Being and Doing
The Co-Active for Sport Leaders series
Most of us know the feeling.
You pour yourself into something. You care deeply. You do the work. And then it doesn't go the way you wanted.
Not because you didn't try. Because sometimes that is just how it goes.
But here is the part that is harder to talk about. The moments that quietly unsettle us are not always the big failures. Sometimes it is something more subtle. The teacher who chose the profession because they believed in it, and somewhere along the way stopped recognizing themselves in the daily work. The doctor who studied for years, who genuinely wanted to help people, who earns a good living, and yet wakes up feeling like something important is missing.
It is not failure. It is a quiet disconnection between who you are and what you are doing every day.
I know that feeling from the inside.
I built a company called Beyond Pulse. The mission was real: help kids move more, support coaches, make a difference in youth sport. I believed in it completely. Beyond Pulse is still going, still doing important work to keep kids active and support coaches. But leadership brings responsibility well beyond the original mission. And the everyday weight of running something, the distance between the why and the daily reality, had me drifting without fully realizing it. At some point it just felt right to step away from the leadership.
I didn't fully understand what had happened until later. It is actually the Co-Active work I have done since that helped me make sense of it. And what I understand now is that I want to help coaches, founders, and leaders stay anchored before they ever have to walk away. To stay grounded in who they are even when the doing gets heavy.
That is what Co-Active gave me. And it starts with one foundational idea.
If you have followed this series, you have heard the word Co-Active before. But this article is where the philosophy behind all of it finally lands. Every tool we have explored so far, listening, the saboteur, all of it, flows from one idea. Being before doing. And the order matters.
What the being actually is
Not a mindset. Not a decision. Not something you arrive at by reading the right book, listening to the right podcast, or completing the right course.
The being is something you access. Something you feel. It lives in the body before it lives in the mind.
Most of us have touched it. You may not have had a name for it.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career studying it. In his book Flow, he describes those moments of complete absorption where time disappears, self-consciousness fades, and everything you have trained for seems to emerge effortlessly. Coaches have it too. You are in the middle of a game, something is happening on the field, and suddenly you are not thinking about what to do next. You are not running a play through your head. You are just there. Fully. Reading everything. Responding before your brain has time to analyze. The doing is happening, but it is coming from somewhere deeper. That is the being showing up in the moment.
And here is what I want you to really sit with.
Because those moments are real. Every coach reading this has felt them. But they are not the whole story. They are not actually what this article is about.
There is a bigger version of this. And it is harder to see because we almost never stop long enough to look.
Think about what you actually are for a moment. Not your role. Not your record. Not your title or your program or your philosophy. What you actually are.
Your body right now is running approximately 37 trillion cells simultaneously. Your heart has been beating without your permission since before you were born. Your lungs are exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide with every single breath, without a thought, without an effort, without you ever having to ask.
Every moment you are alive, something extraordinary is happening in you. Just the fact that you are here, that you exist at all, is one of the most extraordinary things in the known universe.
And yet. We look outside. We look to the doing for meaning.
Most mornings we wake up and the first thing we do is check the phone. The emails. The roster. The schedule. The problem from yesterday that is still waiting. We step immediately into the doing and we never, not for a single breath, pause to feel the miracle of the being underneath it all.
That is what our world does to us. Slowly, quietly, without ever asking permission. It takes the most extraordinary thing in the universe, a conscious human being fully alive, and turns it into a task manager.
And for coaches, the pull toward doing is even stronger. Because your job is measurable. Your results are public. Your worth, in the eyes of the sport world, is tied to what you produce. So the doing accelerates. And the being, that deep sense of who you actually are beneath all of it, gets quieter and quieter until one day it surfaces in the pause. On the drive home. On the Sunday morning with nothing scheduled. As a low hum you cannot quite name.
That hum is not a problem. It is not burnout. It is not weakness.
It is the being asking to be heard.
So what does being actually look like?
Being is not what you do. It is not your role, your method, your system, or your results.
Being is how you show up. The quality of presence you bring into a room before you say a single word. The energy that people feel when they are around you. The thing that stays after you leave.
Here are some being words. Read them slowly and notice which ones create something in your body.
Joyful. Curious. Present. Playful. Bold. Grounded. Warm. Fierce. Open. Generous. Courageous. Alive.
And here are some being words that most of us inherited without ever choosing them.
Serious. Guarded. Efficient. Controlled. Driven. Busy. Closed. Hard.
Not wrong. Not bad. But worth asking: did you choose those? Or did the world hand them to you, one difficult season at a time, one disappointment at a time, until they just became who you are?
Here is a simple way to feel the difference.
