You know that feeling on a Sunday evening when the dread starts creeping in. When your stomach tightens, just thinking about walking back into that office tomorrow, or just starting work, back into the same difficult dynamics, the same people, the same feeling of being one wrong step away from a bad day, that feeling is exactly what today's episode is about. And I'm going to talk about it from somewhere you might not expect. Today's episode starts on a golf course.
Now, I can already hear some of you. Golf? Really, Peggy? Bear with me.
I promise you, don't need to know a single thing about the game for this to land. In fact, if you've never picked up a golf club in your life, this episode is still going to hit you somewhere very real. Because what happened on that golf course this weekend is one of the most powerful illustrations of what happens inside all of us when everything starts going wrong at the worst possible moment. Now, I play golf.
I watch golf. And what I love about this game, what keeps me coming back to it is that golf is a master class in life. Specifically, it is a master class in one question. Do you control your emotions or do your emotions control you?
Because in golf, those two things produce completely different outcomes. When your emotions are running the show, when the frustration from the last hole follows you onto the next tee, when one bad shot becomes a story about everything that's wrong, your game can fall apart in ways that have nothing to do with the actual ability. Sound familiar? But here's what I love most about golf.
With every single hole, the game isn't over. You always get another chance to be better than the last hole you just played. Every single hole. And I want you to hold onto that idea, because it is the entire point of today's episode.
I spent a part of this weekend watching the Masters at Augusta National. And I have to tell you, Rory McElroy gave me this week's entire episode. So thank you, Rory, if you're listening. Here's a man who walked into the final round with the biggest 36 hole lead in Masters history.
Six shots ahead of everyone else. Basically, that is untouchable. And then Saturday happened. He gave the lead back, completely.
And on Sunday, he fell behind again multiple times. And every single time, he found a way to come back. And then came the final hole. Oh my goodness.
Hole 18, the entire tournament on the line, literally. One more hole to finish it. And Rory, the best golfer in the world at that moment, went away off course. I'm not going to lie, I held my breath, because this is the moment.
This is always the moment when you're that close and something goes sideways. And your brain wants to say, this is how it slips away. But here's what happened next. He didn't spiral.
He didn't fall apart. He assessed where he was. He took the next shot. And he won.
That moment right there on 18 is not a golf story. It is a story about what happens inside you when the pressure peaks at exactly the wrong time. And what separates the people who finish from the people who almost finish. Now, I want to talk about what that has to do with your Monday morning.
Hello and welcome. I'm Peggy McKnight. And this is the Career Pivot Accelerator, the podcast for women who dread going to work and are ready to change that. Today, we're talking about the reset.
What happens when your day or your week, your project or your career starts badly. How you respond in that moment is not just about that moment. It is about everything that comes after. And I have a golf story that is going to change how you think about Monday mornings.
Let's get into it. Let me take you back to Augusta National, April, 2023, the master's tournament. John Rahm at the time ranked number three in the world, 10 time PGA tour winner, one of the best golfers on the planet steps up to the very first hole of the very first round and he four putts it. Now, if you're not a golfer, a putt is the short stroke you use to roll the ball into the hole once you're on the green.
And you know, that's the one with a little flag. That's where you're aiming. And on any given hole, you're typically expected to do that in two putts. Roughly.
Rahm took four, four just to get the ball in the hole on the green alone. That's what's called a double bogey, which means you took twice as many extra strokes as you should have on that hole. And for our purposes today, just know this. It was bad, like really bad.
The kind of start where the commentators go carefully quiet and everyone watching at home winces the golf equivalent of sending an email to the wrong person on your first day at a new job while ceasing in your boss's boss and quite possibly your mother. Who knows his odds of winning the tournament immediately plummeted in 14 minutes. He went from eight to one to 20 to one to win. The commentators were politely optimistic.
Twitter, however, was not now. Here's where it gets interesting. Most people in that moment would let the spiral begin. You know the spiral.
We're going to talk about it today. The internal monologue that goes, well, that's at the tone. Today is going to be one of those days. I've already messed up the most important moment.
Everyone saw it and now I'm playing catch up for the rest of this tournament. Ron apparently did not get that memo because on hole two, he birdied. That's one stroke better than expected. The opposite of a bogey on hole three, another birdie.
By the end of that first round, he had shot a seven under 65, meaning he finished seven strokes better than the course expects. One of the best opening rounds in master's history. He went on to win the entire tournament by four shots. On Thursday, just before 11 a.m., John Ron began the master's tournament with a double bogey.
