What a Red Card Taught Me About Getting What You Actually Want

resilience when plans change

Bloom where you are planted

Sixty-fourth minute. Team USA up 1-0 against Bosnia-Herzegovina. Then a red card comes out, and just like that, they're down to ten men.

Nobody asked. Nobody got a vote. The game just changed.

I couldn't stop thinking about how often that happens to us — not on a soccer field, but in the middle of a launch that shifts direction, a conversation that goes sideways, a season we thought we had figured out. One moment everything is tracking. The next, the ground has moved and we're standing in a completely different game than the one we thought we were playing.

Here's what that match ended up teaching me about the four things that actually get you through a moment like that.

Ask the Better Question

When the ground shifts, most of us ask the wrong question first: why is this happening to me? We go looking for someone to blame, something to fix, a way to rewind back to before the red card came out. That instinct makes sense. It also keeps us stuck in the moment instead of moving through it.

The question that creates forward motion is different: Now that this is happening, what do I actually want? Not what I wanted with the old plan. What do I want now, with this new reality, with what I actually have available to me right now?

That's where clarity lives — not in the smooth, easy stretches when everything's going according to plan, but in the moments the plan gets disrupted and you have to decide, on purpose, what direction you're actually moving.

Trust That You Have Enough

Sit with this for a second: Team USA won that match with ten men. Not eleven. One less than the plan called for. One less than felt like enough going into the sixty-fourth minute. And they still scored again at eighty-two and walked off having done the thing most people in that stadium assumed was no longer possible.

I hear women in this community say versions of "I don't have enough time," "I don't have enough support," "I don't have enough experience yet." I've said it too. That feeling of not-quite-enough is one of the most common things standing between us and the next step.

But the question was never whether you have everything you wish you had. It's whether what you're carrying right now is enough to keep going. Those ten players believed it was. Look what they did with it.

Find the One Necessary Move

The moment that red card came out, every player on the field had to decide, fast, without a huddle: pull back and protect what we have, or recalibrate and press forward? Ten individual decisions, made in real time, produced a second goal and a 2-0 win against a team with more players on the pitch.

That's necessity under pressure. Not a full strategic reset — one clear question, answered with honesty: What is the most important move I can make right now, with what I have, from where I am?

That question cuts through the noise, the doubt, the long list of things that feel urgent but aren't. It gets you back to the one move that actually matters. Name it. Then go do that thing.

Let Your Habits Carry You

Here's the part of the comeback nobody puts in the highlight reel: it didn't happen because of a sudden burst of inspiration in the sixty-fourth minute. It happened because of everything those players had already built before that moment arrived — the training nobody filmed, the repetitions that felt pointless on low-stakes days, the habits already grooved in and waiting for exactly this kind of pressure.

You can't build that foundation in the moment you need it most. It has to already be there. The habits you're tending right now — the small, quiet, undramatic ones — are exactly what will show up for you when your own sixty-fourth minute arrives.

The game is going to change on you. That part isn't optional. What you do in the minute after — the question you ask, what you decide is enough, the one move you make, the habits you've already built — that part is.

Ready to build the kind of clarity and consistency that holds up when the plan shifts?

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