Field Notes

My long-term goal was to kick in the NFL.

I trained like it. I showed up to every practice. I trained as hard as I was able to. I did not complain, and I played through pain. That was my definition of mentally tough, and measured against that definition I was doing everything right.

For a while the results agreed with me. My freshman season at Foothill College I was named All Nor-Cal Conference at placekicker. I made nine field goals, hit forty of forty-five extra points, and averaged close to fifty-four yards on kickoffs. In May of 2011 I won the field goal competition in the junior college and transfer division at Chris Sailer’s national kicking event in Las Vegas. ESPN printed my name in the recap.

Five months later my confidence was gone.

My second season came apart. I started missing kicks I had made a thousand times, and then I was in my own head, and once you are in there it feeds itself. Nothing had happened to my leg. My leg was the only part of this that was working.

What had actually been missing the whole time was never reps. It was grades, and the right classes, and a transfer plan. Knowing which credits carried me forward and which ones were a dead end. I needed to make the education system work in my favor. Nobody told me that, and I never thought to ask. So I kept working hard with no end in sight, in the only direction I already knew how to work in.

I had a goal and no map. A goal tells you where you want to be. A map has to tell you two things — where you want to be, and where you are standing right now. I only ever had the first half. I could not have told you what I was missing, because I was measuring myself entirely on the things I was already good at.

The strange part is that the system I was using had worked before. My brother Kenny died when I was ten years old. He was eighteen. From about ten to seventeen, the way I held myself together was to pour everything I had into being an athlete, and it worked. It gave me somewhere to put all of it. It made me good. Then I carried that same system into college without changing a single thing about it, and I got the same results — which by then were no longer enough. What got me there was never going to get me anywhere else. Marshall Goldsmith wrote an entire book with that title. I learned it the slow way.

Looking back, I understand what was happening in that second season. Some part of me already knew there was no future in this, and I had no idea how to move forward, because forward had only ever meant train harder.

That is the cost of letting something else define success for you. My scoreboard was generous. I won the thing. And it still could not tell me whether I was building anything that would hold.

When I sit with an athlete now and ask what success means to them, most of them give me a number. Minutes. A time. A ranking. A roster spot. Those are fine ambitions, and I had one of my own. But a number is a verdict handed down by other people, and if it is the only definition of success you own, then every outcome outside your control becomes a statement about who you are.

That is not toughness. That is an unprotected identity. I know, because it was mine.

If you don’t define success for yourself, the scoreboard will. Someone else will. The outcome will. That is not a line I picked up somewhere. It is the most expensive thing I have ever learned.

Long-term goals get all the attention. Ask an athlete what they are working toward and you will get one — a scholarship, a starting spot, a belt, a title, the pros. You should have one, and it should be big enough that saying it out loud is slightly uncomfortable.

But long-term goals are not what get you there. Short-term ones do. The specific, unremarkable, daily version of the work.

And the honest short-term list is different for every single person, which is why general advice bounces off. The generic answer is always train harder. The real answer might be your grades. It might be sleep. It might be film you have been avoiding, or a conversation you have been avoiding, or the fact that you have never once written down what you are doing this week and why. It depends entirely on where you are actually standing, and most athletes have never been asked.

Three things separate the people who close that gap from the people who keep running at it.

Clarity is knowing your own process, not the general one. That requires an honest read on where you are right now — not where you want to be, and not where you were when things were going well. Where you are.

Accountability is what clarity turns into daily. Habits. The small things repeated on the days when nothing about them feels meaningful. Clarity that never becomes a habit was just a good afternoon.

Support is the one almost nobody has, and it is the reason the first two collapse.

You cannot audit your own blind spots. If you could see them, they would not be blind. Athletes write goals alone every January and most of those documents are dead by February — not because the athlete did not know the steps, but because nobody asked the follow-up question. Nobody was there when the first honest answer was a comfortable one. Nobody said: that is what you want, now tell me what is actually in the way.

I had clarity about my long-term goal and none about my position. I had accountability to a version of hard work that was pointed at nothing. What I did not have was one person outside my own head who could see the map differently than I did.

That is where I come in. Not to hand you a worksheet. To be the person who asks the second question, and the one after that, until the plan is specific enough to be true.

Coaches and parents are the primary mental performance environment. Not the visiting consultant. The people in the athlete’s life every day set the tone for how failure is interpreted, and they are usually doing it without any training in how to do it.

The most common mistake is timing. Immediately after a loss, an athlete is still in physiological arousal — elevated heart rate, narrowed attention, high emotion. Analysis delivered into that state does not land as instruction. It lands as judgment. The information may be correct and still do damage.

The second most common mistake is leading with the outcome. “What happened out there?” sounds like curiosity and functions like an accusation. It asks the athlete to defend themselves at the exact moment they have the least capacity to do it well.

A more useful sequence is short. Acknowledge the effort or the difficulty, without evaluating it. Give it time — often hours, sometimes a day. Then ask a process question instead of an outcome question: what felt controllable, and what did not? Save the tactical correction for the next training session, where it is coaching rather than a verdict.

And sometimes the right move is to say nothing at all and just be present. Silence from an adult who is clearly not angry is one of the most stabilizing things a young athlete can experience. It tells them the relationship is not contingent on the result.

Parents can build their own MVP for this: who do I want to be for my athlete, how will I get there, and what standards do I hold when the stakes are high. It is the same process. It just points inward first.

A team sport distributes the result. A fighter does not have that. The camp is shared, the corner is shared, but the outcome lands on one person in front of an audience, and then the structure that organized their life for eight or twelve weeks disappears overnight.

That gap is where a lot of damage happens, and it happens after a win as often as after a loss. The weight cut ends. The schedule ends. The purpose that made 5 a.m. obvious ends. What replaces it is usually nothing, and nothing is a difficult thing for a competitive person to sit in.

Most fighters have someone for the walk in. Very few have anything structured for the walk back.

This is a solvable problem, and it is not therapy — it is planning. Before the fight, write the week after. What does training look like on reduced volume. What is the eating plan when the cut is over. What non-sport commitments get put back on the calendar deliberately. What is the honest review process, and when does it happen — not the night of, when the story is still emotional.

It also matters that a fighter has answers to who they are when they are not in camp. An identity built entirely on the next fight has to be rebuilt every time a fight ends. An identity that includes family, work, faith, coaching others, or anything else does not disappear when the schedule does.

The tools are the same ones every athlete uses. The timing is what is specific to combat sports: the plan for after has to be written before.

Preparation gets treated as a virtue when it is really a form of engineering. Every habit an athlete builds in advance is a decision they no longer have to make under pressure — and pressure is exactly when decision-making degrades.

This is why big moments feel like they create problems. They rarely do. They reveal problems that were already there: gaps in preparation, focus, recovery, confidence, or identity. The gap existed in November. December just made it visible.

The uncomfortable part is that gaps are usually found by honest assessment, not by effort. An athlete can train hard for months and still be avoiding the one thing they are worst at, because avoidance feels like preference. “I don’t like film.” “I’m not a mobility guy.” “I get up for real games.” Those are gaps wearing a personality.

Building habits that survive a bad month means designing for your worst self, not your best one. What is the version of the routine that still happens when you are tired, discouraged, and busy? If the plan only works when you feel good, you do not have a plan — you have a mood.

This is why the standards get written down as Principles before they are needed. Two or three non-negotiables, small enough to hold on a bad week, specific enough to actually check. Progress gets built brick by brick, and a brick laid on a bad day counts exactly the same as one laid on a good day.

Nobody stays ready by accident. They stay ready because a version of themselves who was thinking clearly made the decisions in advance.