I want to write about something I have thought about for years and rarely say out loud, partly because it sounds like a complaint on behalf of people nobody feels sorry for.
There is a particular kind of person I end up working with. Sometimes it is somebody who became known young, quite suddenly, usually for one thing they were extremely good at. Sometimes it is somebody who did not become anything, but was born to a parent who did, and has therefore never had a private version of their own life to compare things to.
And the presenting issue is almost never what you would expect. It is not the attention. Most of them handle the attention far better than you or I would. It is that the ordinary human skills, the boring ones, never got built. And nobody noticed, because the environment was doing the job instead.
What the environment does for you
Think about what it takes to get through a normal week. You have to tolerate being bored. You have to wait for things. You have to be mildly disliked by somebody at work and carry on anyway. You have to sit with a feeling for a few hours without doing anything about it. You have to be told no, and manage yourself afterwards without anybody helping.
None of that is glamorous and all of it is skill. It is learned, gradually, mostly in your teens and twenties, mostly through low-stakes repetition. That is what those years are actually for, developmentally. Not the achievements. The practice.
Now remove it.
If you are very successful very young, or you grew up inside somebody else's success, a lot of that practice quietly stops happening. Waiting gets solved by somebody. Boredom gets solved by somebody. Discomfort gets managed, often by a team whose actual job is to make sure you never encounter any. Being told no becomes rare, and when it does happen it is delivered so carefully that it barely registers as a no.
I am not describing spoiling. This is the bit people get wrong. It is not that they were indulged. It is that the environment was efficient, and efficiency removed all the small daily resistances, and those resistances were the thing that would have built the muscle.
And then it changes
Which would all be fine, if the environment were permanent. It is not.
Sporting careers end, and they end early, usually with an injury nobody planned around. Public attention moves. Shows finish. A parent's relevance fades, or the parent dies, and a person in their forties discovers that a structure they had never examined has been holding them up.
And at that point somebody who has been managing enormous pressure with real competence for fifteen years finds themselves completely undone by something that would not trouble an ordinary person at all. Not because they are weak. Because they are being asked, at thirty-eight, to do something most people learned at nineteen, and to learn it in public, at speed, with no obvious teacher.
I have seen that go badly a number of times and it is genuinely sad, and it is generally described afterwards in the press as a fall, which is not what it is at all.
Why it is not the same as therapy, and not really maintenance either
The way this work usually gets framed, when it gets offered at all, is crisis support. Somebody has a bad episode, something happens publicly, and a professional is brought in. That is treatment, and it has its place, and I do it.
But it is the wrong shape for this problem, because this problem is developmental rather than clinical. There is nothing to treat. There is something missing that should have been built, and building takes time and repetition and someone who is not alarmed by how slowly it goes.
The other framing is maintenance. Keeping somebody functioning through a demanding period. Which is fine as far as it goes, and it is what a lot of performance psychology in that world actually is. But maintenance assumes the current arrangement continues, and the whole point is that it will not.
What I think is genuinely worth doing, and what almost nobody commissions, is the version aimed at afterwards. Building the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, to regulate yourself without an entourage, to have an ordinary difficult conversation, to be bored, to be criticised and survive the next hour. Skills that are not much use while everything is going well, and are the entire ballgame when it stops.
The people around them
One more thing, and it connects to something I have written about before.
Almost everyone around a high profile person needs something from them. That is not cynicism, it is structural. The agent, the manager, the team, the sponsor, sometimes the friends, occasionally the family. Everybody has a stake in the person continuing to be what they currently are.
Which means that the honest conversation, the one where somebody says I am not sure I want to do this any more, or I do not know who I am when I am not doing it, has nowhere to happen. Saying it to anybody in the structure changes the structure.
That is why an outside person matters so much here, more than in almost any other context I work in. Not because the insight is better. Because it is the only room where saying the thing does not cost anything.
The young ones especially
If I had one thing to argue for, it would be getting to people early. Not when it has gone wrong. In the first year or two, when everything is going well and nobody thinks there is a problem, because that is exactly when there is capacity to learn something and no crisis eating the time.
It is a hard sell, obviously. Nobody wants to buy a service for a problem they do not have yet, particularly at twenty-two when it is all going brilliantly.
But the careers are short and the lives are long, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the damage happens.
Anyways. If you have spent a decade in an environment built to remove every obstacle from your path, what happens on the day it stops?
Until next time, Stacy