On Sunday at 722 p.m., John Ron won the master's and is putting on the green jacket. And here is the fact that I want you to hold onto. He became only the second player in history to win the master's after that kind of disaster on the opening hole. The first was Sam Sneed in 1952, 70 years apart, and the only two people who've ever done it.
What separates those two people from everyone else who ever had a disaster on hole one and never recovered? That's exactly what we're unpacking today. Now, you might be sitting there thinking, okay, golf analogy, very nice, but I'm not a professional golfer. I don't even like the game or I don't play.
I don't have caddies and sports psychologists and years of elite training preparing me to recover from a bad putt. Fair point. But here's what I want to offer to you. The mechanism of the spiral and the mechanism of the reset are identical.
Whether you're standing on the first green at Augusta or sitting in the third meeting of a bad Monday at the office. Let me translate the ROM story into your world. Your whole one moments, your double bogeys might look something like this. You walk into a presentation and your mind goes blank for a moment that feels like an eternity.
You say something in a team meeting and it lands completely wrong. You send an email with a mistake in it and send the next three hours mentally composing your own resignation letter. Your manager questions your work in front of the whole team, a project you led to Mrs. The Mark and you can feel everyone noticing.
Days are your first whole moments. And in that instant, before you've ever finished processing what happened, a decision gets made, usually without your conscious input. The question is, what decision are you making? Let me walk through what is actually happening when bad moments threaten to become a bad day or a bad month.
Because most people understand that spirals happen. It's a given. What they don't understand is why and why they feel almost impossible to stop once they've started. And when you understand what's driving it, you get real power over it.
Ultimately, your brain is trying to protect you. The moment something goes wrong, a visible mistake, a sharp comment from your manager, a room that goes quiet in the wrong way. Something happens very fast inside you. Your brain registers a threat.
And here's the thing. Your brain doesn't much care whether the threat is physical or professional. It responds to both in roughly the same way. Heart rate up, stomach drops, breathing gets shallower, everything sharpens and tightens at the same time.
This is not you being oversensitive. This is a very old and very effective alarm system doing its job. The problem is that this alarm system was built for a completely different world. It was built for physical danger.
For situations where the right response really was to either fight back or run. In those situations, it's perfect. In a conference room, it makes everything worse. Can you imagine players running off a golf course because they had a horrible shot?
It makes for a great funny video. But no, they don't. They stay the course and some even throw a temper tantrum right in front of the world stage by throwing their clubs or doing something that you get the gist that are rather frustrated. The alarm response in your head does something else at the same time.
It narrows your focus. Your brain under threat pulls all its resources toward the danger and away from everything else. The thoughtful, creative, articulate version of you temporarily goes offline. It shuts down.
This is why your best ideas disappear when you're under pressure. It's not that they're gone. Your brain has just redirected everything away from them because right now it thinks your job is to survive, not to be brilliant, and then almost immediately something else kicks in. So the story your brain starts telling.
Once the alarm goes off, your brain starts doing something that psychologists call rumination and it's worth understanding this because it is the engine of the spiral. Rumination is when your mind locks onto a negative event and just keeps cycling through it over and over and over, not to solve it, not to learn from it, just to replay it from every single angle again, over and over. And what makes it particularly hard to stop is that rumination doesn't just reflect how bad you feel. It actively makes you feel worse.
It generates its own fuel. Every time you replay the moment, your brain adds a little more interpretation, a little more meaning, a little more story, a little more fantasy. A colleague's neutral expression becomes disapproval. A delayed message becomes deliberate avoidance.
The thing you said two hours ago gets replayed on a loop and with each replay it sounds worse than the last. And you're not doing this on purpose. You're not being irrational. Your brain is genuinely trying to process a threat.
It just doesn't know when to stop. So what it actually feels like? I want to name the physical experience of this because we tend to talk about spirals in a very abstract term. When your mid spiral, you might notice your chest is tight, your stomach is unsettled.
There's a low hum of anxiety. You can't quite switch off. You feel slightly foggy. Like you can't quite think clearly.
You can't quite find your words. Some people describe it as feeling like they're moving through water. Everything is slower, heavier than it should be. That is your body responding to a perceived threat.
And it is exhausting because you're sitting at a desk trying to do good work while your insides are preparing for something that isn't actually happening. So there are two kinds of spiral. Here's something I want to address directly because I think there are two very different people listening to this today. First is having a bad day spiral.
