Morning Coffee: Being Soft With Yourself Is the Strategy

Good morning.

I want to talk about something the NFL just did that I think is more important than most people are giving it credit for.

At the Annual Meeting in March, NFL owners approved a new requirement: every team must now employ a full-time mental health clinician. Not a hotline number. Not a referral list. A person. Present. On staff. Whose entire job is the psychological wellbeing of the players.

The most physically dominant athletes on the planet — people whose entire identity is built around toughness, performance, pushing through pain — just formally acknowledged that softness is part of the program.

Let me say that louder: the NFL decided that being hard all the time is not a winning strategy.

So why are you still treating yourself like it is?

I’m talking about the internal voice that greets every mistake with a verdict. The one that runs the post-game film on everything you did wrong before it ever acknowledges what you did right. The one that frames rest as laziness, a slow day as failure, a hard week as evidence that maybe you’re not built for this.

That voice is not keeping you sharp. It’s keeping you small.

Being soft with yourself is not the same as being easy on yourself. There’s a difference. Easy on yourself means lowering the standard. Soft with yourself means maintaining the standard while also extending yourself the basic grace you’d give any other person you love and believe in.

You would not speak to your best friend the way you speak to yourself after a bad day. You would not tell her she’s behind, she’s failing, she should have known better, she’s running out of time. You would sit with her. You would remind her of everything she’s already done. You would tell her to rest and come back stronger.

Be her friend. Be your own.

The hardest athletes in the world just put it in the rulebook: you need someone in your corner who helps you stay okay. Be that person for yourself first.

First & Jenn