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.

My friends are often surprised to learn that I haven’t worn a GPS watch on a training run in years. No heart rate monitor or pace alerts—just my favorite running shoes, the road, and whatever my body is telling me.

Some people might hear that and assume I’m doing this casually. Because, you know, it doesn’t really count if it isn’t logged. So says our metric-obsessed culture, after all!

I found that stripping data out of my runs has made me more consistent, more intuitive, and (honestly) more fun to be around after a workout. It might do the same for you.

One early morning a few years back was not going my way. It started with bickering kids, a disappointing run, and what felt like a million different tasks to do. I got to the office—barely had time to put my stuff down, let alone grab a cup of coffee—when it happened.

A well-intentioned colleague dropped criticism on me I was not prepared to handle.

You know that fight-or-flight feeling? When heat creeps up your neck and face, your pulse quickens, and you feel the instinct to bristle up and get defensive. Or worse, lash out at the perceived attacker.

Confession time: I’m not naturally good at rest.

That probably doesn't surprise you if you know me, and it probably doesn't surprise you because you’re in the same boat. High achievers tend to share a particular blind spot: great at doing hard things and terrible at doing nothing.

For a long time, my mindset was “busy is productive,” and “no pain, no gain.”

But at some point, that narrative fell out of sync with the results I was getting, and I had to sit with an uncomfortable question: was I actually performing, or was I just performing busyness?

For the most part, it was the latter. I was treating recovery as an optional afterthought rather than an important part of making progress.

Most high performers I know carry a badge of honor for being the person with all the answers. They’re always available, always ready to weigh in. Always on. It’s an easy identity to build when you’re good at what you do, and people keep coming to you for direction.

It feels great, until it doesn’t. That identity comes with a cost.

What I’ve found—through my career, raising five kids, running nonprofits, and logging miles—is that trying to be that person burns through your best cognitive resources. It burns through them so fast. And usually, I might add, on the wrong things. 

By the time a truly important decision lands on your desk, your brain is fried.

I don't run with a watch.

No GPS. No Strava. No Garmin. Not even a FitBit.

When I head out the door, the only thing I'm tracking is how my legs feel under me.

People find this strange, especially other runners. We live in an age where every split gets logged, every mile gets posted, and your worth as an athlete is apparently measured in monthly mileage totals. I've had runners look at me like I admitted to training in blue jeans.

Most high-performing business owners I know are meticulous about optimizing their operations. Systems, staffing, capital allocation—they sweat every detail. And then they skip lunch and sit for nine hours straight, running out of juice when they need it most.

There’s a disconnect.

I'm not immune to this. I've done it myself!

But once I started to understand what's happening inside our brains when we move our bodies and fuel it well, I stopped thinking of fitness as purely a matter of personal discipline. It became an operational decision instead.