Something went wrong this morning and it consumed your whole day. You can feel it happening in real time. You hate it, but you can't quite stop it. You know the one.
The second is the slow spiral. This one is much harder to spot because it doesn't feel like a spiral at all. It just feels like reality. The slow spiral happens when a bad moment or a series of bad moments or a difficult workplace environment over time gradually rewrites how you see yourself professionally.
It doesn't happen overnight. It happens in small steps over winks and months. You stop speaking up as often as you used to. You second guess emails you used to send without thinking.
You over prepare for meetings because you've stopped trusting your own instincts. You work harder and longer, not because you're more ambitious because you're more afraid of getting it wrong. And at that point you stop noticing there was ever a different version of you. This just feels like who you are now.
If that second one landed differently for you just now, if something shifted, I want you to hold on to that feeling because recognizing it is the first and most important step. So the identity layer. There's one more piece I need to name because it's the deepest one and it's the one that keeps people stuck the longest. For a lot of people, especially in difficult workplaces, the spiral doesn't stay at the level of, well, I had a bad day.
At some point it reaches down and connects to something more personal, a belief. One that sounds something like, I'm not actually as capable as people think. I've been getting away with it and now everyone can see it. Or this is what always happens to me.
I always blow it when it matters. Or even more quietly. I don't really belong here. These beliefs feel like the truth, especially mid spiral.
But they are not the truth. They are a story your brain assembled from the evidence it was given. And often the evidence was given to you and it came from an environment that was never fair to you in the first place. Take a manager who undermined instead of developed.
You know the type. The one who questioned your work in public but never coached you in private. Who took credit for your ideas in the meeting and then acted like they never happened when you were alone. Who gave you just enough feedback to make you doubt yourself but never enough to actually help you improve.
Who made you feel like every mistake was a character flaw and every success was a lucky break. That kind of manager doesn't just affect your performance. They get inside your head and over time you start hearing their voice even when they're not in the room. Or a culture that confused silence with incompetence.
Were you ever in a situation where you thought, oh, I'm not loud, visible and I don't sell myself. Well, this is the type of incompetence that some cultures confuse. If you weren't loud, visible and constantly selling yourself, people just assumed you had nothing to offer. Where the people who walked and talked the most got the credit and the people who quietly did excellent work got passed over.
Not because their work wasn't good but because they weren't performing confidence loudly enough or anyone to notice. And then there's a workplace so politically broken that doing good work stopped feeling like enough. Where who you were aligned with mattered more than what you delivered. Where you could do even everything right and still get undermined, still get overlooked, still get questioned.
So at some point without even realizing it, you stopped trusting that effort and quality would ever be recognized. Because experience had taught you they wouldn't. The spiral didn't start with you my friend which means it doesn't have to end with you either. Here's what I need you to understand about.
Bad starts at work. The double bogey is not a problem. I know that sounds counterintuitive but bear with me. In almost every career situation I've ever witnessed or worked through with clients and in my own experience, the original bad moment is rarely what causes the long-term damage.
What causes the long-term damage is the story we tell ourselves about it. Because here's what the spiral actually sounds like. That mistake just confirmed what they've probably been thinking all along. I'm not cut out for this.
I always do this under pressure. They're going to remember this. This is going to follow me or haunt me. And here's what that story does.
It changes your behavior subtly but significantly. You become quieter in the next meeting. You hedge more. You stop volunteering ideas because you're protecting yourself from other visible failures.
Your work is harder in the background but make yourself smaller in the foreground. And here's the cruel part. When you make yourself smaller people notice. Not because they're keeping score but because people are wired to read confidence and hesitation.
The absence of your usual presence registers even when nobody can name exactly why. So the original double bogey, the email, the blank in the meeting, the mis-deadline, that fades. Nobody is replaying it as often as you are. But the story you told yourself about it and the behavioral changes that story produced, those linger and those are what people actually see.
This is why the spiral is the real problem. The mistake is the trigger. The spiral is the wound. And unlike the mistake, which you can't undo, the spiral is something you can actually do something about.
I want to share something personal here because this isn't just a theory for me. Early, very early in my career, I had a job and I only found this out later that some people in that office believed had been created specifically for me. Meaning it didn't exist before I arrived. Which, looking back, meant that before I'd even done a single day's work, there were already people in that building who had decided I didn't belong there.
They were already judging me and the position. The job itself was, well, let's be honest, not exactly setting the world on fire. I was essentially a glorified receptionist. But I showed up.
