Working out now is harder than it was when I was an athlete. And I’ve been trying to figure out why. The answer is pretty simple: back then, the only thing I had to worry about was showing up. That was my whole job. Someone else was doing all the thinking, and I trusted that completely. Navigating the Transition from Athlete to Post-Competitive Life is something I think about a lot, because that transition is where the difficulty starts — not in the body, but in who’s now responsible for the plan.
Showing up is purely physical for me. I know that sounds reductive, but I changed my mind on this. Mental comes and goes. The body either gets there or it doesn’t. In competition, the whole point was to trust the plan and just execute it — not to second-guess, not to optimize in the moment, just do it. You Don’t Need More Discipline. You Need to Grow into Someone Who Still Shows Up, Even on Your Worst Days. gets at something real here — the act of showing up is not the easy part people assume it is. That’s actually what people get wrong. They think showing up is the baseline, the minimum. But getting your body there consistently, without someone holding the structure around you, is the whole thing.
It’s probably similar in business, honestly. When someone tells you exactly what to do and you trust that it works, execution becomes easy. The cognitive load disappears. That’s the same feeling I had with my coach. Now I Have to Be My Own Coach is the reality I’m living now, and it’s genuinely harder — not because I lack discipline, but because I’m spending energy on the thinking that used to be handled for me. Why You Keep Showing Up (And It’s Got Nothing to Do With Discipline) » Keith Blakemore-Noble - The Overachiever’s Coach points at the same thing from a different angle.
If I could recreate that feeling now, I would outsource as much as possible to get myself back into execution mode. That’s the goal — reduce the decisions, eliminate the friction, and just show up physically. The Paradox of Doing Less for Coaches makes sense to me in this light too, because the best thing a coach ever did for me was take things off my plate, not add to them. You Don’t Have to Be the Best. You Just Have to Still Be Here. - Derek Neighbors is the right frame for this — presence is the practice, and everything else is infrastructure.