It’s coming soon. Even now, the evenings are getting shorter. Pretty soon, the clocks will roll back. When my alarm goes off, it’ll be black outside. Dark in the house along with the sleepy streets of Germantown. 

Most mornings, I run alone. In the summer, that solitude feels like a gift. The air is warm and bright. But by the time November creeps up, it’s dark and cold (at least for a man from Tennessee). If I head out into the dark, log a few miles, and the world still sleeps around me…I’ll be honest, sometimes it feels like it doesn’t do me any good.

Not that I think someone has to see me. It’s more that the cool dark does less to wake me up, and being alone at that hour can feel more isolating than peaceful.

All over the country, runners who spend months stacking miles are crossing the finish line. At least for a few weeks, they're putting their racing shoes in the closet. They’re choosing something most busy professionals forget to do: resting on purpose.

Any good coach will tell you that the off-season is part of your training plan. After a long build-up to a hard race, your body needs a stretch of reduced load to repair muscles and replenish energy. You’re not doing nothing, and calculated rest makes you a better athlete and (I’d argue) a better professional, no matter what industry you’re in.

When you coach youth soccer, you quickly learn you’re not just coaching the kids; you're also coaching their parents. It’s a running joke at this point. The parents often care about the outcomes just as much (if not more) than you or any of the players do.

But the players on the field take direction from you. Their parents do not.

But you’re still asked to do it anyway. In business, the people who shape your success often sit beyond your chain of command. They’re not your team: they’re investors, board members, partners, or the heads of neighboring departments that all hold a stake in your work.

None of them report to you, though, and a good share of your results hinge on how well you work together.

Management writers call this stakeholder management. I think of it a lot like those parents on the sideline.

Every business has one. They’re not the boss or the manager, but they’re the one who gets it. You know the one—you hand them a problem, and it disappears. You don’t feel like you ever need to double-check their work because they’ve earned your trust a hundred times over.

Before you know it, you’re leaning on them and routing more and more of the business through them. 

On one hand, you feel you're identifying talent and giving it room to flourish. And I’ll never say that’s a bad thing.

It can, however, be dangerous. Because leaning on a handful of exceptional people isn’t the same thing as cultivating a strong team.

When I first started long-distance running, I treated my training plan like it was written in stone. Every mile, every rest day, every pace target: all locked in ahread of time. I followed it like the plan itself was the goal, not a means of reaching it.

And then, I got thrown off schedule for the first time. And it wasn’t the only time, either. Nagging injuries, heat waves, freak ice storms, and frenized work weeks have all cropped up more than once.

But because of how I was approaching my training plan, adapting to those moment felt like failure instead of course correction.

All-or-nothing thinking was kicking my teeth in. It was the thought that I’d missed a run, so the plan is ruined, so I might as well try again next marathon.

Looking back, I know where I went wrong: I was mistaking rigidity for discipline.

I spend a solid chunk of my year in rooms full of strangers. Real estate investors in one city, entrepreneurs in the next, and business owners in yet another.

And you know what? The questions people ask after I speak are almost never new. 

That’s not a knock on my audience, by the way. They’re good questions. I just find it interesting—compelling, even—that the same questions keep cropping up regardless of industry or circumstance.

I’ve also noticed that I can come up with answers to their problems much more readily than I can for my own.

That might sound like cruel irony, but it’s a documented psychological phenomenon. And I think understanding it might be one of the keys to solving some of my most confounding problems.

Picture this: an August run through Germantown. 

It’s a sweltering Tennessee summer, because it always is. The heat is ready to ruin your day, but you’re out there anyway. You had a five-mile goal, but now you want to cut it short. Four miles is close enough to five, right? And you’re almost there. You can turn back.

I’ve been there. And you know, I used to think of these moments as a test I was failing (and miserably so). If I felt the urge to quit, I must not have trained hard enough, or I wasn’t tough enough, or I just didn’t want it badly enough.

Pushing through was just a matter of having more willpower than not. If I could outlast it, I could win.

Picture it: drumming your fingers on top of a conference table, desperately trying to keep your eyes open as a coworker drones on about something you already know. You just want to get back to work. 

I’d wager all of us have been there before: stuck in a meeting that was only efficient at being a big waste of time. 

A few years ago, I looked at my calendar and saw eleven meetings coming up before I’d answered a single email. I’d scheduled most of them myself. Some I accepted out of routine—what’s 30 minutes out of my day?

Your phone buzzes halfway through dinner. Before you’ve swallowed your last bite of food, your hand’s on the phone to pick it up. It’s not a conscious decision, but a reflex. The family keeps chatting while you move to sequester yourself for what could be a very important call.

It happens to all of us. 

I’m never going to discount the possibility of a true emergency, but at some point, I realized I was making myself too available. Weekends, in the middle of my kids’ games, while I was already dressed for me.

I never made myself off limits. Maybe I was just telling myself that that’s what leadership required.

Most mornings, I run without a watch and by myself. And most evenings for the past 25 years, I’ve stood on a soccer field surrounded by a roster of kids who need direction, encouragement, and a reason to trust in the process of making progress.

