One by one, the families neatly set up camp. Some with so much gear it looked like they planned to stay overnight. Packed and fully loaded.

We arrived simply with water bottles, the right color of Gatorade, and our outdoor fold-up chairs that were a permanent fixture in our trunk. Always at the ready for word to come on the time and location of the next game. You never knew too far in advance. Like part of the competition was being vigilant enough to show up on time. Often to a field in the middle of nowhere — where somebody decided to carve a clearing next to a soybean crop, add white lines and call it a soccer field.

A familiar scene for soccer families. I was newer to the experience, an outsider from the parent groups. Having spent more years in a New England hockey rink rather than next to a pitch in the suburbs of Ohio. Even newer to the culture displayed on the sidelines.

At the first whistle, the tiny players made their way up and down the field, all swarmed around the ball. More like a tame version of a rugby scrum, rather than players in positions. The only exception was the two or three kids who remained way outside of the pack. More like spectators than participants. Who could blame them — the kicking mosh pit looked chaotic. And really, did they need one more person attacking the ball at that moment? They thought not and I agreed.

Others didn’t. Groups of parents clustered around and enthusiastically proclaimed expertise on playing soccer effectively. There was endless commentary between them. With every fourth or fifth comment shouted to a player on the field. They were loud and it grew with intensity. Energy fueled by consensus. Each shout an invitation to the others to shout. Each carrying what should be done next.

“Jimmy, get your foot on the ball.”

“Leo, what are you waiting for? Look at your options! Shift the ball!”

“Pass it! Pass it right now.”

“Push up! Push up! Go high!”

“Blow your whistle! That’s what it’s for!”

“Mark. Mark! M-a-r-k!!! What are you doing? Get in the game.”

“Don’t pass! Drive it! Take him one-on-one!”

“Ref, do you need a copy of the rulebook? I have one in my minivan!”

“Noah, take the space! Dribble!”

“Mason. You’re not listening. Look alive.”

“Take the shot. Take the shot. No, take the shot already!”

“Ref, he’s literally sitting on the ball! That’s a delay of game!”

“Oh, great! Terrific! See what happens when you hesitate?”

“Jacob, boot it! Just get it out!”

“Hey! Watch your elbows, number four! We see you!”

It wasn’t the collective volume that was surprising. I vividly remember the sound of cowbells and cheers from the hockey rink stands. Orchestrated by a spirited bunch of parents. What I didn’t remember was a stand full of coaches. In the rink, there were two coaches and two assistants — one set for each team and a cheering section. Sure, there was an occasional reminder shouted. An encouraging word to keep going like, “It’s only pain,” after a full contact body check. In that cold rink, everyone understood there were people there to support and people there to coach. Both important roles. Performed by different people.

These sideline commentators believed they were shaping the game. They were — just not in the direction I think they may have intended. Influence is not the same as improvement. And the version they were running came at a cost.

The results? Not once, but numerous times kids shifted their focus from the game to the parents. Some offering rebuttals like, “I know Dad.” Others looked visibly hesitant. With so many different adults screaming orders, who do you listen to? Your parents, the coach, other players, other parents?

And then, the critiques directed toward the referee. He was young. Probably getting paid soybeans to officiate the game. An impossible position to be in. No matter what call he made, somebody on the sideline would see it differently and voice it for all to hear.

The cost to the players. These kids were young. Little sponges. Hardwired to soak up what the environment provides. To feed off of it.

In a lull between plays, when the shouting had died down, without a second guess, I yelled: “Christopher . . . HAAAAAVVVVVEEEE FUUUUUNNNN!”

He stopped looking at his cleats, turned his head in my direction, and a smile slowly replaced the look of defeat on his face. Looking a little red, he trotted off with a lot more bounce in his step to get in position for the next swarm to begin.

Shouldn’t the first directive be to enjoy the game? I thought so. Based on the side eye glances, others thought not. As if to say who is this ridiculous outsider anyways and how dare she speak of fun? They were intent on making the game serious. Like they had the next Messi on their hands. Performance was the only important lesson. Winning the only incentive.

•     •     •

I would imagine you’d expect the commentary about sportsmanship to be placed right here. Important for sure. This experience stayed with me for years for a different reason. The question I couldn’t shake was: what was most important for that moment and how do you best support it?

It is a discipline in leadership. Keeping the most important thing, the most important thing. Not just naming it. Acting to support it.

Parenting sometimes needs to be directive. Leadership is something different. Leadership is being perceived and modeled — every minute, whether or not the parent leader knows it. The sideline parents were not parenting. They were not coaching either. They were performing certainty in front of an audience of 6-year-olds. What they needed most was a parent providing unconditional love and support. The muscle that knows the difference between the tool the moment calls for and the tool you reach for by default — that muscle has a name.

