“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

I think, or maybe I wonder sometimes, that people think I am a little crazy. I have never been particularly predictable, and yet, strangely enough, I think I have been remarkably steady. My dad used to refer to me as a turtle. Slow and steady wins the race. I suppose there was some truth in that, although my path through life has rarely followed the direction most people might have expected.

Each time I have found myself in a position that people in my industry might consider to be “the one,” I have eventually changed direction. It has never been a change simply for the sake of change, nor have I been particularly concerned with what the change might look like from the outside. I think I have simply been motivated by the possibility that there might be something else to see, another perspective to explore, another version of myself that I had not yet met.

That tendency has not been limited to my professional life.

I have been married three times and divorced twice. Not because I wanted change for the sake of it, but because I eventually came to understand that I did not want to remain in a relationship that was no longer right, either for my partner or for me. I found the right person, finally, although I have also come to understand that finding the right person is hardly the end of the story. Jaime wants to grow as much as I do, and perhaps that has been one of the secrets of our life together. We have made a deliberate effort to keep becoming, and somehow to do that together rather than slowly growing apart.

That is not easy. Relationships are not easy, because at some point you have to stop thinking only about what you want and begin thinking about what the two of you need. When children enter the picture, that equation becomes exponentially more complicated. You cannot simply do what you want anymore. You try to understand what everyone needs, including yourself, and then somehow make decisions that allow all of those people to continue becoming who they are. That is a difficult thing to do well.

Perhaps that same instinct has followed me throughout my professional life.

I left Concordia University because I had reached a ceiling of possibility. It was a nice job, filled with good people, and there were plenty of reasons to stay. But I could no longer create the experience I wanted to create there. The environment had become stagnant for me, and I was not.

I left the New York Islanders because the environment was messy and disjointed, and I could not find a meaningful way to serve within it. It was an organization with an incredibly rich history that, at the time, seemed to have lost its direction. I could feel myself becoming part of the dysfunction rather than someone capable of changing it, and eventually I knew I needed to move.

I did not have a choice about leaving the New York Rangers. That decision was made for me. Truthfully, though, in the middle of my second divorce and another period of significant personal change, I suspect I would eventually have found my way toward the door anyway. I could not build what I wanted to build there either. Professional sport can be a remarkably stimulating environment, but it can also be constrained by narrow thinking, fear of failure, politics and the understandable desire to protect what already exists.

Montreal was different. In Montreal, I discovered that I could build something. Perhaps not everything I imagined, but enough to begin creating a different way of working. We built something unique and, for a while, something powerful. I was challenged, stimulated, and surrounded by problems worth solving. Eventually, though, I began to feel that familiar restlessness again. When you work within a professional sport organization, your ability to continue growing often depends upon whether the people and the organization around you want to keep growing too. What many people would have considered the job of a lifetime eventually stopped allowing me to explore the person and practitioner I was trying to become.

B2ten opened that door again. It allowed me to become curious in ways I had never experienced before and to explore possibilities without many of the traditional constraints. For quite a while, it pushed me into places I did not even realize I was capable of going, and it unquestionably made me a better practitioner. Working with those incredible athletes left me professionally exposed. There was nowhere to hide. They had enormous dreams and expectations, and I had accepted the responsibility of helping them solve problems that stood between where they were and where they wanted to go. I had to find solutions. I had to become better. I had to step into the expectation that somehow I could help them move closer to the promise of an Olympic medal. That pressure squeezed growth out of me, and for a long time it satisfied that internal itch for expansion.

Eventually, where I wanted to go no longer aligned with where the organization wanted to go. Once again, I found myself standing in front of a choice. I could continue because it was comfortable. After all, it was successful, or simply because everyone expected that I would, or I could change direction again.

So Jaime and I decided to make a go of private education.

I became a teacher, mentor, business owner, content creator and, whether I was prepared for it or not, a digital entrepreneur. I dove headfirst into a universe I barely understood. I explored so many corners of that space that I am not even sure I could list them all anymore. Every time I thought I understood what I was doing, the rules changed, the software evolved, the algorithm shifted, and the thing I had finally figured out became the thing I needed to relearn. It was frustrating, fascinating, exhausting and incredibly educational. When I look back at everything we have experienced over these past twelve years, I find it difficult to believe how much we have learned, created, failed at, rebuilt and discovered along the way. It has been truly profound.

