to enjoy the coaching and teaching aspect of it. Leading people to get where they want to go, that’s what I enjoy the most. Getting people there. 

Making people believe that they are accomplishing something incredible. 

 

Coaching is interesting. Sometimes, you have to reset people—bring them back to their factory settings. It’s actually really similar to cooking. In both, you’re stripping things back to the fundamentals before building them up again.

That’s where the two worlds—coaching and the kitchen—really meet.

Coaching fine-tuned me. It taught me to lead with more empathy, more compassion. That’s the next step in growth—for any of us. I’m not coaching professional athletes; I’m working with everyday people. You can’t always come in as hardcore as we were in the kitchen. You need a different kind of assertiveness. A softer edge.

I’ve always been driven by feeling. That question: how far can you take this one thing? What can you make of it?

At one point, that drive was all physical. I was deep into weightlifting when I randomly tried a gymnastics class. I asked the coach, how long will it take me to do a planche?
He looked at me and said, you probably won’t get it.
Said my legs were too big. Wrong proportions. Too old.

I couldn’t accept that.

So I started researching. Obsessing. Training. I had to prove him wrong. And in the process, I fell in love with strength training. What started as ego—proving a point—evolved into exploration. I was exploring my own physicality, my own potential.

Two years later, I held the planche. That was a shift for me.

What mattered more than the skill itself was the process—the journey of getting there. That’s where the real joy came in.

At the start, there's always a trigger. Sometimes you don't even realize what it is. And that’s why it can feel so empty when you finally hit a goal—because you never stopped to understand why you were chasing it in the first place.

That’s when everything started to shift:
I began finding joy in the process, not just the outcome.

And now, being the teacher—that’s become one of the most rewarding parts.

Sharing what you know is powerful. It’s a way to give meaning to everything you’ve been through. That’s when your personal practice starts to transcend—it becomes bigger than you. It’s like placing the final piece of your own puzzle into the larger picture.

Yes, personal practice matters. But I believe it’s incomplete until you pass it on. That’s part of being human. That’s how we evolve. No one learns in isolation. We all learn from someone else.

To truly complete a passion, I think you have to share it. Teach it. Give it away. That’s the full circle. That’s how you move beyond just doing—that’s how you become.

Use what you’ve learned—and transfer it.
That’s the best feeling in the world.

BN: 

Living life at the service of others. 

Yannick:

That’s it—service.

I truly believe we’d see far fewer mental health issues if more people felt a sense of utility. You need to feel useful—like you matter, like you’re contributing to something beyond yourself.
That’s the crisis we’re facing right now.

If you’re an influencer teaching others how to become an influencer, but there’s no real value or impact behind it—what’s the utility in that?
But if you’re using your platform to actually help people, to improve lives in a real way—that gives you purpose. That gives you drive.

Honestly, I think one of the most important things as a human is to feel useful.

And one of the simplest ways to do that?
Just share more.
Share your story. Share your struggle. Share your truth. That’s where connection happens. That’s where you create impact.

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BN:

Damn... to finish— can you introduce yourself.
Who is Yannick?

Yannick:

Less restless.
Less busy.
More productive—without doing more.

I’m focused on helping people understand how to break down their goals through physicality.

And in doing so, helping them find purpose through their practice.