Athletes have always called it mental toughness. Mental toughness is an idea associated with sports before becoming a leadership idea. It is easy to point it out in the final moments of the game when sinking a free throw or three-pointer really matters. Mental toughness is a little trickier when it comes to leadership.

Most leadership writing imports the idea badly. It gets reduced to endurance — the ability to push through, suppress emotion, drive harder than the person next to you. The no pain, no gain mantra that landed on T-shirts. That is not what it actually is. And it is not what gives you the edge to sink the game-winning shot.

Mental toughness was an understudied element of success for many years. A study published in June 2026 in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology defines mental toughness as a set of developable psychological skills. Attention regulation. Emotion regulation. Behavior regulation under pressure. Not a fixed trait. Not innate. A muscle. And muscles develop with use.

Here is what the muscle is actually for.

It is the discipline of creating the conditions in which winning is possible. For yourself, and for the people around you. Both, not either.

A winning environment is one in which the people inside it can perform at their best. The conditions are specific. Clarity about what matters most. Safety to make mistakes without being humiliated. A clear sense of who the actual coach is. Trust that the adults in the room have your back. Permission to enjoy the work. A north star big enough that one bad play is not an emergency. Because one play rarely decides the game.

The sideline parents undermined every one of those conditions. They had a coach already. What the kids didn’t have — in that moment — was someone in the parent role. The role that says I have you. The score does not change my opinion of you. Try the hard thing. Do your very best. That role disappeared the moment the parents picked up the microphone they were never handed and started calling plays. They traded the only role they were actually qualified for and replaced it with one the kids did not need a second version of.

Tim Gallwey wrote a book in 1974 called The Inner Game of Tennis that I came to love after hearing Brené Brown reference it many times. His central equation: Performance equals potential minus interference. Most coaching and most leadership puts all of its energy into developing potential. Drill harder. Train more. Sharpen the skill. The athletes and the leaders who actually win at the highest level do not have more potential than their peers. They have less interference.

The sideline parents amplified interference. The kids did exactly what the equation predicts. Hesitation. Eyes on the sideline instead of the field. The two or three kids who stood outside the swarm did so not because they were lazy, but because they had already learned that getting near the ball invited a response they did not want to receive. Looking back, those kids might have had it right. They were holding a position — exactly what the drills teach. The rest of the team just wasn’t ready to use it.

The parents thought they were creating tough kids. They were creating hesitant ones. Their version of tough was the failure of tough.

The behavior also did not stay on the field.

Years later, I found myself doing the cleanup work — gently dismantling the lessons my stepson had absorbed by osmosis. That a lost game is the referee’s fault. That a missed play is the failure of another player. That accountability lives anywhere but in your own contribution. He had not picked those beliefs out of thin air. He had heard them shouted at the sky on every sideline he had ever stood near. The kids absorbed the modeling completely. What the adults did is what the kids learned. What was said about effort and integrity in the car ride home mattered far less than what the adults had performed during the game in front of them.

This is where it takes an extremely strong leader to notice the impact. The behavior travels. A team takes on the operating style of the leader, not the stated values of the company. The team that is shouted at learns to deflect. The team that watches its leader blame the market, the previous quarter, the people who left — that team learns the same move. The leader who is harsh in private conversations is teaching every direct report that harshness is the way to handle harder direct reports. None of it gets announced. All of it gets absorbed.

These are also the leaders who bring in outside help to fix corporate culture — oblivious to the fact that their own behavior creates the culture. Until the source is addressed, nothing actually changes.

Picture the team you lead now. The way it behaves when the pressure is on — where do you think that came from?

I have a Charlie Munger phrase on a digital Post-It note on my computer screen: show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. The leaders who pay to fix the culture they themselves created are not blind. They are responding rationally to what their environment rewards. Until the incentive changes, the behavior creating the culture stays exactly where it is.

This is also where leadership has gotten itself into trouble.

We are watching a leadership crisis I have not seen in 40 years. The old mark of strong leadership was certainty — the most certain person in the room wins. We covered some of where that came from in an earlier piece on Jack Welch and how the strengths leaders are celebrated for eventually become the things that take them down. The certainty muscle was the prized one for decades. I’m not too proud to admit I aspired to live by it for years, with consequences.

The sideline parents thought throwing more certainty at the kids would produce the results they wanted. It didn’t. Leaders in business make the same mistake.

Today, almost no one is certain — and the ones who claim to be might be a bit delusional. The pace of change has outrun any leader’s ability to know what is coming next. Senior people who built their careers on having the answer are quietly relieved when they are told, in private, that they do not have to fake one. The ones who refuse to drop the act — who keep performing certainty when nobody believes it anymore — are the ones their CEOs are quietly losing patience with.