There is a cost to living this way, though, and I do not want to romanticize it. Changing direction means surrendering certainty. Sometimes it means walking away from status, financial security, familiarity, or an identity you worked very hard to create. Sometimes the people around you do not understand why you cannot simply be satisfied with what you have. There have certainly been decisions I questioned, mistakes I made and moments when I wondered whether staying put would have been easier. Almost certainly it would have been. But I am not convinced easier would have been better.

Then, almost as though the timing had been arranged for us, I looked at Jaime and told her I thought it was time to revisit our lives. The place we had once imagined ourselves living forever had gradually begun to feel like a waiting room for retirement. There was nothing wrong with it. In fact, there was almost everything right with it. But something inside me knew I was not ready to settle into the final version of my story.

I did not want to retire. I did not want to wind things down. I wanted another opportunity to revise the story, to explore another corner of myself and, in doing so, perhaps discover another corner of us.

So here we are again.

I have never been afraid of changing direction. Apparently, it is simply something I do. Not because change itself fulfills me, and certainly not because every change has worked out exactly as I imagined it would. What fulfills me is the revision. It is the possibility contained within another iteration. It is discovering that the story is not finished simply because the chapter you are currently living happens to be a good one.

Maybe my dad was right about the turtle after all. I have been slow and steady, just perhaps not in the way he imagined. The steadiness was never about staying in one place. It was about continuing to move toward whatever seemed capable of showing me something I had not yet discovered about my work, the world, the people I love, or myself.

The next iteration has almost always been the most interesting one.

And at 62, I am enormously grateful that I still want to know what happens next.

“Perhaps the hardest part of believing in something isn’t building it. Perhaps it’s continuing to believe in it during the long periods when the world hasn’t yet caught up to what you already know to be true.”

-SL

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether there is ever a right time to let go of something you believe in.

Jaime and I have spent the past twelve years building an educational company dedicated to helping human performance professionals solve difficult problems. It wasn’t a business we stumbled into or a market opportunity we happened to notice. It grew out of a question that followed us throughout our careers.

“What course did you take to learn how to do what you do?”

Sometimes the wording changed.

“How did you get to think this way?”

Different questions perhaps, but born from the same curiosity. People had watched us work with elite athletes, or heard us speak at conferences, or spent time with us in a course, and they were trying to understand where this way of thinking had come from.

The irony was that we never had a simple answer.

There wasn’t one course. There wasn’t one mentor. There wasn’t one certification that unlocked everything else. There were decades of experiences layered on top of one another: seasons in professional sport, failures that taught more than successes, conversations with remarkable people, thousands of athletes, endless reading, relentless curiosity, and an unwillingness to accept easy answers to difficult problems.

Eventually we realized that perhaps what people were really asking wasn’t where we had learned it. They were asking whether there was a way to shorten that journey.

That realization became the foundation for everything we have built.

Last weekend I was reminded of that question once again while speaking at the Professional Hockey Chiropractors Society Conference in Minneapolis. I spent two and a half hours walking practitioners through the management of low back problems in hockey, beginning not with treatment techniques but with the game itself. Hockey players routinely ask their spines to tolerate positions and forces that most people never experience. Their movement world is unlike that of almost any other athlete, and yet we often insist on evaluating and treating them as though they were simply another person with back pain.

The problem has never been that we don’t know healthy movement exists. Of course it does. The problem is assuming that human performance begins with health. It doesn’t. It begins with the demands of the task. Athletes don’t wake up wondering how to preserve the perfect spine. They wake up asking how to make the team, stay in the lineup, or win the championship. Our responsibility isn’t to convince them that the demands of their sport are somehow wrong. Our responsibility is to understand those demands and prepare the person in front of us to meet them.

Everything else follows from there.

As I worked through the presentation, I found myself returning to a principle that has quietly guided much of my career. The brain runs the show. If we fail to consider how it is receiving, interpreting, and integrating information, we inevitably end up chasing the outputs it creates rather than understanding why they exist in the first place.

Pain, movement, coordination, confidence, protection, none of these emerge in isolation. They are the consequence of a remarkably complex interaction between the information entering the nervous system, the experiences that shape its interpretation, and the objectives it is trying to accomplish. Two athletes can be exposed to the same environment, the same injury, and the same rehabilitation program, yet emerge with entirely different outcomes because their brains have interpreted those experiences differently.

That is why understanding the person must always precede understanding the problem.

Halfway through the presentation I found myself saying something I hadn’t planned to emphasize quite so strongly.

“Begin with the person… and end with the problem.”

The room became noticeably quieter.

From there I walked everyone through the case of a young NHL player whose career appeared to be ending before it had really begun. A first-round draft pick only two years earlier, he had become trapped in a cycle of pain, failed return-to-play attempts, medication, frustration, and diminishing hope. Eventually I received a phone call from his organization asking whether I would be willing to have a look.

