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The Boston Red Sox started this season 32–46. Then they went 32–5.

As a baseball statistic, that turnaround is extraordinary. As a performance lesson, it is even more interesting.

Boston went from a season that appeared effectively dead to one of the most remarkable recoveries in baseball. They fought their way all the way back into the postseason. Then Wednesday night, it ended brutally. The Yankees swept them in two games and outscored them 18–2.

Months of recovery, 32 wins in 37 games, a 15-game winning streak, another nine-game winning streak, and a postseason berth almost nobody would have predicted when Boston was 32–46 — and then two nights later, it was over.

There is a lesson in that, and it is much more useful than never give up.

We like comeback stories because we think we know how they are supposed to end. The struggling athlete finds another gear. The injured player returns. The losing team discovers itself. The person everybody counted out refuses to disappear. Then comes the triumphant finish.

Except sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes you do everything necessary to get back in the game and then you still lose. That is what makes resilience difficult. Resilience is not a bargain you make with the universe. You don’t get to say: I endured this. I fought back. I worked harder. I refused to quit. Therefore, I am owed the ending I wanted.

You aren’t.

Neither is a team. Neither is an athlete. Neither is a business owner. Neither is anyone trying to rebuild a life.

What resilience gives you is not a guaranteed outcome. It gives you another opportunity.

At 32–46, Boston could have folded. Instead, the Red Sox changed the trajectory of their season. That is what resilience can do. It can put you somewhere you never would have reached if you had quit.

Boston’s 32–5 run took a team seemingly headed nowhere and put it in the postseason. That accomplishment does not become meaningless because the postseason ended badly. It proves something important: you can completely change where you are going without gaining control over everything that happens when you get there.

That distinction matters because performance is not about controlling outcomes. It is about increasing possibilities. The work gets you back onto the field. The preparation gives you another opportunity. The recovery creates another chance. The comeback keeps doors open that quitting would have closed permanently.

Then you still have to play the game.

There is another lesson buried in this Red Sox season, and it is one that athletes learn over and over again. Momentum is not stored in a bank.

Boston’s extraordinary summer did not give the Red Sox postseason credit they could cash in later. They couldn’t carry ten of those 32 wins into Yankee Stadium. They couldn’t say, We won 15 straight in July, so give us three runs tonight.

Every competition resets the scoreboard.

So does life.

Yesterday’s discipline helps build you. Yesterday’s success teaches you. Yesterday’s adversity can make you stronger. But eventually you arrive at another moment that asks a much less sentimental question: What can you do now?

That is why sustained excellence is so difficult. The comeback and the continuation require different skills. Getting yourself out of the hole may require urgency, courage and belief. Staying at the top requires consistency, adaptation and the ability to perform after the emotional rush of the comeback is gone. Those are not always the same challenge.

The Red Sox should be disappointed. Of course they should be. They were not trying to produce an inspirational story. They were trying to win the World Series.

But disappointment is not the same thing as failure.

This is where athletes, coaches, leaders, business owners and the rest of us sometimes get trapped. We reduce everything to the final result. Won or lost. Succeeded or failed. Made it or didn’t.

But performance development lives in everything underneath that final score.

Did you become stronger? Did you develop skills you didn’t have? Did you learn what you’re capable of? Did you respond differently when things went wrong? Did you build something you can carry forward? Did you discover that the situation you thought was impossible wasn’t impossible at all?

Those gains don’t disappear because the scoreboard wasn’t kind.

I’ve coached athletes long enough to know how tempting it is to celebrate getting back as though getting back were the finish line. It isn’t.

Returning from injury isn’t the finish. Breaking a losing streak isn’t the finish. Recovering your confidence isn’t the finish. Getting your business moving again isn’t the finish. Rebuilding your health isn’t the finish. Getting yourself out of a terrible chapter in your life isn’t the finish.

Those things get you back in the game.

Then another game begins.

That is why Strong Dynamics has never really been about pretending adversity makes everything wonderful. Sometimes adversity is simply awful. Sometimes you claw your way back and still don’t get what you wanted.

But the ability to come back changes you, and it changes what becomes possible next.

Boston’s 2026 season is over, but the Red Sox now know something they did not know when they were 32–46. They know what this group can look like when it clicks. They know they can recover from circumstances that appear almost unrecoverable. They also know that the comeback itself wasn’t enough.

That is useful information for a baseball team, for an athlete, and for any of us.

A comeback doesn’t guarantee the ending you wanted. It gives you the chance to still be there when the ending is written.

And when that ending hurts, the next challenge is not pretending it didn’t. It is taking everything you learned from the comeback and using it when you begin again.

Resilience is not only mental. Sleep, nutrition, recovery, stress physiology, strength and metabolic health all affect how well we perform and how well we recover.

That is the side of the conversation I explore at TotalWellCoach.com — whole-person health, healthy aging, nutrition, supplementation, stress, sleep and the biology underneath how we feel and function.

Here at Strong Dynamics, I keep asking the other half of the question:

What do we do with ourselves when the game gets hard?

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There is an exercise in The Art of Possibility called “Giving an A” that I have been thinking about differently lately.

The important part is not earning the A.

The important part is getting the A before you begin.

That sounds almost backward. Most of us have spent our entire lives being taught that the grade comes after the performance. Do the work. Take the test. Prove yourself. Then somebody decides whether you were good enough.

Giving yourself the A turns that around.

You begin by deciding that the result is settled.

I am an A student. I have already earned the A.

Now there is nothing left to prove.

What remains is a much more interesting question: What did the person who earned that A actually do?

That question has been following me around because I am reinventing a surprising amount of my life at once. I am building businesses and publications. I am writing and making music. I am looking seriously at my finances. I am clearing a house that has accumulated decades of things. I am thinking about loneliness, connection, purpose, work, money, aging and what I want my life to look like by my birthday next June.

The old way of thinking would have me ask whether I can pull all of that off.

The A removes the question.

I already did.

So now I get to look backward from six months in the future and figure out how.

That is a very different mental position.

When you are trying to prove yourself, every setback becomes evidence. You miss a day and think maybe you are not disciplined. Something does not sell and maybe the business idea was foolish. You spend more than you intended and suddenly you are “bad with money.” You look at a cluttered room and decide you will never get through it.

You are constantly collecting evidence for the prosecution.

But if the A is already yours, a bad day is simply a bad day.

It does not get to redefine you.

You ask a different question: What would the A student do next?

She might make the phone call.

She might open the bill instead of avoiding it.

She might raise the price.

She might throw away the thing she has moved from one room to another for fifteen years.

She might ask somebody for help.

She might stop giving hours of work away because asking to be paid makes her uncomfortable.

She might admit that she is lonely and call somebody.

She might rest because exhaustion is not evidence of commitment.

She might stop pouring energy into something that is neither meaningful nor productive simply because she has already invested time in it.

This is why I think identity matters so much in performance.

We tend to think behavior creates identity. Sometimes it does. But identity can also organize behavior.

If I tell myself, “I am trying to become financially secure,” there is still uncertainty built into the sentence.

If I write from six months in the future and say, “I became financially secure enough to breathe again,” I have created a different problem for my brain to solve.

How did I do it?

Now I can work backward.

I stopped adding debt. I knew exactly what I owed. I paid aggressively. I increased income. I asked to be paid fairly. I stopped scattering my attention across work that produced neither income nor meaning. I built savings. I prepared instead of panicked.

The same thing works with the house.

Instead of, “I need to get rid of all this clutter,” the future version of me says, “My house has space again.”

How?

She stopped trying to organize everything she owned. She got rid of things. She sold some. Donated some. Threw some away. She stopped keeping objects for imaginary versions of her future life.

That is actionable.

Even loneliness looks different from the future.

“My life feels more connected.”

How?

She reached out. She accepted some invitations. She made some. She told people she missed them. She became more selective about the difference between having people around and actually feeling connected to them.

The A does not eliminate the work.

It eliminates the argument about whether you are capable of doing the work.

That may be its real power.

I have also realized that the A does not require perfection. That would defeat the purpose. The future version of me undoubtedly made mistakes during those six months. She wasted time. She bought something she should not have bought. She procrastinated. She had days when she accomplished almost nothing. She probably started things she later abandoned.

None of those things revoked the A.

She adjusted.

That is another difference between confidence and perfectionism. Perfectionism says one mistake calls the whole enterprise into question. Confidence says the destination has not changed, so figure out the next move.

I find that especially interesting at my age.

We talk endlessly about reinvention when people are young. Reinvention at 25 is practically expected. Reinvention at 40 gets called a second act.

As we get older, people can start behaving as though the story has already been written.

I do not accept that.

I am not pretending age is irrelevant. It is not. Time is more valuable because there is less of it. Energy has to be managed more carefully. Some opportunities are gone.

