The Honest Version

Part One

I went through a version of this myself, from a different door. I had spent thirty years in a high-performance career in investment banking and the C-suite, and I had built a professional capacity for honesty about performance that was, in its own way, as developed as anything an athlete builds. I could read the numbers. I could read the room. I could hear the truth in the post-mortem of a deal that did not work. I had been told the truth, often painfully, by people whose job was to tell me the truth, and I had become very good at hearing it without flinching.

What I had not built, and what almost no one in that world builds, was the equivalent capacity for honesty about who I was outside the performance. That was a different kind of honesty, and the professional version did not transfer.

The reason it does not transfer is that performance honesty is built around an external referent. The film. The numbers. The deal. The opponent. The market. There is something objective, something measurable, something that exists in the world, that the honesty is calibrated against. The capacity grows because the referents are real and unforgiving.

Identity honesty has no such referent. There is no film of who you are. There are no numbers. The questions that have to be answered are not "did the body produce the performance" but "who is the person who is no longer producing the performance, and who is that person going to be now." Those questions cannot be answered by the methods that produced the answers about performance. The athlete who tries to use professional honesty on identity questions usually finds that the tool that has worked for a whole career suddenly does not work, and finds that strange.

It is one of the more disorienting parts of the transition, because the failure of the tool is itself unfamiliar. The athlete has been trained to respond to a failing tool by training harder, refining the technique, finding a better version. Identity honesty does not respond to any of that. It responds to a different mode of attention entirely.

Part Two

The work that addresses identity honesty is different in kind from the work the career trained for. It is slower. It does not respond well to pressure. The methods that produced the breakthroughs in performance, the discipline, the focus, the relentless pursuit of the next gain, often slow this work down rather than speed it up.

It is not, in my view, a soft world. It is just a different world from the one the career was conducted in, and it has its own kinds of rigour. Looking carefully at who you have been, who the body allowed you to be, who you are becoming as the body shifts, and what kind of person you want to be in the second half of a life that has a long way still to run, is not soft work. It is honest work of a particular kind, conducted on a longer timeline, with different feedback.

From what I have read and watched of athletes talking about retirement, most approach the end of the career without this work having been done. Some find a version of it later, after several difficult years. A small number begin it early, while the career is still running, and from what those few describe publicly, they tend to end up in the best position when the transition actually arrives, because the interior life has been partly built, rather than having to be built from scratch at the moment of greatest pressure.

Continue reading: Different Door, Same Question →

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