Stay Even, Keep Moving

Don’t get too high in the highs or low in the lows.

”Don’t get too high in the highs or low in the lows.”

My school coach, Gerald Stewart, said this line so often that it echoes in the minds of his athletes decades later. He was a believer in keeping an even keel. If you just kept putting in the work, taking the long view, you’d not only reach higher heights but do so more enjoyably and sustainably.

Over his coaching career, he realized that getting stuck was often the problem. Talented athletes would get a taste of success and then bask in it so long that they lost focus on the amount of work that it took to get there. Complacency took over. The hunger faded. And the potential they’d once shown faded away. On the other side, a particularly hard loss could snuff out the light. The sting of defeat would linger. They couldn’t let go of the disappointment or the harsh realization that their best wasn’t quite good enough that day. It got cemented in their mind and became proof that they weren’t capable whenever they stepped into the arena. The vivid negative emotions instilled a kind of trauma response so that the next time they stepped out onto the track, panic was the default. A single poor performance altered their trajectory.

Either side of the coin, success or failure, brought potential baggage with it. To Stewart, the answer was simple but hard: stay even and keep momentum.

17th-century samurai master Takuan Soho described a similar philosophy. He warned of our mind stopping, or lingering on whatever just occurred. As he put it, “the mind must always be in the state of ‘flowing,’ for when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind.” In other words, don’t linger, and keep the mind flowing.

Flowing or keeping an even keel doesn’t mean to ignore all emotions, or never pause to celebrate a big win or to deeply feel a disappointment. It means acknowledging that success and failure are temporary disruptors. They cause us to pause, to linger.

The key is in making that pause temporary, not to get in the way of a loss of momentum. If we’re in the middle of a sword fight, like Soho was describing, any sort of lingering could be deadly. But in most endeavors, we can see it more like training. A day off may be a pause, but it can actually help us keep momentum as we stay healthy enough to repeat our exercise for months on end. But if we stretch that day off into the majority of the week, we’re detraining and losing the momentum we’ve built up.

How do you keep momentum and minimize stopping?

1. Reward the work

Consider the simple math of any pursuit. You spend months training for a race that lasts a few minutes or years building a company for a sale that happens in a day. For just about any pursuit, you spend 99% of your life on the climb and a fraction of 1% at the summit. If you rely on the view from the top to justify the struggle of the ascent, the equation will never balance out. You have to locate meaning in the climbing itself.

It’s why coach Stewart emphasized the work. We had mile clubs, and each time you increased your mileage, you got a new shirt. We kept training logs to highlight the consistency. When all you talk about is the result, then you’re setting yourself up for lots of starts and stops. But when you put the work first, even after a bitter defeat, there’s a hint of progress that you can hold on to.

2. Be the Counterbalance

It’s not about ignoring outcomes or denying the joy of a victory or the sorrow of defeat. It’s when everything is pushing you in one direction, you’ve got to pull in the other.

Texas A&M football coach Mike Elko put it well: “My job is to be calm and collected when they’re frantic. My job is to create intensity when they’re not intense. My job is to always be opposite the moment.” This applies not only to their mood but also to how they view their pursuit. If someone is overly focused on the short-term, your goal is to bring perspective. To get them to zoom out and see the big picture. Or, if they are so broad that they forget that the outcome actually does matter and that it’s time to compete, you may need to emphasize the short-term.

3. Set Boundaries

When I was in high school, we had a rule. Win or lose, you hang out with the team, feel the joy or sorrow, but then get up the next morning and get back to work. In a world of high-mileage running, there was almost always another run to get in. We came to coin this the 24-hour rule.

The point wasn’t to suppress your emotions or to become some kind of stoic. It was to set a boundary. A point to get back to the things that mattered. Sometimes that point is only a few hours, other times it’s stretched to a week.

Sports (and life) are emotional roller coasters. One day, you’re unstoppable. Next, you’re questioning everything. Without structure, the swings get wider and longer. The goal is to flatten the curve, just enough, so that you can stack pretty good days for a really long time.

-Steve