Presence Beyond the Shoreline

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. We preach from dry land about identity, mindset, performance, as if clarity only exists in the oxygenated air above the surface.

But performance doesn’t happen on the shoreline.
It happens in the turbulence.
In the silent undercurrents of self talk.
In the murkiness of pressure and implied expectation.
In the invincible, and at times unobtainable, rhythm of flow.
Trying to explain water from the shore is like explaining gravity by handing a textbook to someone mid freefall.
They’re not reading.
They’re plummeting.

Confusing distance for objectivity is the classic philosophical error.
We’ve convinced ourselves that being removed from a situation gives us clarity.
But detachment isn’t clarity, it’s just disconnection in a lab coat.
I wonder what would happen if we stepped into the more courageous act of proximity?
Meeting people where they are, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
To sit with them in the unknown.
To feel the real weight of their doubt.
To learn to speak their language, not just translate it into sports psychology babble.

Athletes don’t need another lecture. They’ve seen enough hype videos and heard enough anger fueld post game rants from coaches and parents to cover whatever we’d say anyway.
They need presence. Not a perfectly manicured sermon.

They just need you.

They don’t need a calculated breakdown of their psyche from your safe perch above the chaos.
They need someone who knows the difference between talking about pressure and bleeding in the middle of it.
Someone soaked, not dry.

The satire is that we build entire frameworks around mental performance as if the athlete isn’t already performing.
We forget the complexity. The absurdity.
While we theorize flow, they’re in the trenches, bleeding it in real time.
There are those who talk about performance. And there are those who risk everything to actually do it.
Our job is to stay grounded in the presence of their lived experience.

The fish knows the water. He lives in it every second of every day.
So maybe the goal isn’t to define it. Maybe it never was.
Maybe the goal is to remember, with them, how suddenly the waters can rise.
How drowning can look like dancing from a safe distance.
And to finally quit pretending we’re lifeguards scanning the surface and admit: we’ve choked on it too.