Did eleven years working in the National Hockey League help? Certainly. But not because they gave me secret techniques. They taught me to notice the things that mattered.

At one point during the session I asked the audience how many people were familiar with skate profiling. Three hands went up in a room of roughly seventy practitioners.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, skate profiling changes the geometry of the blade beneath the athlete’s foot, subtly altering where the body’s centre of mass lives over the skate. Those seemingly small adjustments influence posture, force production, loading patterns, and ultimately the stresses experienced throughout the kinetic chain, including the lumbar spine. I’ve watched players develop back pain after changing nothing more than their skates and blade profile, simply because no one had appreciated the consequences of those changes.

The point wasn’t really about skate profiling. It was about context.

Every activity creates its own movement realities. Every sport asks different questions of the human body. If we don’t understand those questions, how can we possibly know whether someone possesses the movement options necessary to answer them?

When I finally assessed that player, I wasn’t looking for pathology first. I was looking for missing options. I already understood what hockey would demand of him. The assessment simply revealed what his nervous system no longer felt comfortable accessing.

Your brain will not consistently access movement that it either doesn’t know exists or no longer perceives as safe. Pain changes everything. It serves as a warning output, but it also quietly reshapes the movement solutions available to us. The movements we stop using gradually become less represented within our internal maps, and as those maps lose clarity the nervous system becomes increasingly reluctant to revisit them. The result is a vicious cycle in which protection limits movement, reduced movement limits experience, and diminished experience reinforces protection.

As I explained this process, I could see the room beginning to understand that solving a movement problem is rarely about correcting the visible output alone. It requires understanding the quality of the inputs and the way the nervous system is processing them. If all we ever do is chase the outputs, we will continue to miss much of the problem sitting quietly beneath them.

The final third of the presentation focused on restoring those movement options, making them safe again, and then building enough capacity for the athlete to express them under speed, load, fatigue, and competitive pressure. Without that final step, we haven’t really solved anything. We’ve simply created temporary relief.

When I finished, I sensed that something meaningful had happened. People stayed behind asking questions. Others thanked me for making them think differently. Over the following two days I listened as subsequent presenters referred back to ideas we had discussed together, weaving those concepts into their own talks.

One conversation in particular has stayed with me.

A Canadian chiropractor who had built a tremendously successful practice and life in Northern California came over after his presentation. We spoke for quite a while about the remarkable overlap between our philosophies and approaches to human performance. Eventually he looked at me and said, “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of you before this weekend.”

I smiled because I honestly didn’t know what to say.

I told him that Jaime and I sometimes feel a little like The Tragically Hip. In Canada, many people know our work. South of the border, despite years of teaching, writing, podcasting, travelling, speaking, and trying to contribute to this profession, it often feels as though we simply don’t exist.

That conversation has stayed with me all week, because it touches something much deeper than recognition.

For twelve years we’ve been trying to answer the very question people kept asking us. How do I learn to think this way? How do I develop this approach to problem solving? How do I shorten the decades it took you to put all these pieces together?

We built what we wished someone could have offered us thirty years ago.

And yet here we are.

Our newest Complete Reconditioning Experience cohort hasn’t attracted enough registrations to justify running it. After months of preparation, refinement, and sharing what we genuinely believe is valuable, we find ourselves wondering whether we have failed to communicate that value, whether we’ve been speaking to the wrong audience, or whether some ideas simply take longer to find the people who need them.

I don’t honestly know.

What I do know is that the work itself still feels true. Every athlete I’ve worked with, every practitioner I’ve mentored, every difficult case that has reinforced these principles reminds me why we started this journey in the first place. The evidence isn’t found in marketing metrics. It’s found in human beings who now see problems differently than they once did.

Perhaps that’s why I’m struggling with the question.

Not because I’m ready to let go, but because I care deeply about the possibility that people who are asking the very question we built our lives around answering may never discover that the answer exists.

Maybe that’s simply part of building anything worthwhile. Maybe every meaningful idea spends part of its life waiting patiently to be discovered. Or perhaps there are still lessons for Jaime and me about how to tell this story more clearly than we have so far.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that every meaningful chapter of my career has required living with uncertainty long before clarity arrived. This chapter, it seems, is asking the same thing of me.

So tomorrow I’ll probably get up, keep teaching, keep writing, keep learning, and keep trying to help people think differently.

Perhaps that’s not giving in at all.

Perhaps that’s simply what belief looks like.