But other things are available to me now that were not available decades ago.

Experience.

Pattern recognition.

Perspective.

A much better understanding of what matters.

And a rapidly diminishing interest in spending precious time trying to impress people who have no meaningful role in my life.

Those are assets.

So I wrote myself the letter.

I dated it March 25, 2027.

In that letter, I am debt-free except for my mortgage. I have savings. I have steady income above Social Security. My house has space again. My work supports me instead of draining me. I am more connected to people. I am still writing, creating, coaching and participating in the world around me.

I already know the ending.

Now I have six months to discover exactly how I got there.

And that may be the point.

The A was never waiting for me at the finish line.

I had it when I started.

Try It Yourself

Pick a date six months from now. Give yourself the A. Do not qualify it. Do not write down all the reasons you might fail. Do not make yourself earn permission to imagine something better.

Then become your future self for a few pages.

Tell yourself what happened.

What did you stop doing? What did you begin? What did you finally face? What did you learn? What did you ask for? What did you walk away from? What did you build? What did you discover you were capable of?

Do not write the plan from where you are now.

Write the story from the place where it already worked.

Then come back to today and begin.

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Strong Dynamics is about what happens between deciding something is possible and actually doing it. I write here about mindset, identity, confidence, resilience, focus, performance and the stories we tell ourselves before we ever take the first step.

I am also writing about the broader building and maintenance of the human body and function at TotalWellCoach,com, where I look at health, stress, aging, relationships, environment, behavior and the practical realities that affect how well we live.

If you are rebuilding something too — your work, your health, your confidence, your finances, your purpose, or simply your belief that there is still more ahead of you — join my community. We can find out together what happens when we stop waiting to feel ready and start living like the A is already ours.

Subscribe, free or paid if you want to support my work, comment and share. It all helps!

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On June 24, the Boston Red Sox were 32–46. They were 15½ games out of first place in the American League East, six games out of a Wild Card spot, and eight teams stood between Boston and postseason position. If you looked at the standings that morning, there was plenty of evidence supporting one very reasonable conclusion: this season wasn’t going anywhere.

Three months later, the Red Sox are going to October.

On September 20, Boston clinched a postseason berth. Along the way, the Red Sox became the first team in Major League Baseball history to lose 46 of its first 78 games and still finish with a winning record.

There is a lesson buried inside those numbers that has very little to do with baseball.

The Score Tells You Where You Are, Not Where You Have to Finish

One of the most dangerous things we do when we’re struggling is turn a current condition into a permanent conclusion. We look at the scoreboard, the bank account, the scale, the business numbers, the relationship, the diagnosis, the race standings or the collection of mistakes behind us, and we decide that what is must also be what will be.

I’m behind, therefore I can’t catch up. I failed, therefore I’m a failure. I’m losing, therefore I’ve lost. This isn’t working, therefore it will never work.

But 32–46 was a score. It wasn’t a prophecy.

That record accurately described what had already happened to the Red Sox. Forty-six losses were real, and none of them could be taken off the board. But the record contained absolutely no information about what Boston was going to do on June 25.

The next game hadn’t been played yet.

You Don’t Have to Fix the Whole Season Today

This is where people often get overwhelmed. We see the size of the hole and think we somehow have to climb out of the entire thing at once. The distance between 32–46 and October looks enormous when you stare at it from the bottom.

The Red Sox couldn’t wake up on June 25 and erase 46 losses. They couldn’t replay April, fix May or go back and make June different. Those games were over. All they could control was what happened next.

So they played the Yankees.

Boston swept all four games at Fenway. Then the Red Sox kept playing. In July, they put together a 15-game winning streak that tied the franchise record. After that streak ended, they kept playing.

Eventually Boston produced the best 30-game stretch in Red Sox history, going 27–3. From June 25 through August 7, a team that had begun the year 32–46 went 32–5.

Same season. Same organization. Many of the same players.

A completely different trajectory.

Momentum Doesn’t Arrive Before You Move

We talk about momentum as though it is some mysterious force that arrives and carries successful people along with it. More often, momentum begins much less dramatically.

You do the next thing.

Then you do it again.

You get one result that is slightly better than the last one. That gives you a little evidence that change might actually be possible. Your confidence increases, your decisions improve, other people begin responding differently to you, and the evidence starts accumulating in a new direction.

The Red Sox couldn’t think their way out of 32–46. They couldn’t talk their way out of it either. They had to play their way out, one game at a time, until the standings finally reflected what they had been building.

That’s one of the most important principles in performance psychology: confidence doesn’t always have to come first. Sometimes action comes first, evidence follows, and confidence grows because you have finally given yourself a reason to believe again.

A Bad Chapter Is Not the Ending

This applies far beyond sports. There are seasons in life when the numbers really are bad, and resilience does not require pretending otherwise.

Maybe you’re behind financially. Maybe your business isn’t working the way you thought it would. Maybe your body isn’t performing the way it once did. Maybe you’ve lost your confidence after a failure, rejection, injury or long period of struggle. Maybe you’ve invested months or years in something and have very little to show for it.

Looking at the scoreboard isn’t pessimism. It’s information.

The mistake is deciding the scoreboard also knows the future.

There is enormous power in being able to look directly at 32–46 and say, Okay. That’s where I am.

Then ask the only question that can actually change anything:

What do I do next?

Perfection Was Never the Requirement

Last week, Red Sox rookie Payton Tolle gave us an almost absurd example of baseball perfection. He opened a game against Kansas City with an immaculate inning: nine pitches, nine strikes and three strikeouts.

For one inning, everything worked.

But nobody gets an immaculate season.

Sports don’t work that way, businesses don’t work that way, relationships don’t work that way, and lives certainly don’t work that way. Most meaningful accomplishments include mistakes, bad stretches, injuries, wrong turns, losses, failures and moments when absolutely nothing seems to be working.

Mental toughness isn’t pretending those things don’t hurt. It is refusing to turn them into an identity.

You can have a terrible inning without being a terrible pitcher. You can have a losing stretch without being a loser. You can be 32–46 without knowing how the season ends.

Stay in the Game

When the Red Sox finally clinched their postseason berth Sunday, “Stayin’ Alive” was playing in the clubhouse. The joke almost writes itself, but underneath it is the entire lesson of the season.

Sometimes staying alive is the strategy.

You don’t need to know today how you’re going to get all the way from where you are to where you want to be. You need enough discipline, courage and patience to stay in the game long enough to take the next meaningful action.

Then you take another.

There is no guarantee that every comeback ends in October. Sometimes the hole really is too deep, the clock does run out or the goal has to change. Resilience isn’t a promise that persistence always produces the outcome you wanted.

It is the refusal to declare the ending before you have actually reached it.

On June 24, the Boston Red Sox were 32–46.

On September 20, they were spraying champagne.

32–46 was the score. It wasn’t the prophecy.

Whatever your scoreboard says today, look at it. Learn from it. Respect what it tells you.

Then decide what you are going to do next.

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Strong Dynamics is about performance, resilience, mindset and what happens when the game — or life — doesn’t go according to plan. It is about developing the mental skills to compete, recover, adapt, lead and Get Back in the Game. 🎶

If those are conversations you want to be part of, subscribe and join the Strong Dynamics community. I’ll be writing about athletes, teams, coaches, leadership, performance psychology and the lessons sports can teach us long after the final whistle.

If this work gives you something useful to carry into your own sport, business, leadership or life, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions help support the time and work that go into building Strong Dynamics and allow me to keep more of this writing available to everyone.

Sources

Major League Baseball, “’Stayin’ Alive!’ Red Sox clinch postseason spot that once seemed improbable,” September 20, 2026.

Major League Baseball, “What’s behind the Red Sox’s midseason surge?” July 20, 2026.

Major League Baseball, “He knew! Tolle cracks smile before capping immaculate inning,” September 14, 2026.

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Colin Kaepernick still gets up before dawn to train for a job he hasn’t had in nearly ten years.

That stopped me when I heard it. His last NFL game was in January 2017. He had already taken a team to the Super Bowl. Then he knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, became one of the most polarizing athletes in America, and eventually found himself outside the league altogether.

Now, almost a decade later, his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, arrives at a remarkably interesting moment. Kaepernick is back talking publicly about what happened to him, what it cost him and what he believes the NFL owners were protecting when they decided there was no longer a place for him.

Meanwhile, he is still training.

He told Men’s Health that he gets up around 4:30 or 5 in the morning and works out five days a week. Sprinting. Plyometrics. Strength training. Quarterback work. He is 38 years old and has not taken an NFL snap in nearly ten years, but he still wants to be ready if the opportunity comes.

Some people will hear that and think he should have moved on years ago.

I hear something different.

Who Gets to Decide When You Are Finished?

