A note: Written during playoff season — NHL, NBA, NCAA and ISL lacrosse — when mistakes are most costly, and how players and coaches respond to them most revealing. Publishing on a Saturday morning because it’s game day!

The pass sails wide and out of bounds. Your head drops. Now your opponent is on the move.

The voice comes next — it always does. You suck. You can’t make that pass. What is wrong with you? Fast and familiar, like it’s been waiting.

Here’s what thirty-five years of watching players has taught me — and what I learned as a player myself, standing on a field with that voice screaming: it isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens next. Whether you become it.

Because you can. It’s easy. I’ve done it many times, on and off the field. You merge with the voice, wear it like a jersey, carry it up the field. The next play starts and you’re still back there, still in the moment of the missed pass, still agreeing with the prosecution. And you sink.

Or you don’t.

You hear it — you can’t not hear it — but you watch it the way you’d watch a cloud move. Like an object. There it is. And then you return. To your feet on the ground. To the field. To the game that is already, always, happening right now.

That return is the whole thing. Not the mistake. Not the absence of the voice. The refusal to live inside it. The awareness that the game is only happening right now. This is your time.

The energy of the mistake doesn’t disappear. It converts. That’s the alchemy — lead into gold, regret into the energy that drives the next play. Perhaps with a little more accumulated wisdom.

Keep playing. Feel your feet on the ground. Come back into your body. You can’t think your way through the game — you have to play through it. Respond naturally, as you’ve been trained. Your body knows.

The game is a good teacher that way. And the practice doesn’t stay on the field — it can’t. The same voice shows up everywhere. So does the choice.

— Pete

Notes arrive on Sundays and some Wednesdays

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About me, and Practice Notes → here 
About Integrative Coaching → here 
About my book, The Why of Sports → here