The game of Survivor is all about trying to outwit, outplay, and outlast other players, but this notion is something that easily translates into our everyday lives.
WATCH BELOW: Australian Survivor 2021: Laura’s Backstory
It’s something that Laura Wells discovered after she returned home from Australian Survivor, where she quickly realised the game was not over yet.
Instead, after being voted out in a shocking turn of events, Laura left the mind games of the show and entered into the regular mind games of real life. Luckily, she feels the show taught her how to better deal with people, especially if they’re trying to pull the wool over her eyes.
“Being able to look at people and read people differently and understand that people in the real-world act like it is a game of Survivor – there is constant manipulation and deception,” she tells New Idea.
“Being able to identify that and in a way is positive and you can use that to your advantage in something that you can kind of take out of Survivor,” she says.
During the show, Laura had to come to terms with the fact that she would have to play the game by playing other people in order to win.
“It’s really hard to separate real personality and real life to what you do in Survivor, and you really need to manipulate and deceive, and it can be really difficult to put your headspace in that situation when that’s not normally what you do in your everyday life,” she says.
The marine scientist’s strategy was all about playing a social game and working on more strategic moves while she was in there.
“There’s things you can’t prepare for, and you just have to kind of go in there with an open mind and stick to your plan.”
Throughout the show, Laura formed some great relationships with her fellow castaways, including what we saw between her, Rachel and Georgia, and then later on with Dani.
“Living in the outback that long, you form a little family and you become really supportive to each other,” she says.
“The fact that we’re put in this situation and it’s just us and we are trying to survive, you kind of rally around each other and show each other support – even though you are still trying to vote each other off,” she laughs.
Watching the show back, Laura feels she played an honest game and stayed true to herself the entire time she was out there.
“I was definitely genuine to myself; I was loyal and probably to my detriment in some ways.”
The 36-year-old hopes that her true character reflects back to people watching at home, who don’t always understand that what you see is not what you get.
“They see a small snippet of who we are and quite often it’s a tiny a snippet, it’s nothing to do with our entire lives, of what we do, what are passions are,” she says.
“And we’re playing a game so of course things are different so just reminding people that their words and their actions when they sit behind their phone or their computer screen actually do affect real people, with real emotions just like them.”
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