Couldn't Save a Beach Ball

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Holy crap.

One save on the first eight shots. My second save didn’t come until nineteen minutes in, and it took nineteen shots to get my save percentage over .500. I know that because I was counting, because I felt like shit and wanted to know when I’d at least be stopping half of them.

It was shinny, so nobody keeps score, but I feel like we lost, bigly. I try to give up less than a goal every ten minutes, and over 87 minutes I let in 17 on 46 shots, which is about double that.

I came in tired, stressed and distracted. There’s been a lot going on, at work and at home, and for the first 45 minutes I felt like I couldn’t do anything right.

The strange part was the end. Guys were complimenting the quality of the saves I was making and telling me I’d played well, and honestly the numbers back them up, since after that start I stopped 19 of the last 27. But none of it landed, because in my head I couldn’t have saved a beach ball.

That’s what a bad headspace does. It doesn’t just make you play worse, it wrecks your read on how you’re playing, and the results came back long before the feeling did. And when you’re in that spot, a compliment between whistles sounds like what it usually is, someone being nice to keep you trying.

The best manager I’ve had caught this in me once. It was the week after I got back from vacation, a shortened week too, the kind where you’re supposed to come back rested, and he realized I was burning out.

He had a regular meeting with his direct reports, six of us, and he paused it and asked everyone to say something they liked about what I brought to the group and why they liked working with me.

I’m not used to getting compliments, so honestly it was uncomfortable. But I was flabbergasted that he asked it of the group at all, and by how quickly they got on board and just did it. They talked about how I care for my people, my peers, my boss and the business. They said I was kind, caring, creative, enthusiastic and deeply skilled.

It took fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes they had turned me around, and I’d argue it kept me on the right track for a good while after that.

So why did that work when the compliments at the end of last night’s game didn’t? It was intentional. He stopped the meeting to do it, so there was no way to write it off as in-game politeness to keep me going. He also didn’t make it about his own feedback, he stepped back and let my peers do the talking, and that felt better than anything he could have said himself. And even though we were remote, it was cameras on, which is about as face to face as remote gets.

If you lead people, the week someone gets back from time off is worth watching, because if they don’t come back lighter, that tells you something. And fifteen minutes of a meeting you were already having is a pretty cheap thing to spend.

You don’t have to be the manager to do it, either. It was the people in that room who actually said the words.

As I’m writing this, I can see it in my own team. I’ve got one person who feels like they’re the only one leaving our systems better than they found them. I’ve got another who protects their peers’ focus by taking on-call when they know they’re too distracted to do project work.

Sometimes you can get out of a bad headspace on your own and do great things. But sometimes you need to be supported by your leader or your peers, and I’m pretty sure a couple of mine are out there right now feeling like they couldn’t save a beach ball. I owe them the same fifteen minutes.

Burnout on Coffee or Blog

Couldn't Save a Beach Ball