Early in my coaching career, before a game against a team that was clearly better than us, I gave the speech. The amped-up one. We believe in ourselves. We want it more. Tomorrow is “our day dammit!”
We were down five before the first quarter ended.
I remember standing there watching it unravel and feeling something else unravel with it — not just the game plan, but my own credibility. The team could tell the difference between a coach who believed in them and a coach who was hoping out loud. Hope isn’t a strategy. And once they catch you selling it, they stop buying anything else you say.
The speech, I came to understand, was standing in for something I hadn’t built yet. I’d been a good player. I didn’t yet know how to be a good coach — how to see the game from outside it, how to teach the concepts that actually mattered, how to use practice time so that every minute was purposeful. How to build a culture, not just a roster. That took years to learn. The rah-rah talk was what I reached for in the meantime, because I didn’t yet have anything truer to say.
What changed, once I’d done that work, was that I stopped needing the speech at all. I could remind them of all the sprints they’d run. The film session where they finally saw what they’d been doing wrong. All the practice. I could tell them they already had what the moment required, because we had spent months building it on purpose. Hope had been replaced by something we’d actually made.
I learned this lesson again, far more painfully, as a caregiver — except I didn’t learn it in time to use it. Eight treatments. Thirteen months. Every one of them failed, and every single time I was certain, eternally hopeful, that this would be the one that worked. I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t trained for it. My only instinct was the old one — try harder, endure, push through — and that instinct cost me.
It was after she was gone that I found what I’d been missing. Mindfulness. Meditation. Sitting still on purpose, not because anything was wrong, but because by then I knew something eventually would be. I wish I’d started years earlier. So I started, with whatever time is left, instead of waiting for the next thing to force my hand.
What I learned is that there’s a softer way through. Not endurance as a brute-force exercise, but something practiced daily, in small amounts, long before the day requires it. A few minutes of sitting still. Noticing the breath, the body, the mind doing what minds do. Taking care of yourself — actually eating, actually sleeping, actually resting — not as a reward for getting through it, but as part of getting through it.”
Stepping outside helps too. The birds talking to each other, the breeze doing what it does, the particular color a sunset turns when you actually watch it instead of glancing at it. There’s something in that kind of mindful attention that opens a door hoping never does. Chop wood, carry water — the old teaching was never really about wood or water. It was about doing the basic, unglamorous thing every day, on purpose, until you’re someone who can. It takes the development of focus, of steadiness. Recognizing false hope while still holding something real. Not gripping the outcome so hard that losing it breaks you.
There’s a name for this, from an unlikely source — a businessman’s account of a prisoner of war. The Stockdale Paradox holds two things at once: unwavering faith that you’ll come through, and total honesty about how hard it is right now. Stockdale noticed something telling about who didn’t survive captivity. It wasn’t the ones with faith. It was the ones who’d quietly swapped faith for a deadline — out by spring, then by fall, then by spring again — and ran out of road every time the date came and went. He never set one. He just never stopped believing, and as hard as the moment was, he stayed in it. (More here.)
If you’re in it right now — and a few of you reading this, I know you are, because we’ve been on the phone — the diagnosis, the treatment, the call you didn’t want to make: I’m not going to tell you it’ll be fine. I don’t know that. Neither do you. But the hope that holds isn’t the hope that promises an ending. It’s the quieter kind, built one day at a time, long before you needed it.
You have more of it than you think.
— 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