When was the last time you performed a certainty you did not feel?

This is where the muscle gets its real workout. The leader who says I do not know yet in front of their team is not being weak. That is mental toughness in its current form. It takes more control to admit uncertainty than to perform confidence. It takes more discipline to invite the team into the not-knowing than to manufacture a directive that sounds correct and changes again next week, month, or quarter. Vulnerability — the real kind, used in service of the work — is the muscle most leaders are not exercising right now. They confuse it with weakness because the old mark of strength was the opposite of it. The price can be high for some. In an unhealthy environment, this move gets exploited — and can be the equivalent of career suicide.

Real empathy is the same kind of muscle, and it is the antidote to the noise.

Think about the coach who yells all the time. When she finally yells about something that actually matters, no one hears it. She has burned every flare. Her team cannot tell the difference between the noise she makes when she is annoyed and the urgency she means to convey at a critical moment. The yell has lost its meaning because it always means something.

Similar to the sideline parents — who became nothing but noise to some of the players.

Now think about the coach who is mostly steady — quiet, observant, present — and then raises her voice once, at the exact moment that calls for it. That yell cuts through. The whole team feels it. They know it matters because she has not spent the rest of the season making everything sound like an emergency. She is not trying to create action by demeaning players. She is naming — with the volume on high — what matters most in the moment and how to support it.

Empathy works the same way. Performed empathy also becomes noise. The constant murmur of “I hear you” and “that sounds really hard,” unaccompanied by any change in what actually happens is just noise. It loses meaning because it is always present, and because the people on the receiving end learn that the words do not predict action.

Real empathy is rare enough to land when it shows up — and it is followed by something. A leader who is steady most of the time. Who stops at the moment that calls for it, lets a person be fully seen, and then changes something as a result. That kind of empathy takes the discipline to stay quiet the rest of the time.

The leader who can do this builds the one thing lip service never will: trust. Real concern is the tipping point. A team can feel the difference between a leader performing care and a leader who actually carries it. When she stops to listen, she means it. When she names what matters, she means it. When she says she will act, she does. And here the absorption finally works in your favor. The same way bad behavior travels, this travels too. The team mirrors it. Care becomes the operating style. The culture catches up.

This is what creates the environment in which people will actually take risks, tell the truth, push back, and bring the work that only they can bring. Trust is built one rare, deliberate act of real presence at a time — followed by the thing the moment called for.

Mental toughness is the discipline that produces all of it.

The leader who does only the inside work — managing their own internal weather while ignoring the room — transmits steadiness into a dysregulated environment that needed something else. Calm is not the same as regulation. The leader who tries to manage the room without doing the inside work transmits their own dysregulation to everyone in it. Both are required. Neither is sufficient alone.

The practices that build the muscle are smaller and less impressive than most leadership writing suggests. Pausing before responding instead of reacting. Asking what the moment actually requires before reaching for the default tool. Identifying how you best support what’s most important, and acting appropriately. Saving intensity for the moments that earn it. Naming what matters clearly enough that the team does not have to guess. Modeling the behavior — actually modeling it, not describing it — and recognizing that what you do under pressure is teaching everyone in the room what is acceptable under pressure. Catching yourself when you are about to blame the ref, and choosing not to.

These look minor in isolation. They compound. They produce the kind of leader people perform for not because they are afraid but because the leader has earned it. It becomes a team they want to be on. A team they care about.

What made the “HAVE FUN” call from the sideline mentally tough was not the volume. Not the courage to push back against the other parents. It was the discipline to identify what mattered most in that moment for that child, and the control to support it cleanly. A tiny act of environment-building in a setting where nobody else was doing it. A small refusal to abandon the role I was actually there to play.

It looks small. It is not. The same instinct, applied at scale, is what separates the leaders who produce sustained performance from the ones who produce spikes followed by burnout, turnover, and quiet quitting.

Mental toughness might be the most important capacity in leadership. I have come to believe it outweighs skill and knowledge.

Skill and knowledge are tools. Mental toughness is the capacity that tells you which tool the moment requires, and gives you the control to use it cleanly. Without that capacity, the most skilled leader in the room is just rapid-firing tools at problems that did not call for them. The volume on the sideline is the proof. The results, the evidence.

The good news is that it is a muscle. It develops with use. It does not come pre-installed. It does not belong only to the people who looked tough early. It belongs to anyone willing to slow down enough to see what is actually happening in a room, choose what matters most in it, and support it cleanly.

That is the practice. And the practice is the work.

•     •     •

If the work you have been wanting to do is on this — what you keep choosing under pressure, what gets harder when the volume rises, where you want to be steadier — that is what a Discovery Conversation is for. It determines if working together is the right fit.