We spend a lot of time talking about resilience as though it means bouncing back quickly. Lose the job, get another one. Lose the game, win the next one. Get knocked down, stand back up.

Life usually isn’t that tidy.

Sometimes the next opportunity doesn’t come. Sometimes the phone doesn’t ring. Sometimes you never get the explanation or apology you think you deserve. The people who closed the door move on with their lives while you are left standing on the other side trying to figure out who you are without the thing you spent years becoming.

That is what makes Kaepernick interesting to me now.

Football wasn’t simply something he did. He spent much of his life becoming a quarterback. Then that identity collided with something else he believed mattered enough to risk it.

We can argue forever about the politics of what he did. America already has.

The more interesting Strong Dynamics question is what happens after you make the choice and discover the price was real.

What do you do when conviction costs you something you actually wanted?

The Price of Not Falling in Line

The timing of Kaepernick’s book makes that question even harder to ignore.

This week, while discussing the controversy involving Macklemore, Ed Sheeran and Robert Kraft, Kaepernick pointed directly back toward the power structure he says pushed him out of professional football.

Kraft acknowledged barring Macklemore from performing at Gillette Stadium after objecting to the artist’s political statements. Sheeran has said the decision was made by promoters and venues rather than by him. Kaepernick, speaking with MeidasTouch, described what happened as NFL owners “openly colluding.”

Whatever eventually comes of that particular dispute, you can understand why Kaepernick sees an echo.

A performer says something powerful people dislike. Access to the stage suddenly becomes conditional.

Kaepernick has lived that story.

And nearly ten years later, he is watching another version of the argument unfold around some of the same enormously wealthy institutions.

That feels remarkably full circle.

But the lesson isn’t that Kaepernick was right about everything or that everyone needs to agree with Macklemore. That would be too easy, and it would miss what interests me here.

The lesson is that occasionally life puts a very expensive question in front of us:

How much are you willing to surrender to keep your place in the room?

I wrote a song called Do the Right Thing, even when it costs you and even when they mock you.

Most of us will never answer that question with an NFL career on the line. But we answer smaller versions of it all the time.

We stay quiet in meetings. We negotiate against ourselves before anyone has even said no. We tolerate behavior because we are afraid of losing a relationship. We make ourselves smaller because somebody else controls the paycheck, the opportunity, the invitation or the next step.

Sometimes compromise is necessary. Adults compromise constantly.

But there is a line somewhere between compromise and abandoning yourself.

Kaepernick decided where his line was.

And then he had to live with what happened next.

When the Thing You Were Becomes the Thing You Used to Be

This is the part nobody prepares us for.

One day you are the quarterback.

Then you used to be the quarterback.

You are the executive, until you used to run the company. You are married, until you used to be somebody’s spouse. You are the parent raising five children, until the house gets quieter and the children have lives of their own. You are the athlete until your body says otherwise. You are the person everyone depends on until suddenly they don’t.

Those transitions can shake us because we confuse our roles with ourselves.

We say, I am a nurse. I am a coach. I am a CEO. I am a wife. I am an athlete.

Then life takes away the noun.

What remains?

Kaepernick’s answer, apparently, has been to keep working.

That doesn’t mean sitting by the phone for ten years. His life didn’t stop when football did. He built organizations, created publishing ventures, supported community programs and continued his activism.

But he also kept training.

I find that fascinating because there is an important difference between waiting and staying ready.

Waiting puts your life in somebody else’s hands.

Staying ready keeps it in yours.

Getting Back in the Game May Not Mean Going Back

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of getting back in the game. I even wrote a song about it called Get Back in the Game.

But Kaepernick’s story reminded me that getting back in the game doesn’t necessarily mean getting back into the same game.

We have a tendency to measure a comeback by whether someone recovers what they lost. The old job. The relationship. The money. The position. The status. The career.

Sometimes that happens.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Maybe the harder comeback is building a meaningful life even when the old door never opens again.

Maybe you keep training because being ready matters to you, not because somebody has guaranteed you another chance.

Maybe you discover that the discipline developed for one field becomes useful somewhere completely different.

And maybe someday the phone rings.

If it does, you are ready.

If it doesn’t, you haven’t spent the last decade letting somebody else’s decision determine whether you kept growing.

They Don’t Get to Write the Last Chapter

People are remarkably comfortable deciding when somebody else’s story is finished.

Too old.

Too controversial.

Too difficult.

Too much time has passed.

Nobody wants you anymore.

Move on.

Kaepernick has certainly heard all of that.

Yet here he is, nearly ten years removed from his final NFL game, publishing a book called The Perilous Fight, talking publicly again about what happened, watching the argument over speech, power and access circle back through the league he left behind — and getting up before dawn to train.

Maybe he never plays another NFL down.

That doesn’t erase the lesson.

You cannot control whether somebody hires you, signs you, promotes you, chooses you, forgives you or finally admits they underestimated you.

You can control whether you are ready for whatever comes next.

You can also decide that the people who shut one door do not get ownership of the rest of your story.

Sometimes getting back in the game means somebody finally lets you back onto their field.

And sometimes it means realizing you don’t need their field anymore.

You can build your own.

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StrongDynamics.com is about what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan — when the career changes, the relationship ends, the opportunity disappears or somebody else decides your moment has passed.

It is about what we do next.

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A free subscription brings every new Strong Dynamics article directly to you and helps this community grow. If you are able to become a paid subscriber, your support makes it possible for me to keep doing this work and writing about resilience, leadership, performance, identity and what it really takes to get back in the game.

Free or paid, I want you on the team.

Because somebody else may get to close a door.

They do not get to decide when your story is over.

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There is a peculiar kind of pride attached to being tired. Athletes train early and stay late. Coaches watch one more hour of film. Executives answer emails long after everyone else has gone home. Nurses, first responders, entrepreneurs and parents become very good at functioning when their bodies would rather be asleep.

We often call that commitment, and sometimes it is. The problem begins when we confuse the ability to endure exhaustion with the ability to perform well while exhausted.

Those are two very different things.

A determined person can refuse to complain about being tired. An athlete can still show up for practice, a coach can still stand behind the bench and a leader can still walk into the meeting. Discipline can get the body into the room.

What discipline cannot do is make a sleep-deprived brain behave exactly like a rested one.

Functioning Is Not the Same as Performing

Sleep loss affects attention, vigilance, reaction time and concentration, but the consequences become even more important when the task requires judgment. Decision-making, working memory, emotional regulation and the ability to inhibit an impulsive response all depend on a brain that is receiving and processing information efficiently.

The tricky part is that sleep deprivation does not necessarily make a competent person suddenly look incompetent. Performance can become uneven instead. Someone may handle several difficult tasks perfectly well and then miss something surprisingly obvious. A coach may remember a complicated matchup and overlook the clock. A leader may make three thoughtful decisions and then become uncharacteristically impatient with the fourth.

That inconsistency is one of the reasons high performers can underestimate the effects of fatigue. They can point to everything they are still doing well as evidence that they are fine.

But being able to perform some tasks well does not mean the entire system is operating at full capacity.

Think About the Coach Behind the Bench

The final minutes of a close game provide a good example. A coach may be tracking the score, clock, personnel, matchups, timeouts, injuries and what the other team is likely to do next. At the same time, that coach is communicating with assistants, managing players’ emotions and trying to decide which pieces of information actually matter.

That is an extraordinary amount of cognitive work happening in real time.

Now add inadequate sleep.

The question is not whether an experienced coach can still coach while tired. Of course they can. The better question is whether the tired brain notices the same information, weighs it the same way and reacts with the same speed and flexibility it would have after adequate recovery.

Sometimes the difference may be tiny. In a close game, tiny differences are often the whole game.

Leadership Is Also a Cognitive Performance

We tend to talk about leadership as though it is primarily a matter of character. Integrity matters. Courage matters. Experience and preparation matter enormously.

But leadership also requires a functioning brain.

A leader has to absorb changing information, distinguish urgency from noise, regulate emotion, interpret other people accurately and make decisions without always having enough information. Then that decision has to be communicated in a way other people can understand and act upon.

Fatigue can interfere with every part of that process. A tired leader may become more reactive or less patient. Attention can narrow. Working memory can become less reliable. The first solution that comes to mind may feel more attractive simply because considering alternatives requires more cognitive effort.

Sometimes the exhausted leader does not make a dramatic mistake at all. They simply fail to notice something they normally would have caught.

That may be the more common cost of fatigue: not catastrophe, but a gradual erosion of the margin between adequate performance and excellent performance.

Athletes Understand Recovery—At Least in Theory

Modern sports take recovery seriously. Teams monitor workload. Strength programs build in rest. Athletes use wearables and track heart rate, training volume and readiness. We understand that muscles need time to recover from physical stress.

