In the current framework of athletics, you’d think toughness was the only currency that matters. You hear it in everything athletes step into, from team mottos to playoff t-shirts to every coach's favorite soundbite the regurgitate in the locker room. Toughness is the one thing people like to push the hardest. Pressure. Grit. Tough players win. Show up and deliver. Burn the ships. The catchphrases go on and on.

But after years in this space, working with athletes from middle school to the pros, across every possible kind of intensity, I keep coming back to this truth:

Sustainable performance doesn’t come from grinding harder. It comes from creating environments where the nervous system doesn’t feel like it’s being hunted.

There are times when I wonder why we keep yanking fish out of the water just to explain to them what they’re swimming in. We reel them in. Net down into the water with a quick scoop, only for us to hold them by the mouth while they’re gasping and flopping. All the while we’re standing over them with a whiteboard, diagramming currents and drawing flowcharts about resilience and self-awareness.

It’s absurd.

Perhaps the real move isn’t pulling them into our world, but learning how to join them in theirs.
Maybe we shut up, dive in, and figure out how to breathe through gills.

Here’s the deal: so much of coaching, especially on the mental side of the game, is based on the assumption that we need to convince athletes to see it our way in order to grow.

As you ascend the mountain of self growth inching closer to greatness, whether you find yourself on the pitch, on the court, or on the field, there comes a serene but seismic realization that not everyone who was with you at basecamp is equipped for the thin air of higher altitudes. While it takes other people during times of growth, it is very much a singular journey. Only you can do the work. Growth is a clarifying fire. A ruthless eliminator of the ill equipped and unprepared. You can’t fake self evolution. Your best attempt to fake it will be endlessly talking about everything you’re learning. They’ll buy a book about the climb, post it on Instagram, and feel spiritually sore for a week.

In athletics, the illusion of there being a world “out there” is persistent and cunning. The scoreboard, the crowd, the stat sheet, are all moving independently of you, while you simply react. As if you're simply a participant in a the game. You were handed a jersey and a role by coach, left to cope with whatever the game decides to throw at you. This is the myth of separation. This idea that the performance lives outside of you, and your job is to catch up to it. You’re the quintessential greyhound chasing the rabbit. Though you pursue it with tireless resolve, it evades you as if tethered to the horizon.

A large part of my work lives in the shadows. watching athletes compete and looking for their patterns to determine when the quiet unraveling behind their eyes begins. I’m not just observing a missed free throw or a busted defensive rotation. I’m witnessing someone carry the unspoken burden of expectations that were never theirs to begin with. Echoes of past failures. Family projections. The punch in the gut of a setback. The identity crisis in the midst of a major injury. The haunting of what could have been. The ever present should be gifted to them.

In every game, there’s more at play than points on the board.

Most people aren’t drowning in the deep end. They’re flailing in the kiddie pool of their own avoidance, screaming for a lifeguard that isn’t on duty. The water isn’t the real threat. The outright denial that you can stand up at any time and save yourself is.

Remember, you are the light. But don’t be naive. Being the light means you’ll cast shadows too.

Pole vault is a dance between chaos and control. It’s a sport where the laws of physics meet the will of an athlete. It’s not just about clearing a bar, it’s about convincing your nervous system that hurling yourself toward the sky, inverted with a fiberglass pole is somehow the act of a sane person. Nicho, thankfully, never seemed burdened by what limits most of us.

I’ve worked with Nicho through the quiet months. The ones no one posts about. The mental reps. The vulnerable conversations about fear, relief, frustration, expectation, internal dialogue, pressure, and identity. Vaulting isn’t just physical. It’s psychological warfare disguised as sport.

Fear has a powerful voice in our internal dialogue. It’s neither a scream or a whisper. It’s more like a sly negotiator in a tailored suit, always ready to pull us aside to have a chat while the board meeting of our brain is conducting business. The moment we give fear our ear, even out of politeness, is the moment ego starts filling the time. Fear isn’t just a normal primitive reaction, it’s a master manipulator. It cloaks itself in the cover of assumed expectations, speaks the dialect of doubt, and pitches us worst case scenarios with the charisma of a veteran closer. When fear gets the mic, ego occupies all the airtime. Fear and ego are collaborators in the art of self protection and self promotion fooling us to think making decisions based on their input is wisdom.

If we are sincere in our pursuit of growth, if progress is not just a motivating slogan printed on a locker room banner but a real desire…

There are days. The quiet, bitter ones, when I miss coaching track with a kind of holy ache. Not just the whistle and making small adjustments to relay exchanges, or the monastic obsession with technique, but the entire absurd religion of it. The cathedral of the track, where sermons were preached in sweat, in muscles that felt like they pumped battery acid and PRs eked out by the grace of biomechanical nano-adjustments and sheer human will. Coaching wasn’t just work. It was devotion. A stubborn, beautiful masochism. It was my own personal evolution.

Honestly, I miss the athletes most. Their ridiculous optimism, standing by them in solidarity after tough losses, their unwavering trust, their savage work ethics.

Step into this life holding nothing too tightly in your clenched fist. Be ready to learn and receive from a place of curiosity rather than judgment. Be a student of the chaos, not its critic.

There will be things in life that are difficult, and others that are refreshing.

You’ll go through chapters and, at the end, do your best Tiger Woods fist shake. You know the one. It’s his sacred flex. The seismic twitch that tells everyone, “I own this moment”.

