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.