The athlete playbook: effort in, results out
For most of your life, effort was the lever. Train harder, play better. Stay late, make the team. The playbook was simple and it was true, because the rest of the system was handled for you: a coach wrote the plan, a schedule told you when, a team noticed when you didn’t show, and nobody needed you at 2 a.m. You didn’t have to be disciplined. You had to be an athlete inside a structure, and you were a very good one.
I know this one from the inside. “If I try harder, then I’ll succeed” worked for me until it didn’t, first when my body ended my college career, then again when I became a mom.
What actually changed
Not you. The rules of the game changed. Your responsibilities changed. Your ability to regulate yourself, however and whenever you want, changed. These aren’t excuses; they’re real variables.
Look at the four things that quietly carried the old playbook: time that was yours, sleep that was reliable, a structure someone else maintained, and a body that recovered on schedule. Motherhood touches all four at once. The time is now fragmented into pieces shorter than a warm-up. The sleep belongs to whoever woke up last. The structure is now yours to build, with no assistant coach. And recovery runs on a toddler’s immune system.
When the Mulier Institute in the Netherlands interviewed 22 mothers who had been active in sport, keeping a routine after the first child was a real struggle for them. Their finding that stuck with me: the quality of the time mattered as much as the amount. Uninterrupted minutes count for more than a long window that keeps getting broken up. (NL Times has a short write-up of the study.) Hint: if you’re trying to regulate your own body after being a co-regulation tool for the last 30-minute toddler meltdown, the last thing your body wants is an intense HIIT workout during your limited workout time. Your pelvic floor may have something to say, too.
So when “try harder” fails now, it isn’t failing because you got softer. It’s failing because you’re pulling a lever that was never the engine.
Why “just be consistent” backfires
Here’s the trap for athletes specifically. We were trained in all-or-nothing, and it worked, because the season had a shape: pre-season, in-season, off-season. You could go all in because “all” had an end date.
Mom season doesn’t. So the all-in week is followed by the sick week, which becomes the “I’ve already blown it” week, which becomes the restart on Monday. Each restart costs more than the last, and each one teaches your brain that this is a thing you fail at. That’s not a consistency problem. That’s a design problem: a plan built for a season that has an off-season, run in one that doesn’t.
Values first, then systems
The thing that works is less dramatic and more durable. Start with what you want your life to look like, not with a rule. Then look honestly at the week you have, not the one you’d design. Then build one system that fits inside it.
A system is anything that makes the action happen without a decision. The 20-minute training slot that lives inside club practice, because you’re already in the parking lot. The dumbbells by the coffee maker. The walk that’s also the phone call with your sister. None of these need you to feel motivated. They need you to have decided once.
What you’ll notice is that discipline stops being the question. You aren’t gritting through anything; you’re running a system you built around something you care about, and you adjust it when a variable moves. That is what coaching is: a second set of eyes on the system, and honest feedback when it meets real life.
One small experiment this week
Pick one action you keep meaning to do. Shrink it until it fits in the worst version of your week, not the best. Attach it to something that already happens: a drop-off, a nap, a practice. Run it for seven days and count completions, not perfect days. Then look at the pattern. Where did it hold? Where did it break, and what was true that day?
That pattern is the whole game. You’re not looking for a reason to feel bad. You’re looking for the next adjustment.
If you want someone to look at it with you, that’s what the free call is for.