Other times, you’ll mutter under your breath, “This is all a bunch of cosmic horseshit.” You’ll want to hang it up. Close the book. Set fire to the shelf.

Honestly, I hope you get to experience both.

I have to remember that I both transcend and include. The truth is, everything that occurred before has conspired, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes clumsily, to make me who I am today, and it lingers like an old cologne. Faint but familiar. What happened before doesn’t keep me from growth. It is a part of me that I now celebrate with the serene resignation of someone who’s endured the brutality of adolescence and every version of themselves that tried to find their purpose before 25, because I understand it was steps down the path to who I am and where I find myself today.

We all have a story.

Yours is yours.

Mine is mine.

You sit where you are now, reading ramblings masquerading as meaning, this black text on a glowing screen.

Every athlete I’ve worked with wants to perform at their highest level, but in order to enter the elusive state of flow (aka the zone) you must first master the art of slowing the mental game. I recently talked to a college player who said, "I know I’m the best on the floor, but I get in my own way." More and more athletes are stepping into a new way of working on their mentality. There’s a quiet shift happening. A move away from "tough players win" toward the realization that those fully living in the moment are the ones who find a way to dominate. Yet slowing the mind remains a maddening paradox, like trying to fall asleep by trying harder, only to push it further out of reach.

It is inexorable. The path is relentless.

At some point in your journey as an athlete, you'll face the choice of what to dedicate yourself to. Every year several athletes approach me with some version of this question… should I stop playing this sport so I can throw all my efforts into the one I love the most?

I answer with the very words my dear man Rob Bell once told me, “…you can do whatever you want to do.”

Too often we hear great things from great people in life and we cling to their perspective as our own without ever stepping back to examine whether or not it fits. Years go by before we realize the very thing we see the world through has skewed our perspective on this life. And we end up down a path we never wanted to walk.

Athletes tune in for a second.

The real truth here is you can decide to do whatever you want.

If you’re an athlete, you’re a machine when it comes to suffering. You’ll lace up for another brutal hill sprint with blood in your mouth and call it therapy. You’ll train until the floor starts breathing, just to get 100 more makes. Over the years you’ve made friends with the pain. You gave it a nickname, tucked it in at night, and called it growth. You know the body keeps the score, and you want to be on the scoreboard.It drains you of excuses, of illusions, of the cozy blanket you wrapped around your comfort zones. And you show up everyday for more.

We all know the work is hard. It’s soul scraping, bone aching hard. Like getting a liver punch by your own potential, repeatedly, all while smiling for the camera.

Underperforming comes with luggage. And it’s not a carry-on.

We (coaches, parents, athletes) tote this luggage replete with the history of our story. Dragging it from home to practice, practice to home, home to competition, competition to home.

It is tethered around our waist and we lug it everywhere we trudge.

Some of these items are our own.

Some items have been handed to us by others and are not ours to carry.

The articles occupying space in our soul were an unkind gift given to us at some point in our story.

When we value who someone is, we value them entirely. Not as a utility, not as a reflection of our pride, but as themselves. Fully.

No conditions.

No agenda.

No performance bonuses.

No unreadable fine print.

Just pure, simple support and love. The kind of love that doesn’t clock in or out.

But when we value someone for what they are, a title, a role, or a highlight reel, we aren't loving a person true to their full identity. We're applauding a performance. And in doing so, we unwittingly teach them that their worth lives in the product, not the producer.

After years of sitting in the trenches of deep conversation with people scattered across the vast spectrum of ambition, goals, anxiety, insecurity, pain, doubt, and performance paralysis, I’ve come to believe one thing with unshakable certainty:

What people crave in the depths of their being most isn’t reaching a goal. It’s to be seen. To be heard. To be loved, supported,  and empowered to be the best version of themselves.

To truly see someone, to hold space in a way that makes them feel like their existence isn’t just tolerated, but respected, requires something radical. A heart steeped not in agenda, but in something softer, bare-boned.

Being content with your skill level today isn't complacency, it’s strategy. It’s the conscious decision to anchor your mind in the present, standing on the shoulders of every gritty, unglamorous, unseen day you've stacked before this one.

It’s not as if your life is a movie with a rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The pursuit of mastery isn’t born in a grand cinematic moment of glory. It’s built in the quiet repetition of showing up when no one’s watching.

My route to coaching wasn’t the same as most-there was no childhood dream, no coaching ladder climbed with a whistle in hand. Coaching was never part of my post college five-year plan. Neither was it the stranger softly knocking on my door asking for a moment of my time. It just barged in one day and said, “You’re doing this now.”

So when I landed in the muddy trenches of the coaching world, I quickly realized my approach didn’t quite… match the wallpaper. While others were focused on upholding the tradition passed down from generations before, I kept hearing this rebellious whisper in my head:

“But we don’t have to do it that way.”

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of work to become an expert. I don’t know how many hours I’ve logged in this work, but I’ve loved every second. Or at least, I’ve convinced myself I have—because if I stopped to count, I might start questioning my sanity.

The truth is, the behind-the-scenes isn’t glamorous. It’s not dopamine. It’s not dopamine’s cousin. It’s spreadsheets at midnight, a wall of research papers that don’t know how to shut up, and the existential weight of athletes trusting you with their minds.