Mindset
“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.