Yet sleep is still remarkably easy to sacrifice.

Travel ends late. Practice starts early. Young athletes have school. Adults have jobs. Screens stay on. Anxiety before competition makes sleep difficult, while adrenaline afterward can keep an athlete awake long after the game ends.

Then we expect the same reaction time, concentration, emotional regulation and physical recovery the next day.

If a strength coach deliberately shortened the recovery period between every set and watched performance deteriorate, nobody would call the athlete weak. We would change the training plan.

Sleep deserves the same logic.

The High Performer’s Trap

High performers may actually be more vulnerable to this mistake because they have spent years learning how to push through discomfort. That ability often helped them become successful. They know how to keep going when someone else stops, stay late after practice, finish the shift or make one more decision when they are already exhausted.

The problem is that a strength can become a liability when it is applied to the wrong problem.

Discipline can make you get out of bed after too little sleep. It cannot recreate the physiological recovery that was supposed to happen while you were in it. Mental toughness can help you tolerate fatigue, but it cannot guarantee that the decision you make while fatigued is identical to the one you would have made rested.

This is not an argument for becoming precious about sleep or believing that nobody should ever perform while tired. Real life does not work that way. Games go into overtime. Babies wake up. Flights are delayed. Emergencies happen. Deadlines arrive, and sometimes leadership means doing the job under less-than-ideal conditions.

That is precisely why recovery matters.

Resilience is not proving that you never need rest. It is building enough recovery into your life that you still have something available when life demands more than usual.

Rest Is Part of the Work

For athletes, sleep is part of training. For coaches, it is part of preparation. For executives and other leaders, it is part of decision-making. Anyone whose work requires judgment under pressure should think about sleep in the same way they think about every other tool that affects performance.

We have normalized exhaustion so thoroughly that busyness can almost become a status symbol. Being tired proves that we are needed, committed or working harder than everyone else.

Maybe that is the wrong scoreboard.

The goal is not to prove how much exhaustion you can tolerate. The goal is to be ready when your performance matters.

You can outprepare another person. You can outwork them. You may even be able to outlast them for a while.

But you cannot out-discipline biology.

The Health Side of the Story

Sleep deprivation does not stop affecting us when we leave the field, office or meeting room. Chronic inadequate sleep is also connected with metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, cardiovascular function, inflammation and the way we recover as we age.

I explore that side of the conversation in the companion article, “You Cannot Outrun Sleep Debt,” at TotalWellCoach.com.

Performance and health were never really separate conversations. We simply tend to notice the performance cost first when something important is on the line.

Sources

CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, Short Sleep Duration and Sleep Difficulties Among Adults: United States, 2024

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, How Sleep Works: Why Is Sleep Important?

American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Sleep Is Essential to Health

Examining the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Decision-Making: A Scoping Review

Sleep Loss, Decision-Making, and Executive Function

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Sean McDermott was fired by the Buffalo Bills back in January. What makes his story worth writing about now is what he said on September 4 about what he has been doing ever since.

That happened on January 19, two days after Buffalo lost 33–30 in overtime to Denver in the divisional round of the playoffs. By then McDermott had spent nine seasons in Buffalo, helped end a 17-year playoff drought, taken the Bills to the playoffs eight times and compiled a 98–50 regular-season record.

Those are not the numbers of a man who did not know how to coach.

And yet Buffalo fired him.

Bills owner Terry Pegula explained at the time that the organization needed a different leadership structure if it was going to reach what had remained stubbornly out of reach: the next level.

That is what makes McDermott interesting to me now.

Nearly eight months after his firing, he appeared on The Rich Eisen Show on Friday, September 4, and talked publicly about what he has been doing with the time since Buffalo let him go. He wants to coach in the NFL again. He still wants to win a championship. But rather than simply waiting for another team to call, he has been doing something every coach, executive and leader ought to pay attention to.

He has been investigating himself.

When What Worked Stops Working

I coached hockey for a lot of years, and there is an uncomfortable reality in coaching that eventually catches up with everyone: something can work very well and still stop being enough.

That is harder to accept than simple failure.

Failure gives you an obvious instruction. Something is broken; fix it.

Success is trickier because success reinforces what you have already been doing. The system worked. The team won. The organization grew. People praised your leadership. So you keep doing more of whatever produced the success.

Until one day it doesn’t produce enough of it.

McDermott did not inherit a Buffalo team cruising toward a Super Bowl. He helped turn the franchise around. The Bills became consistent winners under him. They made the postseason almost every year. They became a team everyone expected to contend.

But they could not get through the final door.

Eventually the standard changed.

Getting to the playoffs was no longer the accomplishment. Winning the division was no longer enough. Even winning 10, 11 or 12 games did not answer the only question Buffalo had left.

Can you get us to the Super Bowl?

McDermott never did.

There is a lesson in that far beyond football.

Sometimes your greatest professional danger is not being bad at what you do.

It is becoming very good at something that no longer gets you where you need to go.

The Blind Spots That Come With Leadership

On September 4, McDermott told Rich Eisen that during his time away he has gone back to people he trusts from inside the Bills organization and asked what he might not have seen while he was running it.

He described the process in terms of finding his blind spots.

That caught my attention because leaders accumulate blind spots almost by definition.

The higher you move in an organization, the farther you can become from the experience of the people doing the work. Information reaches you after passing through other people. Bad news gets softened. Employees become cautious. Players learn the coach’s moods. Staff members figure out which conversations are worth having and which are more trouble than they are worth.

Sometimes nobody has decided to deceive the leader. The organization simply begins adjusting itself around the leader’s personality.

Then the leader mistakes the adjusted environment for reality.

McDermott has talked about recognizing that his intense focus on the work of coaching may sometimes have come at the expense of connecting personally enough with players.

I understand how that happens.

The work can consume you precisely because you care so much about getting it right. You prepare more. You analyze more. You solve another problem. You watch more film. You develop another plan. From your own perspective, you are giving the team everything you have.

Meanwhile, somebody on that team may be experiencing you as increasingly distant.

Both things can be true.

That is one of the hardest lessons in leadership: your intentions and somebody else’s experience of your leadership are not necessarily the same thing.

Get Out of Your Own Building

McDermott has done something else during this forced break that I particularly like.

He went to other people’s training camps.

He spent time around Sean McVay and the Rams, John Harbaugh, Ben Johnson and Mike Macdonald, watching how other NFL coaches run their programs and looking for things he can learn from them.

Think about how difficult it is for a head coach to do that while he is actually coaching.

The NFL schedule barely leaves time to run your own operation, never mind wander into somebody else’s and observe it with fresh eyes. McDermott suddenly had something he had not possessed for nine years: distance.

Distance can hurt when it comes because somebody has just taken away the thing that defined your professional life.

It can also teach you.

I have always believed coaches should remain students. The minute you become convinced that your experience means there is nothing left for somebody else to teach you, you have probably already begun declining.

Experience should expand curiosity, not replace it.

There is always another way to run a practice. Another way to communicate. Another way to organize a staff. Another way to reach a player who does not respond to you. Another coach who sees something you have missed.

The same applies in business. In medicine. In teaching. In parenting. In almost any work involving other human beings.

You can have 30 years of experience and still be wrong this afternoon.

Success Is Sometimes the Thing You Have to Outgrow

There is a tendency after someone is fired to rewrite the entire story as failure.

That does not make sense here.

McDermott succeeded in Buffalo.

He also eventually got fired from Buffalo.

We should be able to hold those two ideas at the same time.

He helped build something that became good enough to expect more than he was ultimately able to deliver. In a strange way, the standard that cost him his job was partly a standard he helped create.

That happens elsewhere too.

A founder builds a company with sheer force of personality and then discovers that the same hands-on style that worked with 12 employees suffocates an organization of 500.

A manager gets promoted because she solves every problem herself and eventually discovers that senior leadership requires her to stop solving everything herself.

An athlete succeeds on talent until everyone else at the next level has talent too.

A person spends decades becoming exceptionally good at a career and then technology, economics, age or circumstance changes the game.

None of that means what came before was a mistake.

It means the next chapter requires something different.

That distinction matters, particularly for people going through reinvention. We tend to think change is required only when we have done something wrong.

Sometimes change is required because what we did right already did its job.

Game Film for Your Own Leadership

One of the best things about sports is that eventually you have to look at film.

Memory is generous to us. Film is not.

You remember what you meant to do. Film shows what happened.

You remember what you told the player. Film may show that your instruction was impossible to execute from the situation you put him in.

You remember the mistake that cost the game. Film may show five earlier mistakes that made that final play matter.

Good coaches do not watch film simply to find somebody to blame. They watch because the game contains information.

Leadership needs game film too.

