Last year, former Top 10 player Caroline Garcia announced the launch of a new podcast, "Tennis Insider Club," where she and her co-host (and now, fiancé) Borja Duran promised to pull back the curtain on the professional tennis tour, and give fans and followers "a real way to see what is going on from the inside."

It was quickly a hit. The guest list for the first season was a who's who of top tennis players, including Naomi Osaka, Victoria Azarenka, Danielle Collins and Ons Jabeur, and Seaspn 2 kicked off with a bang on Monday as World No.2 Iga Swiatek joined the show.

"For me, it was a real privilege," Garcia teased of speaking with Swiatek.

Here are three things we learned from the World No.2's candid, nearly hourlong chat with Garcia -- teased as a side of the five-time champion "you've never seen before."

She thought she was going to lose in the first round of the tournament that made her

When Swiatek arrived in Paris to compete at Roland Garros five years ago as a talented 19-year-old ranked World No.54, she thought winning the tournament -- moved to October as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic -- was "impossible." 

"It was never my goal because it was too abstract," she said, saying that she felt that only someone in the Top 10 could make such a declaration. 

"I remember this season overall was pretty ... I think it was my worst season if I would take this Roland Garros out. I lost everywhere like second round, also in Rome before this. So I just went there and I remember my coach kind of even, he didn't know what to do with me because I played so bad in Rome that we didn't know if I should stay in Europe and practice or come back home. I remember he talked to my dad as well. They decided that I should come back home and just reset, so I went [to] Roland Garros and I was like, 'OK, that's the last tournament of the season, whatever.'

"And then it happened. Don't ask me how, because I don't know."

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The rest, as they say, is history. Beginning with an upset of defending finalist Marketa Vondrousova in the first round -- a match she thought at the time that she had hardly a chance to win -- Swiatek stormed through the field with the loss of just 28 games, the fewest since Stefanie Graf lost 20 in 1988, to become the first Polish Grand Slam singles champion and youngest woman to win a major since Monica Seles in 1992.

At age 23, she's loosening the reins and enjoying life more

One of the topics Swiatek discusses in depth with Garcia and Duran is how she balanced tennis and academics in her youth, and, unlike many top players in the modern game, attended traditional school in her native Poland through high school. Despite having that experience, she remained incredibly dedicated to pursuing an elite sporting career, even at times to the point of tunnel vision. 

But things have changed, and not to her detriment, she says.

“I would say before I was only tennis, tennis, tennis. ... I’m deleting Instagram, Twitter, the notification on my emails," Swiatek said. "So at the beginning it was a good way for me to be more focused. But now you just can’t do that anymore because if you’re going to do that for like 40 weeks per year, that’s not a life anymore. So I'm mixing it up."

That new perspective was on display as recently as last spring, during the Internazionali BNL d'Italia, a tournament she won. 

“I remember after the semifinal I went to dinner and I finished at like midnight. This is something I wouldn’t do a year ago,” Swiatek said. “It was fine. I managed to be focused the same way. I won the tournament and I was really happy that I’m trying to enjoy life a bit more. You need to balance that when you have these days off."

She's keeping her goals for this season close to the vest.

After losing the World No.1 ranking to Aryna Sabalenka in October, we might assume returning to the summit is chief among Swiatek's goals for 2025. 

Not so, the recent United Cup runner-up says. Instead, she's focused on keeping an open mind with her new coach, Wim Fissette, whom she hired in October. 

"It's exciting, but for sure, I want to see how my tennis is going to evolve in the next year," she said. "I think like my main goal is to see how I adjust to that, because honestly that's only the second time I'm switching coaches, so it's not like I'm super experienced at that."

"I need to force myself to be kind of open and to remember that ... one of the reasons I have new coach to learn something new, because it's also not easy to do that when you know that you've been playing for a while, so well for the last years.

"But still, if you're not going to evolve in tennis, the other girls are going to come after you and suddenly you'll wake up as being I don't know, outside of the Top 50 or something.

"I'm trying to be open-minded. We're not changing a lot because there's no need to. All these things that we work on, I wanted to work on before. It's just a little bit different approach or different way to do that.

"I was never the one that put goals, I don't know, 'Win Indian Wells,' or 'Win Roland Garros.' Just doing this and focusing on the details is a good way to go."