Team versus solo.

It’s pretty easy to pit these ways of training against one another, but I truly don’t think it’s a matter of which way is better. Training alone and training with others flex different muscles and form different habits.

That’s why I’ve come to think of it less like either/or and more like cross training.

I’m not much of a Reddit person, but even I haven’t been able to escape one of the more viral types of posts to come out of the platform.

People post the blow-by-blow of an argument with a spouse, a coworker, a neighbor, and end with the same line: Am I overreacting? Thousands of strangers weigh in. The threads get long, the opinions get sharp (even controversial), and the original poster usually walks away with more clarity.

And you know, I find asking myself that question is much more useful before I react at all.

Every August, a new kid would show up to preseason with that look on his face — the one where he's sizing everyone up. Coach Chris included.

Twenty-five years of coaching competitive soccer, and I still caught myself wanting the new kid to like me. Not respect me. Not fear me. Like me.

For a long time, I thought it was a silly instinct. It felt beneath the job or superficial. Especially because these were kids, not my peers. I figured the wanting-to-be-liked part was a leftover from being a kid myself—something to grow out of, not lean into.

Why does it seem so hard to “eat right”?

We have great intentions in the morning but feel deprived and unsatisfied all day, until we break and run through a drive-thru for the greasy satisfaction of a burger and fries. 

When we do, that satisfaction is short-lived, replaced by guilt—even shame. It’s your fault for not trying hard enough, right? For not having the willpower to stick to healthy stuff.

That’s how most people go about it, but it’s really not a sustainable way to approach nutrition habits.

There's a concept in behavioral research called decision fatigue: the idea that the quality of your decisions degrades as the number of decisions you make in a day accumulates.

After years in your role, you start to learn the rhythm of things. That’s never a bad thing—your experience makes certain things second nature. Maybe you get to the point where you think, “man, I could do that with both hands tied behind my back!”

That kind of expertise is invaluable because it is built only through hands-on experience. You have to be in it. And these days, fewer and fewer people stick with their careers long enough to reach that level of know-how.

That’s not knocking the younger generation—work culture has changed—but I think being a “rare breed” of particularly seasoned professionals carries risks with its exclusivity.

Summer for working parents is in a category all its own. The kids are home, the heat is relentless, and the wheels start coming off around 2 p.m. on Tuesday.

I don’t just mean the distractions, though those are definitely part of it. I’m talking when your morning momentum evaporates and the rest of the day turns into an impossible slog. 

And you know, it’s easy to think that’s a discipline issue. But if that were the case, why don’t we struggle this way in October?

Turns out, it has everything to do with biology—plus the unique challenges of summertime.

Some leadership moments look great on the highlight reels. The big speech with roaring applause, the bold call that rescues the deal from the edge of disaster.

But you know, those magazine moments are few and far between—and in my experience running businesses and building teams for over twenty years, I see that they don’t do the heavy lifting for your credibility that people think.

The greatest strides are made in the mundane and the routine.

Not sexy, but true.

Picture this: hurrying through the airport to get to your next gate so you can catch a few precious minutes of quiet. Passing by airport bars and restaurants, all wafting the delectable smell of quick-and-easy carbs in your direction.

The donuts, burgers, fries, and bagels. 

The line looks short at that one. You can afford to stop, and so you do.

And that is often the beginning of the end of your resolve to keep your diet “on track” for the rest of the trip.

I coached competitive soccer for 25 years, and I had to train myself out of deciding too early where a player belonged.

I remember this tall, athletic kid specifically. I watched him, and, in the first twenty minutes of a tryout, I just knew he was going to be a goalkeeper.

And from that point on, without realizing it, I'd watch him through that lens. Every time he read a play well or used his size, I filed it as confirmation.

Ever have a crab boil? Here, it tends to be crawfish, but I once heard someone describe a Deep South summer as being a steamed crab in a bag. I laughed when I heard it, of course. Then I went outside in July and thought, yeah — that's about right.

If you've never run through a Memphis summer, it's hard to explain what you're really up against.

You step out the door, and the air hits you like a wall: thick, wet, and heavy. Oppressive. And there's no relief waiting for you out there. Not in the shade. Not from a breeze. The humidity will get to you no matter where you are. You're soaked before you've covered a block, whether you’re moving like a Usain Bolt or a snail.

I attended a speaking event a while back. You know the kind—good energy, electric with possibilities, surrounded by people you’d love to connect with. During a break, I was maneuvering between tables when something familiar caught my eye.

Me.

There my headshot was on someone’s phone. They were scrolling through my LinkedIn profile, no idea I was right behind them. I kept going, of course. No idea how much they invested in researching me in the moment. Maybe my bio, a few posts, or a look at my credentials. Or maybe they’d end up here (if so, hi). 

We did eventually meet, and they came in prepared. They already had questions, referenced things I said online, and a pre-loaded version of me set. In some ways, that’s pretty convenient—in other ways, it makes the real-life “first impression” a lot different than it used to be.