Sometimes that means asking people who worked for you what they saw. Sometimes it means looking closely at who left your organization and why. Sometimes it means comparing what you thought you communicated with what people actually heard. Sometimes it means walking into another successful organization and resisting the urge to explain how you would do everything.

Just watch.

That appears to be what McDermott has been doing.

And there is something refreshing about a man who still clearly believes he can coach at the highest level being willing to entertain the possibility that the next version of Sean McDermott should not be identical to the last one.

The Coach Doesn’t Play the Game

I wrote here recently that the coach does not play the game. A coach prepares people to make decisions and perform when the coach cannot step onto the ice and do it for them.

There is another side to that.

Because the coach is not actually playing, he can never see the game exactly as the players do.

That is why listening matters.

Leadership gives you perspective, but it also creates distance. The trick is using the perspective without allowing the distance to make you blind.

McDermott may get another NFL head-coaching job. He may not. If he does, there is no guarantee that visiting successful coaches and examining his blind spots will produce a championship.

Leadership does not come with those kinds of guarantees.

But he has already done something important with what could easily have become seven months of resentment.

He turned it into study.

He went looking for what he did not know.

He asked other people what they could see that he could not.

And instead of treating 98 wins as evidence that he had nothing left to learn, he seems to be treating those wins as the foundation for whatever he learns next.

That is the lesson I want to carry beyond football.

What got you here does not have to have been wrong for it to be insufficient to get you there.

Sometimes the hardest part of getting back in the game is accepting that you cannot return as exactly the same person who left it.

That is what Strong Dynamics is becoming: a place where I can take what sports have taught me about coaching, competition, leadership, resilience, failure, success and starting over, and carry those lessons beyond the rink or the field.

If that sounds like a conversation you want to be part of, join my team here. Free subscribers help me build the community. Paid subscribers help me keep doing the work and give this new publication room to grow.

We’re just getting started.

Sources

Buffalo Bills, January 19, 2026 — announcement of Sean McDermott’s firing after nine seasons as head coach.

The Rich Eisen Show, September 4, 2026 — McDermott discussing his time away, lessons from his departure, and visits with other NFL coaches.

September 8 reporting on McDermott’s effort to identify his leadership blind spots and seek candid feedback from people inside the Bills organization.

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There are plenty of ways to get knocked out of the game, and most of them don’t come with a scoreboard.

Sometimes it’s a career that goes sideways. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s a marriage, a diagnosis, a rejection, or the slow accumulation of years when you were busy taking care of everybody else and suddenly look up wondering where your own plans went.

That is what I kept thinking about when I wrote Get Back in the Game.

The song is upbeat, fast and full of swagger, but the reason I wanted that sound was because I didn’t want to write another sad song about getting knocked down. I wanted to write about what comes after that. The moment when you stop staring at what happened and start deciding what you’re going to do with what’s left.

And what’s left can be a lot more than we think.

Nobody Gets Through Life Undefeated

One of the first lines in the song says:

Life’s got a funny way of keeping score
You win a few, then you’re flat on the floor.

That sounds almost playful when it’s sung over a driving beat, but there is some truth underneath it. Life can change very quickly. You can be doing fine and then suddenly find yourself trying to understand how everything got rearranged.

Maybe you lose money. Maybe you lose friends. Maybe the thing you thought was permanent turns out not to be permanent at all.

The song gets more specific from there:

Maybe love left with half your stuff.

There are people who will hear that line and laugh because they know exactly what it means. There are others who will feel it land somewhere deeper.

A relationship ends and suddenly you are not only dealing with heartbreak. You are dealing with the house, the bills, the furniture, the routines, the future you thought you had, and the strange task of figuring out who you are now that the life you built has been split in two.

Then there is another line:

Maybe the doctor said words you feared.

That one doesn’t need much explanation.

There are sentences you hear in a doctor’s office that divide your life into before and after. You walk into the room as one person and walk out as somebody who has suddenly been handed a new reality.

The game changes.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the game is over.

Sometimes the Clock Is the Thing You’re Fighting

Another line in the song says:

Maybe you blinked and you lost ten years.

I think that may be one of the quieter truths in the song.

Most people don’t deliberately lose ten years. They spend them.

They raise children. They care for parents. They work jobs they don’t particularly love because somebody has to pay the mortgage. They get sick. They recover. They help somebody else recover. They survive a divorce. They build a business. They lose one. They put dreams on shelves because there are groceries to buy and people who need them.

Then one day they look around and think, Wait. Wasn’t I going to do something else too?

That is where age starts playing tricks on us.

We begin telling ourselves that we missed the window. Somebody younger got the opportunity. Somebody with a straighter career path got the job. Somebody who didn’t have to stop and start five times got farther down the road.

The song puts it this way:

Somebody younger stepped into your place.

That happens in sports, certainly, but it happens everywhere else too.

There is always somebody younger. Somebody faster. Somebody with a newer degree, a cleaner résumé, a bigger following, fewer wrinkles, fewer complications, or fewer years between where they started and where they are trying to go.

That doesn’t mean they get to decide whether you are finished.

The Coach Doesn’t Ask You to Relive the Mistake

Coaching taught me something important about mistakes.

When a player made a bad play, I didn’t want them spending the next five minutes replaying it in their head. The game was still moving. There was another shift coming.

You learn from the mistake, certainly. But eventually you have to get back into the play.

That’s why this line matters to me:

One more shot.
One more swing.
You don’t need permission
To change everything.

Permission is an interesting word.

We wait for it more than we realize.

We wait for somebody to tell us we’re qualified enough, young enough, talented enough, healed enough, financially secure enough, or somehow sufficiently entitled to try.

Sometimes nobody is coming to give that permission.

You may have to give it to yourself.

That doesn’t mean you get everything you want. It doesn’t mean the comeback is easy. It doesn’t mean there won’t be another rejection tomorrow.

It means you get to take the shot.

Getting Back in the Game Does Not Mean Going Backward

I also don’t think getting back in the game means returning to exactly who you used to be.

That person may not exist anymore.

If you’ve been through enough life, you aren’t supposed to be unchanged by it.

The better question may be: Who are you now, and what can this version of you do?

That’s why another idea in the song matters:

You don’t have to be twenty-five
To still have something left to say.

There are industries, workplaces and even social circles that can make people feel invisible as they get older. There is an assumption that ambition belongs to the young, that reinvention is something you do at thirty, and that eventually you are supposed to quietly become grateful for whatever role you already have.

I don’t believe that.

There is no expiration date on having an idea.

There is no age at which curiosity becomes inappropriate.

There is no official deadline for changing direction.

And there is certainly no age at which you have to stop wanting more from your own life.

The Song

That is what Get Back in the Game is about.

It is not really about winning.

It is about participation.

It is about getting back on the ice, back into the room, back into the job search, back to the keyboard, back to the drawing board, back to whatever part of yourself you stopped believing still had a place.

It is about refusing to let the worst thing that happened become the final thing that happened.

Click the play button to listen to Get Back in the Game.

Maybe your game right now is finding another job after being laid off. Maybe it is starting over after a relationship ended. Maybe it is rebuilding after financial trouble. Maybe it is learning how to live in a body that has changed. Maybe it is finally trying something you talked yourself out of years ago.

Whatever it is, you don’t have to know exactly how it ends before you begin.

You just have to decide you are still willing to play.

If you’re still here, you’re still in it.

Get back in the game.

Read the original song release and follow my music and songwriting on Joyce Strong

Join My Team

I’m building Strong Dynamics as a community for people who are still learning, still leading, still rebuilding and still willing to try again after life has changed the plan.

That includes athletes and coaches, but it also includes people changing careers, recovering from setbacks, starting businesses, rebuilding confidence, learning new skills, or simply trying to figure out what comes next.

If that sounds like you, I hope you’ll join me here.

Free subscribers help grow this community and bring more people into the conversation. Paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep writing, creating and building Strong Dynamics into something substantial — a place for honest conversations about resilience, leadership, reinvention, performance and the complicated business of staying in the game.

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There is a moment behind a hockey bench that every coach knows. You can see the play developing. You know where the pressure is coming from, you can see the open ice, and maybe you’ve practiced this exact situation all week.

You also can’t do a damn thing about it.

You don’t have the puck. The player does.

You can yell from behind the boards, and hockey coaches certainly aren’t known for their silence, but the game moves faster than instructions shouted from the bench. By the time a player hears you, processes what you’ve said and tries to act on it, the play may already have changed. At some point the player has to see what is happening, make a decision and live with it.

That is one of the hardest things about coaching, and leadership isn’t much different.

You can prepare people. You can teach them what to look for, talk through situations, establish expectations and correct mistakes. But if everything still has to come through you before anyone can act, you haven’t built much capacity around you. You’ve built a system that works as long as you’re standing there.