A coach obsessed with winning the next game is doing. A coach who decides to be fully present with every athlete today, regardless of the scoreboard, is being. Same gym. Same practice. Completely different experience for everyone in the room. And over time, a completely different kind of team.
The being shapes the doing. Not the other way around.
And here is what I genuinely believe: performance does not suffer when a coach leads from being. It deepens. The doing does not disappear. The preparation, the tactics, the standards, all of it stays. But it becomes anchored in something solid. And athletes feel the difference between a coach who is performing leadership and a coach who is living it.
Youth sport | The coach who sets the tone
A twelve year old makes a mistake in front of the whole team. Drops the ball. Misses the shot. Freezes at the wrong moment.
What happens in the next five seconds matters more than most coaches realize.
Not what you say. Who you are in that moment.
Because that child is not thinking about tactics. They are thinking about whether they are still okay. Whether you still believe in them. Whether this mistake defines them in your eyes. Their nervous system is scanning the room before your mouth opens. They will read your body, your face, your energy, before they hear a single word.
A coach operating from doing in that moment reaches for correction. For instruction. For the teachable moment. All of which have their place. But if the being underneath is frustration, impatience, or anxiety about the scoreboard, the athlete feels that first. And the correction lands in a body that is already bracing.
A coach operating from being reaches for the human first. Not because performance does not matter. But because they know that a child who feels safe makes fewer mistakes over time, not more. That presence is not softness. It is strategy.
The sport world will teach young athletes how to perform. Only a coach grounded in their being will teach them who to be while they perform. That is the gift that lasts long after the season ends.
Elite / College sport | When the environment pulls hardest
This is where the doing accelerates fastest.
Transfer portals. Scholarships. Recruiting cycles. Win totals that determine contract extensions. At the elite and college level, the pressure to produce is not background noise. It is the entire atmosphere. And in that atmosphere, being is the first thing to go.
I have a friend named Josete. He runs a football academy in Huesca, Spain. He is one of the most relational coaches I know. He invests deeply in his players. Not just their technique. Their confidence. Their sense of who they are as people. He builds real relationships. The kind that take years. And he extends that care to their families too.
A player he had invested in deeply, someone he had genuinely cared for over many years, made it to the next level. And somewhere in that transition, he chose money over the relationship. That is all there is to say about it.
I heard Josete talk about it. And yes, there was pain. Real pain. You could hear it. But underneath the pain was something that did not move. He was not closing off. He was not becoming the coach who says this is just how it is and starts protecting himself by caring less.
He was more himself than ever.
Because that moment had shown him exactly what he stood for. Not as a concept. As a lived experience. The betrayal did not shake his being. It sharpened it. He now knew, with total clarity, what he was not willing to become.
That is what being grounded actually protects you from. Not from disappointment. From the drift that follows. The slow, quiet moment when a coach decides the environment is right and starts to become someone else.
The sport world at this level will test you in exactly this way. It will offer you a thousand reasons to become harder, more transactional, more guarded. And every time you refuse, every time you come back to who you are, you are not being naive.
You are doing the hardest and most important work in coaching.
Professional sport | When everything is on the line
At the professional level, the doing never stops.
Film sessions at midnight. Roster decisions that affect livelihoods. Press conferences after losses. Owners with expectations. Agents with agendas. A fanbase that has an opinion about everything. The professional coach lives inside a machine that runs twenty-four hours a day and does not care how you feel about it.
I spent two years under the leadership of Ken Lolla at the University of Louisville men's soccer program. He is one of the finest leaders I have ever encountered. Not just in sport. In any room, in any context, in any industry.
Every program he touched, he transformed.
What I remember most about Ken is not a single decision or a tactical moment. It is something harder to name and impossible to fake. Every single day, you could feel that he was happy to be there. Genuinely blessed to be doing what he was doing. His family was woven into everything around him. Not separated from his coaching life. Present. Part of the culture. Part of who he was.
He was extremely present. And that presence was not a technique. It was not something he turned on for the team meeting and turned off afterward. It was the natural overflow of a man who knew exactly who he was and had chosen, every day, to show up fully from that place.
That is being. Not as a concept. As a lived example.
The doing was exceptional. The results were real. But the doing grew from the being. You could feel it in the building. And the people around him felt it too, whether they had words for it or not.
That is what the highest level of coaching actually looks like when it is done right. Not just tactics and preparation and relentless work. All of that matters. But underneath it, an anchor. A person who knows who they are. Who shows up the same way on the hardest days as on the best ones.
