Skill Floors Can Be Built to Rise
Why preparing for your worst day builds more durable skill than chasing your best.
There’s a line from Steve Magness that stopped me cold the first time I read it. Not because it was flashy or clever—but because it felt already known, like something I’d lived through coaching, but hadn’t yet put into words:
"Lower the bar. Raise the floor. Shed perfection. Embrace who you are. Trust your training. Trust yourself. Develop a quiet ego." (Steve Magness, Do Hard Things)
I wasn’t planning on writing about it. In fact, I’m usually allergic to centering a newsletter around a single quote, especially one that risks becoming another self-help Instagram slide. But this one lingered.
It spoke, in surprisingly compact form, to many of the ideas I’ve come to believe are essential to skill acquisition, particularly through the lenses of ecological dynamics and differential learning. And so, rather than treating it like a flag to wave, I’m treating it like a trail marker: a sign pointing toward a deeper exploration. Not a gimmick. A mirror.
Let’s follow where it leads.
3 Key Takeaways:
Raising your performance floor matters more than hitting new personal bests.
Trust is built through solving problems—not perfect execution.
A "quiet ego" unlocks deeper learning and self-trust in athletes.
2 Thought-Provoking Questions:
What does your current practice environment reveal about the “floor” you're building for your athletes—or yourself?
In what areas are you still coaching for peak moments, and what might change if you designed for adaptability instead?
Raising the Floor: Practicing for Your Worst Day
We often coach for peaks. We chase “personal bests,” talk about hitting top gear, and dream up scenarios where athletes rise to the occasion. But in real games—or life, for that matter—most people fall to their level of preparation. You don’t get your best day when things get tough. You get your floor.
Which makes me ask: what kind of practice builds a reliable floor?
The answer, at least from an ecological perspective, is not one built on idealized, repeatable perfection—but one forged in the ugly, uncertain, adaptive mess of representative learning. In these spaces, we discover a set of responses instead of rehearsing a solution.
Take flag football. I love teaching defense with just three players on the entire field—especially with kids. It’s uncomfortable. The runner has endless space, and the only way the two defenders can succeed is by coordinating well in real-time. Most of the time it looks awful. Flags are missed, players collide or freeze. But every rep is different. Every attempt is a chance to adapt.
The Quiet Ego: Self 1 vs Self 2
Much of what we call "mental blocks" are really just ego interference. Not arrogance—just a mind too loud.
Magness’s concept of a ‘quiet ego’ echoes Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game theory, but through a different lens. Where Gallwey distinguishes between Self 1 (the critic, the evaluator) and Self 2 (the doer, the learner), Magness invites us to shift attention entirely—quieting the evaluator to empower real-time learning. Both point to the same coaching truth: the loudest voice often gets in the way of performance.
Self 2, the learner, is nurtured best in low-stakes, feedback-rich environments.
In coaching, I’ve seen this clearest not in big moments, but in practice environments where the stakes are low and the information is rich. That same 2v1 flag football game becomes even more interesting when I add zones on the field: areas that earn extra points if the runner crosses into them. Suddenly, players start experimenting. They run backwards. They take detours most coaches would hate. Yet, mostly they just run like hell with great drive towards the finishing line (conditioning included).
But here’s the thing: it works. Because they’re in the moment, not in their heads. There’s no scoreboard yelling at them. Feedback is immediate—did you pull the flag or not? Did the runner cross the line? There’s barely time for internal dialogue.
A quiet ego doesn’t arrive fully formed. It begins to take shape in the kinds of environments that invite attention over evaluation, awareness over achievement.
Trusting Yourself & the Mess
“Trust your training. Trust yourself.” I used to hear that as a motivational throwaway. But now, especially within differential learning (ref. Wolfgang Schöllhorn), it’s taken on a very different flavor.
In differential learning, we purposely introduce variability—even noise—to help athletes build systems that hold their shape when the conditions shift. We're not encoding perfection; we're shaping movement capability.
Flawless execution does not build trust so deeply as familiarity with the unpredictable. It’s the recognition that you’ve already navigated strange angles, tricky rules, and unplanned disruptions—and still managed to find a way through, however inelegantly.
As coaches, we can highlight features of this messy game. Want to shift perception? Change the size or shape of the field. Want to prioritize timing? Add or subtract defenders. Play with distance. Adjust scoring incentives. But always with the goal of nudging the athlete back into discovery.
Trust is built through solving—not being told the solution. And that trust becomes self-efficacy. A kind of embodied resilience:
"I can handle this. I’ve handled worse."
Lowering the Bar to Invite Authentic Engagement
Let’s talk about that first line: “Lower the bar.”
It’s provocative. It sounds like settling. But what if it’s the opposite?
Lowering the bar shifts the focus: not toward ease, but toward possibility. It’s a design choice that opens more doors—so more learners can walk through, explore, and build from where they are.
Here’s what that might look like:
Kids understand this intuitively. A wide-open field asks them to run. You don’t have to coach it. The affordance is loud. Adults—national team players even—respond the same way. Set the right constraint, and the learning happens on its own.
Where Growth Actually Happens
What I’ve come to believe is that real growth doesn’t look impressive. It’s usually not cinematic. It’s quiet. It shows up in the athlete who, on a bad day, still holds their ground. Still finds their spacing. Still keeps moving.
With my U13 team, I’ve started noticing this. These aren’t kids with tons of game experience. But there’s a baseline now—a floor they don’t fall through. And that feels like the win. Not because it makes me proud (though, yes, there’s a more than bit of that). But because it shows they feel safe enough to try.
"Lower the bar. Raise the floor. Shed perfection. Embrace who you are. Trust your training. Trust yourself. Develop a quiet ego." (Steve Magness, Do Hard Things)
The more I sit with this quote, the less it reads like motivation and the more it reads like a coaching framework. One rooted not in hype, but in humility. One that doesn’t just chase the top end—but builds the kind of floor you can count on.
Skill floors can be built to rise.
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Rolf is a seasoned performance coach and coach developer, with a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking. He works across both the business and sports worlds, supporting teams and individuals through change. Currently, he coaches multiple teams and provides personalized guidance to leaders in both fields.
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