The Trouble With Being the Person Who Can Fix It

This can be especially hard for capable leaders because being useful is often how they got where they are.

You solve problems. You know the business. People come to you when something is difficult because you’ve probably seen some version of it before. When you can make the decision in five minutes and somebody else may need an hour, stepping in feels efficient.

Often it is efficient.

Today.

Keep doing it long enough, though, and people learn something you may not have intended to teach them: the safest decision is to wait for you.

Managers start bringing problems instead of recommendations. Employees become careful about exercising judgment because experience has taught them that the answer will eventually come from above anyway. The executive works longer hours, complains that nobody takes enough initiative, and continues making most of the decisions that would allow people to develop initiative.

I’ve watched variations of that dynamic in sports, health care and business. It doesn’t always come from ego or a desire for control. Sometimes the leader is trying desperately to be helpful. Sometimes they care so much about the outcome that letting somebody else struggle with the problem feels irresponsible.

But there is a difference between helping someone make a decision and repeatedly making it for them.

Are You Developing Judgment or Compliance?

Imagine a hockey coach trying to direct every decision from the bench.

Pass. Shoot. Go left. Get back. Cover him. Move the puck.

You might get a player who becomes very good at listening for the coach. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as developing a player who can read the ice.

The distinction matters because the game will eventually present something you didn’t practice. There will be a bad bounce, an unfamiliar opponent or a situation moving too quickly for somebody on the bench to provide instructions. Now the player has to recognize what matters and choose.

Organizations have their own versions of those moments. A client presents a problem nobody anticipated. The market changes. A manager has to handle something before the executive can be reached. An employee is standing in front of a customer and has thirty seconds to decide what the company actually means by “use your judgment.”

That’s when you find out whether people have been learning how to think or learning how to wait for instructions.

The same thing happens when leaders confuse standards with personal preference. “I need it done right” can gradually become “I need it done the way I would do it.” Those aren’t identical statements.

There are certainly environments where procedures have to be followed. My years in health care leave me with no romantic notions about improvisation when safety is involved. Clear boundaries, standards and accountability matter. But inside those boundaries there has to be some room for people to develop judgment, and that means occasionally watching another capable person take a route you wouldn’t have chosen.

They may still get there.

They may even find a better way.

Ask What They Saw

One of the most useful questions a coach can ask after a mistake is simple:

What did you see?

A player turns the puck over and everyone in the rink can see the result. What you don’t know yet is why it happened. Maybe the player never saw the pressure coming. Maybe she saw it and misunderstood her options. Maybe the decision was sound and the execution failed. Maybe the other team simply made a better play.

If all I do is tell the player what she should have done, I may correct the outcome without understanding the decision.

Formal coach training with Wellcoaches reinforced this for me years after I had begun learning it on the ice. My hockey coaching education, which eventually took me through USA Hockey Level 5, involved teaching a sport, systems, skills, safety and player development. Wellcoaches approached coaching through behavior change, listening and the quality of the questions we ask. They are different disciplines, but the overlap became obvious to me.

People think more deeply when they are asked to examine their own thinking.

That doesn’t mean a coach never gives an answer. Of course we do. Teaching has a place. Expertise has a place. Sometimes somebody simply doesn’t know what they need to know, and pretending the answer is hidden inside them somewhere isn’t coaching; it’s wasting their time.

The skill is recognizing the difference.

An executive whose decision went badly may benefit much more from being asked what information she had, what she assumed, what alternatives she considered and what she would look for next time than from hearing a lecture about the decision you would have made.

Now you’re working on judgment, not just correcting one event.

Accountability Doesn’t Disappear

Giving people room to think is not the same as removing standards.

I’ve never had much use for coaching that becomes so afraid of making someone uncomfortable that nobody is accountable for anything. Teams need expectations. Organizations do too. If someone repeatedly ignores feedback, refuses to prepare, makes the same preventable mistake or won’t take responsibility for the effect of their behavior on other people, that isn’t a problem a clever coaching question is going to solve by itself.

Coaching requires participation from the person being coached.

What matters is being clear about the standard. If the real expectation is “figure out what the boss wants and don’t surprise her,” people become skilled at managing upward. If the expectation is “understand what we’re trying to accomplish, know the boundaries, use your judgment, communicate when something changes and own your decisions,” you are asking much more of them.

You’re also treating them like people capable of growing into responsibility.

The View From the Bench

A coach does have one advantage the player doesn’t: distance.

The person on the ice is dealing with speed, pressure, fatigue, contact and a narrow field of vision. From behind the boards, a coach can sometimes see the shape of the play more clearly. Not because the coach is smarter than the player, but because they’re standing somewhere else.

That’s one of the reasons executive coaching can be useful.

An executive knows her organization in ways an outside coach never will. She knows the history behind the personalities, the financial realities, the difficult employee nobody wants to talk about, the client relationship that looks simple from the outside and isn’t. An outsider who arrives believing he understands the business better than the people running it isn’t much use to me.

But living inside a system creates its own blind spots. People have histories with each other. Old assumptions stop sounding like assumptions because they’ve been repeated for years. A workaround becomes “how we do things.” A leader gets so close to a problem that every option begins to look like a variation of the same bad choice.

Sometimes another set of eyes helps.

The coach may notice a pattern. Ask the question people inside the organization have learned not to ask. Hear the hesitation underneath an answer. Challenge an assumption that has been treated as fact. Or simply create enough distance for an executive to hear herself think.

That is very different from arriving with a bag of business-school answers.

I Don’t Want a Client to Need Me for Every Decision

I have never thought dependence was evidence of successful coaching.

A hockey player shouldn’t have to look at the bench every time the puck comes to him. A manager shouldn’t need to ask the executive how to handle every unfamiliar situation. An executive working with a coach should become better at recognizing her own patterns, testing assumptions, making decisions and knowing when she’s the one getting in her own way.

That doesn’t mean coaching eventually becomes useless. Responsibility changes. New problems arrive. People move into bigger roles. Even very experienced leaders benefit from somewhere they can think out loud without having to perform certainty for everyone else.

But the value isn’t that the coach possesses the right answer.

The value is in what the person being coached becomes better able to see and do.

When the Gate Opens

In hockey there is a small moment that says a lot about coaching. A player hears his number, stands up and goes over the boards. Whatever you’ve taught him goes with him.

You don’t.

The same thing happens in leadership every day. The meeting takes place without you. The manager handles the difficult employee. Someone else talks to the client. A successor makes a decision you wouldn’t have made. The organization hits a problem nobody put in the manual.

Those moments tell you more about the strength of your leadership than how well things work while you’re controlling every variable.

A good coach wants players who can see the ice for themselves.

A good leader should want the same thing.

Join Strong Dynamics

Strong Dynamics is about coaching on and off the ice and the human behavior underneath leadership, performance and teams. I spent decades coaching hockey, trained through USA Hockey to Level 5, went through formal coach training with Wellcoaches, and carried what I learned into health care, business and executive coaching.

I’m interested in what actually helps people perform better—not slogans about leadership, but the harder questions about trust, confidence, accountability, communication, judgment and what happens when pressure enters the room.

If that’s useful territory for you, subscribe and join me here.

Joyce Strong
USA Hockey Level 5 Coach

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I didn’t become a hockey coach because I was looking for a second career or had some carefully considered plan for reinventing myself. I started coaching when my life was about as unsettled as it could get. I had five kids, my marriage was ending, money was tight, and then I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

It was the perfect storm: cancer, divorce, financial distress, five children depending on me, and not much left that felt secure. Cancer doesn’t arrive after you’ve cleared your calendar and solved the other problems. The bills still come. The kids still need rides and food and somebody paying attention to what is happening in their lives. You still wake up in the morning and have to figure out how you’re going to get through the day.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started coaching hockey.

Looking back, the timing sounds ridiculous. What I needed was less responsibility, not more of it. But the rink gave me somewhere to go where there was a job to do. Practice needed to be planned. Players needed to be taught. Somebody needed help with an edge, somebody wasn’t paying attention, and somebody who couldn’t do something two weeks earlier was suddenly doing it without thinking.

The puck was going to drop whether the rest of my life was cooperating or not.

Learning to Play What Is in Front of You

Hockey doesn’t give you much time to mourn the play you intended to make. You can draw something beautifully on a board and watch the whole plan disappear three seconds after the faceoff. Somebody falls. The puck takes a crazy bounce. A defenseman pinches. A player reads the situation differently than you expected, and now everyone has to respond to the game that is actually happening instead of the one you planned.

My life had become a lot like that.

The future I thought I was headed toward wasn’t available anymore. I couldn’t fix all of it, and some of it wasn’t mine to control in the first place. What I could do was deal with what was directly in front of me and then deal with whatever came after that.