And if we think about the professional athlete for a moment. Their career and personal life depend on performance. Their identity is wrapped up in it. Every game, every season, every contract negotiation is a referendum on who they are. That is an enormous amount of pressure to carry. And the coach who leads from being is the one who can actually reach the person underneath all of that. Who can help each athlete stay anchored in who they are, separate from the result, separate from the contract, separate from the noise.
Because here is what the best teams understand. A collective is only as strong as the individuals within it know themselves. When players are lost, unanchored, performing from fear or ego or survival, the collective becomes fragile. It fractures under pressure. But when each person in that room has a strong sense of their own being, the collective becomes something rare. Something that holds together when everything is on the line. Something that actually performs when it matters most.
Strong individuals make strong collectives. And strong individuals need a coach who already knows who they are.
It starts not on the sideline. Not in the film room. Not in the press conference.
It starts in the quiet. In the pause. In the decision to know who you are before the world tells you who to be.
The Self | Who are you being?
We have talked about your athletes. Your program. Your culture.
Now let's talk about you.
Not the coach. Not the title. Not the record. You. The person who shows up before any of that exists.
Because everything in this article, everything in this series, starts here. You cannot lead from being if you have not done the work to know what your being actually is. And most coaches, if we are being honest, have never been asked that question. Not directly. Not seriously. Not in a way that required a real answer.
So here are three questions. Take your time with them. Do not answer quickly. Let them sit.
Who do you want to be?
Not what do you want to achieve. Not what kind of program do you want to build. Who do you want to be as a person, as a leader, as a coach? If you had to name three words that describe the being you want to bring into every room, every practice, every conversation, what would they be?
Joyful. Present. Fierce. Grounded. Curious. Generous. Bold. Alive.
Take your time. Name your three.
Your wise self, ten years from now, looks back at you today. What does it see?
Not your record. Not your trophies. The quality of your presence. The way you made people feel. The moments where you were fully yourself and the moments where you drifted. The version of you that your future self is most proud of, and the version it wishes had shown up more often.
What would that wise, older version of you say to you right now?
Imagine your retirement. The people you led are in the room. Your favorite athletes. Your staff. The people who gave years of their lives to something you built together. They are not talking about your record. They are talking about you.
What are they saying?
What did you bring into the room that nobody else could? What did they feel in your presence that they have never forgotten? What did you teach them, not about the game, but about how to be?
Those three questions are not rhetorical. They are the beginning of the most important work a coach can do.
And if the answers feel unclear, that is not a problem. That is exactly where this work begins. In Co-Active, we call this the Leader Within. The most resourceful, most grounded, most fully alive version of you. It is not something you build from scratch. It is something you return to. Again and again. Through the wins and the losses, through the drift and the return, through every season that tests who you are.
It is already there.
The question is whether you are willing to lead from it.
And here is what nobody tells you after that moment of clarity.
You walk into the building the next day and the environment is exactly the same. The staff member who sees everything differently is still there. The player who has not seen consistent minutes and is starting to simmer is still there. A room full of high achievers, each with their own strong opinions about how things should be done, is still there. Nobody paused while you did your inner work.
And if you have not designed your life to return to your being again and again, the automatic surroundings will quietly take over. Not all at once. Slowly. The way they always do.
Think about what sustains a spiritual practice. A person of faith does not go to church once and consider the work done. They return. Every week. Every day for some. They read. They reflect. They create rhythm and ritual that keeps them connected to what matters most. Not because they are weak. Because they are human. And being human means we forget. We drift. We need to return.
Your being is no different. Once you know it, you have to design your life around coming back to it. A morning practice. A question you ask yourself before you walk into the building. A person in your life who knows who you really are and will tell you when you have drifted. A journal. A walk. Something that is yours and that you protect.
This is not extra work on top of coaching. This is the foundation that makes everything else possible.
Coming Next
You now know what being is. You can feel the difference between leading from that place and drifting away from it.
But here is the question that naturally follows: how do you invite that in yourself and in others?
And wait. Before we go there. As coaches, as leaders, as humans, we are often the first to show up for everyone else and the last to turn that same quality of attention toward ourselves. So let's start there. With you. And then with the people you lead.
Next, we explore powerful questions. Not the questions we ask out of habit or politeness. The ones that stop someone in their tracks. That open something up. That make an athlete, a staff member, a person, feel truly seen and then move toward something they could not see before.
And after that, we go deep into fulfillment. What it actually means to live and lead from purpose. Your values. Your vision. The leader within you that already knows. That will be a journey of its own, and one I cannot wait to take with you.
Resources
Co-Active Training Institute | coactive.com
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Positive Intelligence assessment | positiveintelligence.com/saboteurs
