She's Not Lazy. She's Stuck.
Usually it's one of three things: no focus, no time or no confidence. Here's how to tell which, and a page you can hand her tonight.
Okay, so let me start with me.
I have ADHD. In school I talked nonstop, got thrown out of almost every class and almost never did my homework. My grades? Fine. At parent-teacher night my parents asked the teacher what exactly the problem was, and that's where the conversation ended.
The way I got through was building methods for myself. For school, for work, for sports. Later I built a bigger one, for life, and taught it to my players. Mostly to the girls I coach.
Three reasons she's stuck
The way I see it, three things usually get people stuck: no focus, no time and no confidence.
No focus
She wants more. From her sport, from school, from herself. And she ends up on Instagram, TikTok, the group chat and YouTube instead. Same loop, every day. She wants out. She just doesn't know how.
Tony Robbins has a line for it: where focus goes, energy flows. Right now her focus is on everybody else's videos and pictures. The day she gets a little more interested in her own life than in theirs, things start moving her way.
No time
School, practice, homework, friends, family. By the end of the day she's tired, and underneath the tired there's a little disappointment. That feeling of "I didn't get to it."
That feeling usually comes from one place. There's no clear direction written down, no plan she's actually working from. It's all in her head, in a mess.
No confidence
"I'm not good enough at this." "I can't." "I'm not getting where I wanted to be." Or just scared.
This one starts to change when she's busy with what she wants. Once she knows what she wants and works toward it, her chances of getting better go way up. And so does her confidence.
The paradox
Because she doesn't work with an organized plan, she doesn't have enough focus, time and confidence. And because she doesn't have enough focus, time and confidence, she doesn't work with an organized plan.
In five years you will arrive. The question is where.
How I got out
I was stuck once too. Badly. Some nights it wouldn't let me sleep.
So I started thinking. An hour or two a day, for about two weeks, I thought and wrote about where I was. Who I am, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what I got from my parents and grandparents, which values matter to me. Then the harder questions. What's my purpose? What do I actually want from this life?
And then I wrote my goals. The things I want to have, do and be. That part took about 30 minutes.
A pen, paper and a chair. That's it. Before that, I was driving blind. After that, I knew where I was going, and my life changed.
The kid who loved a hard puzzle
The psychologist Carol Dweck once gave kids puzzles that kept getting harder. One boy pulled his chair in and said he loved a challenge. That boy led to 30 years of her research on two mindsets, a fixed one and a growth one. She wrote it up in her book Mindset.
What to do tonight
Print the page below and hand it to her. It's written to her, the way I talk to my players, and it asks her the same three questions I asked myself. It takes about thirty minutes.
For her: three questions, thirty minutes
One printable page, written to her by Coach Isaac. Letter size.
Free: The Next Play Mini Journal
A seven-page journal for your athlete, written by Coach Isaac in the same words he uses with his own players. One page a day, five minutes a day, in the week between one game and the next. By the end of the week she has looked at the game with a clear head, picked one thing to work on at practice, and written her game plan for the next one.
- Day 1, The Reset. Tonight, before she goes to sleep. Three slow breaths, one honest sentence about what happened, a name for the feeling, and the one thing this game is teaching her. Then she closes the game. Tomorrow is a different page.
- Day 2, The Tape. The next morning. Coaches watch the tape the next day, never the same night, because the same night you only see the mistakes. The next day you see the whole game, including what she did right.
- Day 3, My Why. When the why is strong, the how gets easier. She writes down why she plays, clearly enough to say it out loud.
- Day 4, One Focus. She knows what to fix and why it matters. Now she turns it into one small thing she can do at practice this week, and repeats it. That's how real improvement works.
- Day 5, Winter. A sports season works like the seasons of the year, and game season is winter. You can't cancel winter. What you can do is get better at it: stronger physically, stronger mentally, stronger with your feelings.
- Day 6, Believe. Belief isn't magic. It's what she says to herself, over and over, until it's what she thinks. On this page she writes her own lines instead of the ones other people put in her head.
- Day 7, Next Play. Her game plan for the next game. Eyes forward. The season only moves in one direction.
It's free. Leave your email, and the download opens right away, in Letter and A4.
Based on chapter 2 of From Gazelle to Lioness by Coach Isaac. The puzzle study is from Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.