We have a tendency to make resilience sound prettier once we know how the story turns out. We look backward and turn difficult years into a clean narrative about strength, as though the person living through them knew all along that everything would work out. That’s not how I remember it.

Sometimes resilience is very ordinary. You get up. You go to the appointment. You figure out which bill you can pay. You make dinner. You show up for your kids. You go to the rink because there are players waiting for you, and for an hour or two the problems in your own life aren’t the only things demanding your attention.

Then you do it again.

Coaching Made Me Pay Attention

One of the unexpected gifts of coaching during that period was that I couldn’t spend all my time looking inward. Coaching requires you to notice people. Really notice them.

One player responds when you challenge her. Another gets quieter and plays worse. One needs more explanation; another understands perfectly well and needs you to stop talking. A player who looks lazy may be confused. A player who looks confident may be terrified of making the mistake that gets him benched. Sometimes a correction needs to be immediate. Sometimes a kid already knows exactly what went wrong and doesn’t need a coach piling on.

Those aren’t lessons you learn by standing at center ice giving speeches.

You learn them by watching.

Over time I became increasingly serious about the craft of coaching. I continued through USA Hockey’s coaching education until I became a Level 5 coach, and I also went through formal coach training with Wellcoaches. They approached coaching from different directions, but together they gave language and structure to things experience had already begun teaching me.

Good coaching isn’t demonstrating how much the coach knows. It requires listening closely enough to understand what another person actually needs, asking questions that make someone think instead of merely handing over your answer, recognizing patterns, and knowing when to challenge and when to leave enough space for the other person to find their own footing.

That matters on a hockey rink. It matters just as much away from one.

When You Have Nothing to Lose

There is also something that can happen when life has already taken a wrecking ball to your sense of security. Some of the things that frightened you before don’t have quite the same leverage.

I don’t mean that I became fearless. I certainly didn’t. Cancer, divorce and financial uncertainty weren’t some wonderful liberation exercise, and I have no interest in polishing them into one. But once so many assumptions about my life had already been stripped away, I became more willing to move without guarantees.

That turned out to matter.

Athletes do it all the time. They make decisions without knowing exactly how the play will unfold. They read what they can see, commit to something, adjust when the situation changes, and keep participating in the play. Waiting until you are completely certain is not an option because by then the puck is somewhere else.

Life doesn’t always give you much more certainty than that.

Just Keep Skating

Years later, when I started writing songs, I found myself returning to those years and to one of the simplest instructions hockey had given me.

Just keep skating. 🎶 Click the link to read the lyrics and listen to the song here.

I know how that phrase can sound outside hockey: push harder, never stop, grind your way through anything. That isn’t what I mean by it.

Anyone who has played the game knows that skating isn’t a straight line toward the net. You stop. You turn. You cross over. You circle back. You lose the puck and have to recover. You get knocked down. A lane closes and you have to find another one. Sometimes you come off the ice because your shift is over and somebody else needs to take it.

Keeping skating means staying in the play.

There were years when I couldn’t see very far ahead. I couldn’t tell you how everything was going to turn out or what my life would look like on the other side of what was happening. But I could usually see the next few feet of ice, and sometimes that was enough.

What the Rink Taught Me About People

I kept coaching, and eventually I realized that hockey had become one of the places where I had learned the most about people. Not just athletes. People.

I saw what fear does to judgment. I watched talented players become tentative when they were more worried about the coach’s reaction than the play in front of them. I learned that accountability and humiliation are not remotely the same thing, although plenty of coaches confuse them. I saw quiet players hold teams together and gifted players make everyone around them worse. I saw what happened when people trusted each other and what happened when they didn’t.

I also learned that you cannot coach every person in exactly the same way and then blame them when only some of them respond. The standard may be the same. The person standing in front of you is not.

Those lessons followed me into health care, preventive and functional medicine, business, and coaching people outside sports. The setting changes, but much of the human behavior is familiar. Executives lose confidence. Leaders get stuck inside their own thinking. Capable people carry too much because they have become accustomed to being the person everyone depends on. Organizations continue doing something because it used to work, long after anyone has stopped to ask whether it still does.

Sometimes people don’t need another person telling them what to do. They need enough room and the right questions to see what they already know differently.

The Coach Stays Behind the Boards

There is one lesson from hockey that probably explains more about my approach to coaching than anything else.

A coach can prepare a player. From the bench, you may see something the player can’t see from the ice. You can teach, question, challenge, correct, and help someone recognize a pattern they’ve been missing. You can help them become better at reading what is unfolding in front of them.

Then the gate opens.

You stay behind the boards.

They skate the shift.

That has always seemed to me a good test of coaching. The object isn’t to make another person increasingly dependent on your answers. It is to help them become more capable of seeing, deciding, adjusting, and trusting their own judgment when you’re not standing beside them.

Maybe that is part of why coaching found me when it did. At a time when I couldn’t control much of what was happening in my own life, hockey kept reminding me that I didn’t have to know how the entire game was going to end.

I had to look at what was in front of me, decide what I could do next, and keep skating.

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Strong Dynamics grew out of decades of coaching on and off the ice and my continuing fascination with what happens to people when something matters: how we lead, how we respond to pressure, how confidence is built or destroyed, why some teams work and others don’t, and what helps people change when the old way isn’t working anymore.

I’ll be writing about those questions here, and share books, ideas and resources I’ve found useful along the way. If that sounds like territory you want to explore with me, subscribe and join the Strong Dynamics community.

Joyce Strong
USA Hockey Level 5 Coach

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The defenseman turns the puck over at the blue line. Seconds later, it’s in the net.

He comes back through the gate already knowing exactly what happened.

Now watch the bench.

Does somebody move over and make room? Does a teammate say something useful? Does the coach correct the mistake and move on? Or does the whole bench tighten around him as if failure might be contagious?

I spent a lot of years behind hockey benches, and some of the most revealing moments had very little to do with the puck. Watch the player whose ice time has been cut, the kid who expected to be on the power play and isn’t, the star when somebody else scores, or the player who has been sitting through three shifts waiting for a number to be called.

You can learn an extraordinary amount about a team without looking at the scoreboard.

The bench is not where the game stops. It is part of the game.

Everybody Matters When They Don’t Have the Puck

One of the great misunderstandings about team sports is that the action belongs to whoever has the puck, the ball, or the opportunity. In hockey, a player without the puck may be creating the entire play. She may be pulling a defender away from the net. He may be covering for a defenseman who pinched. Someone may be talking from behind the play, identifying pressure a teammate cannot see. Five players can contribute to a goal that gives points to only two or three of them.

The same is true on the bench. Players are watching tendencies and matchups, listening to the coaches, recovering physically, thinking about what just happened, and preparing for the next shift. A player who stays mentally in the game will step back onto the ice differently from one who has spent two minutes stewing over something that happened on the last shift.

That’s one of the things I learned to notice as a coach. A disengaged bench doesn’t magically become an engaged team when the gate opens.

The Shift You Don’t Get

Everybody wants to play. They should. Competitive athletes want the puck, the important shift, the power play, the final minute. They want to be trusted when the game is on the line. I never considered disappointment over lost ice time a character flaw. Sometimes it’s evidence that a player cares very much.

What interested me was what happened next.

A player can disagree with a coach’s decision and still remain part of the team. They can be angry and still pay attention. They can think the coach is completely wrong and still be ready when their number is called. Competitive sports guarantee disappointment. Somebody doesn’t make the team. Somebody loses a starting job. Somebody gets moved off a line. Somebody else gets the assignment you wanted.

This is where we sometimes confuse coachability with obedience. They aren’t the same thing. Good athletes think. They ask questions. They want to understand. Good coaches should be able to explain decisions, and coaches get things wrong just like players do.

Coachability is the ability to receive information, consider it, adapt when necessary, and remain engaged even when your ego has just taken a hit.

That’s a difficult skill in hockey. It’s an even more valuable one in life.

The Bench Reveals the Coach, Too

The players aren’t the only people being revealed.

A defenseman makes a bad turnover and it ends up in the net. Everybody in the building knows what happened, including the player coming back to the bench. What does the coach do with that moment?

There are times when a correction needs to be immediate and direct. There are also times when the player already understands the mistake and piling humiliation on top of it teaches absolutely nothing.

Good coaching requires knowing the difference.

It also requires understanding that a bad result does not necessarily mean a bad decision. Hockey is too fast and unpredictable for that. A player can make the right read and get beaten. Another can make a terrible decision and get lucky. If coaches teach entirely from outcomes, players eventually learn to avoid risk instead of learning how to read the game.

Fear can produce compliance, and sometimes it even produces short-term results. A player terrified of making a mistake may stop making that particular mistake. But they may also stop creating, communicating, trusting their instincts, or attempting something difficult.

Eventually they’re no longer playing the game in front of them. They’re playing the coach behind them, calculating what will keep them from getting yelled at or benched.

That’s not the kind of player most coaches claim they want to develop.

Culture Isn’t the Sign on the Wall

Sports organizations love words like accountability, respect, discipline, hard work, and team first. Put them on a locker-room wall and they look impressive. But those words don’t tell me much about a team’s culture.

Show me how the captain treats the last player on the roster. Show me what happens when the third-line winger misses an open net or when the backup goalie finally gets the start. Show me whether the best player listens while the coach is talking to somebody else.

And don’t only show me adversity. Show me what happens when the team starts winning.

Success reveals people too. Roles change. Attention shifts. Somebody suddenly becomes indispensable, somebody else becomes expendable, and praise starts accumulating around a handful of people. A healthy culture can absorb those changes without convincing everyone else that their contribution no longer matters.

Culture isn’t what a team says it believes. It is what people repeatedly do with one another, especially when nobody is standing over them telling them how to behave.

Every Organization Has a Bench

This is where hockey stops being only about hockey.

Every organization has people holding the puck right now and people whose contribution is harder to see. There are people getting recognition and people doing essential work nobody notices. Someone is waiting for an opportunity. Someone is recovering from a mistake. Someone else is wondering why another person got the assignment they wanted.

I’ve worked in health care, coached athletes, and spent enough time inside organizations to see these dynamics repeat themselves.

When people believe their value disappears whenever they aren’t at the center of the action, you don’t really have a team. You have individuals temporarily occupying the same organization.

Strong teams understand something different: your role can change without eliminating your responsibility to the group, and your role can change without eliminating your value to it.

That distinction matters.

Leadership Doesn’t Always Have the Puck

We tend to look for leadership in obvious places: the captain, the coach, the star, the person giving the speech.

Some of the best leadership I’ve seen in sports was much quieter than that.

It’s the player who says the right thing to a teammate after a mistake without pretending the mistake didn’t happen. It’s the veteran who notices that a younger player is sitting alone. It’s somebody recognizing that a teammate has already been corrected and doesn’t need six more people piling on. It’s the player getting fewer minutes than they want who keeps watching because when the opportunity finally comes, they intend to be ready.

None of those things appear on a scoresheet. They can still change the outcome of a game.

That’s one of the reasons I have always loved sports. Strip away the uniforms and the scoreboard and you’re watching human dynamics unfold in compressed time: confidence, fear, ego, generosity, resentment, trust, courage, selfishness, discipline, and leadership.

Pressure doesn’t necessarily create those qualities.

Very often, it simply reveals them.

Watch the Bench

The next time you watch a hockey game, spend a few minutes looking somewhere other than the puck. Notice what happens after a mistake. Notice who remains engaged when they aren’t playing. Notice how the best player treats the weakest one and what the coach does when the game begins slipping away.

You may discover that some of the people doing the most to hold the team together aren’t the ones showing up in the highlights.

They may be sitting three feet away from the coach, waiting for the gate to open again.

And once you learn to see leadership there, you start seeing it everywhere.

Join Strong Dynamics

Strong Dynamics begins with sports, but it isn’t only about sports. I’m interested in what competition teaches us about leadership, performance, confidence, communication, culture, resilience, and the way people behave when something is at stake.

I’ll be writing about those connections here, drawing on decades of coaching and my experiences in health care, business, and life. Over time I’ll also share books, coaching resources, and other tools I believe are genuinely worth using.

If this is the kind of conversation you want more of, subscribe and join me.

The puck tells you what’s happening in the game.

The bench often tells you what kind of team you’re watching.

Joyce Strong
USA Hockey Level 5 Coach

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I’ve spent enough years around hockey players to know that the big moment rarely turns someone into a different player. Pressure doesn’t suddenly give you skills you never developed, discipline you never practiced or confidence you never earned. More often, it strips away the noise and shows you what was there all along.

That’s one of the reasons I still think about so much of life through the lens of coaching. Hockey is the sport I know best, but the lessons were never confined to the rink.

A player can desperately want the puck in the final minute of a close game. He can believe he is ready. His parents can believe it. His coach can hope for it. But when that puck comes to him, wanting the moment isn’t enough. He is going to rely on what he has practiced over and over again, often without thinking about it.

The same thing happens in a boardroom, during a difficult conversation, in a crisis, before an important presentation or when something suddenly goes wrong and everyone turns toward you for an answer.

Pressure reveals more than it creates

We tend to give enormous importance to the moment itself. The championship game. The interview. The presentation. The negotiation. The decision that has to be made when there isn’t enough information and there isn’t enough time.

But most of what happens in those moments was being built long before we got there.

It was built in preparation. It was built through repetition. It was built in the way we handled the hundred smaller situations when the stakes weren’t nearly as high. And just as importantly, it was built in how we learned to respond when we made a mistake.

As a coach, I learned to watch what happened after the mistake.

A bad pass tells you something, but the next shift often tells you more. Does the player keep replaying what went wrong? Does he get tentative because he is afraid of making another mistake? Does he begin looking toward the bench instead of reading the play in front of him?

Or does he understand what happened, make the adjustment and get back into the game?

That ability to recover is one of the most valuable skills an athlete can develop, and I don’t think we talk about it nearly enough outside of sports.

When the goal quietly becomes “don’t screw up”

I’ve watched talented players become less effective when they stop trying to play well and start trying not to make a mistake.

That distinction matters.

When avoiding failure becomes the goal, people get smaller. They hesitate. They second-guess decisions they once would have made naturally. They start watching for consequences instead of opportunities.

You see the same thing in business. Someone gets torn apart in a meeting and stops offering ideas. A manager makes one poor decision and becomes reluctant to make the next one. Someone loses a client, a job or an opportunity and walks into the next situation thinking primarily about how not to lose again.

Before long, they aren’t performing. They’re protecting themselves.

In hockey, the player starts watching the coach instead of watching the play.

In business, a leader starts managing reactions instead of leading.

Different setting. Same dynamic.

Confidence has to have something underneath it

We talk about confidence as though some people simply possess it and others don’t. I’ve never believed that.

The confidence that matters usually has evidence underneath it.

I prepared for this. I practiced this. I’ve been uncomfortable before. I’ve made mistakes before and figured out what to do next. I know I won’t execute perfectly every time, but I trust myself to respond.

That is very different from standing in front of a mirror and telling yourself everything is going to be fine.

Sometimes everything isn’t fine.

You can still know how to function when it isn’t.

That, to me, is a much more useful kind of confidence.

What are you practicing when nobody is keeping score?

This may be the question underneath all of it.

What are you practicing when the stakes are low?

Are you practicing preparation, or are you repeatedly putting things off until urgency forces you to act? Are you practicing making decisions, or endlessly second-guessing them? Are you learning how to recover from mistakes, or teaching yourself to replay them for hours?

Are you practicing speaking when something needs to be said, or staying quiet because silence feels safer?

None of these habits suddenly appear when the pressure arrives. We bring them with us.

Eventually, there will be a moment when there isn’t time to analyze every possibility. Something will happen, a decision will be required, and we will fall back on the patterns we have built.

That’s why Strong Dynamics has never felt like only a hockey idea to me.

Hockey gave me a place to see these things clearly. Coaching gave me thousands of opportunities to watch people learn, struggle, respond, improve, lose confidence, regain it and discover that they were capable of more than they thought.

But the dynamics travel.

They show up in sports. They show up in business. They show up in leadership and relationships and in the way we handle ourselves when life suddenly asks more of us than we expected.

The rink was one of my classrooms. The lessons were always bigger than the rink.

That’s what I want Strong Dynamics to be about.

If you’re also interested in the health and wellness side of performance, visit TotalWellCoach.com for more on longevity, nutrition, resilience and staying well enough to keep doing what matters.

Strong Dynamics

Strong Dynamics has been part of my life for a long time. Coaching has shaped much of how I think about people, preparation, performance, pressure and resilience. The lessons I learned in hockey have followed me far beyond the rink.

But Strong Dynamics was never just about hockey.

This is a place to explore coaching, mindset, leadership, team culture and performance—and what helps people keep moving when things do not go according to plan. Sometimes that means preparing for a big moment. Sometimes it means responding to failure, fatigue, pressure or disappointment. Sometimes it means figuring out how to get back in the game after life has knocked you sideways.

Those lessons belong to more than athletes. They matter to coaches, business leaders, parents, teams and anyone trying to perform well, lead well and keep growing.

Sports will always be part of Strong Dynamics because they are one of the clearest places to see preparation, pressure, teamwork, adversity and recovery in action. But the ideas here are meant to travel beyond the rink, the field and the arena.

The dynamics matter wherever people are trying to become stronger, work together and perform when it matters most.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.