I worked hard. I found ways to keep busy when things were quiet. And I did the best I could with what I was given. Which I still believe is the only way to approach any job, no matter what it is.
And then one day, a woman came down to cover my desk while I went to lunch. I'd been putting some work aside to get through after I came back, trying to manage my time. Stay productive. Normal.
Reasonable things to do, right? She went ballistic. Completely laid into me. Accused me of not doing the work.
Not pulling my weight. The whole thing. And I stood there stunned like a deer in headlights because I genuinely couldn't understand what I had done wrong. I hadn't done anything wrong.
I ended up crying in the bathroom, unfortunately. And at that moment, standing in the bathroom, trying to pull myself together, that was my first real experience of a workplace spiral. Because the story I started telling myself wasn't just that was unfair. It was maybe I really don't belong here.
Maybe they're right. Maybe this shouldn't exist. Or this job shouldn't exist. And neither should I in this role.
What I didn't know at the time, what I only understood much later, was that her office upstairs had been talking about me and about the job. About how unnecessary it was. And she'd had work taken off her to send down to me. Which she resented.
And I had no idea. I was just the target. That was the easiest to aim at. I did the one thing I knew how to do.
I ran. Straight to HR. Not because it was the right move. Looking back, it absolutely wasn't.
But because I was brand new to the working world. And that was the only tool I had. When something felt dangerous, you find cover. HR to me felt like cover at the time.
What I should have done. What I wish someone had told me to do was to go back to that woman and try to understand where she was coming from. Ask questions to find out what was actually going on. Like why are you getting your wig out of joint?
Not to say that she was wearing a wig. I have no idea. But because the problem wasn't really me and it was really her. It was a situation neither of us really had created.
Neither of us had been asked about. But I didn't know that then. I didn't have the skills, the confidence. Or honestly the emotional steadiness to do anything other than flee.
And that right there is the spiral in action. Not the crying in the bathroom. That's just being humid. The spiral was what came next.
The assumption that the only thing I could do was remove myself from the situation. The belief that I had no other move. As it happened, HR moved me to a different area. And that move started my career in training.
Which I absolutely loved. In that moment, it felt like divine order. Like even the wrong door had opened into the right room to my true calling. But I want to be honest with you.
That was at the end of the story. Not by a long way. Since then I've been in jobs where managers have seen me as less than capable. Where I've had to fight to be taken seriously.
Where I've questioned myself more than I ever should have. And there have been times, long stretches of times, where I couldn't see the thread at all. What I've learned slowly and not always gracefully is that divine order doesn't always look like a smooth path. Sometimes it looks like another hard lesson.
Another difficult manager. Another moment where you have to decide whether to shrink or to take the next shot anyway. I'm still learning and growing. And honestly, that's what is so beautiful about the world of work.
There's always an opportunity to become a better version of yourself. Not a perfect version. Just a better one than yesterday. And that opportunity doesn't disappear because of a bad day.
A bad manager. A bad colleague. Or a bad run of days, weeks, months, or years. It's still there.
Waiting for you to take the next shot. What I now know that I didn't fully understand then is that the version of me that recovered fastest wasn't the version that pretended nothing had gone wrong. It was a version that acknowledged it, named it, and then asked one very specific question. And that is exactly what I want to give you today.
So let's go back to the golf course for a moment. Because here's the thing about elite athletes that most people don't realize. What separates them from everyone else at their level isn't just talent or work ethic. Both are everywhere at the top.
What separates them is that they have a system for what they have to do. What they have to do is they have a system for what to do when things go wrong. Not hope. Not a natural gift.
A system. A deliberate practice set of tools they use to interrupt the spiral before it takes hold. Let me show you two examples because these tools work just as well in a boardroom as they do on a court or a fairway. Serena Williams and the reset ritual.
When you watch Serena Williams play tennis, you'll notice something between points. She bounces the ball the same number of times before every serve. She has a specific way of adjusting her strings. She talks to herself.
You can sometimes read the lips, the words like, come on, or let's go. These aren't nervous habits. They're deliberate anchors. What Serena is doing is using a physical ritual to bring herself back to the present moment.
The moment she starts the routine, her brain has one clear job. Execute this familiar sequence. Not replay the last point. Not think about the score.
Not worry about what happens if she loses this game. Just bounce, bounce, bounce serve. The ritual interrupts the spiral before it starts. It gives her brain something specific and familiar to do instead of cycling back through what just went wrong.
In your world, this looks like taking three slow deliberate breaths before you speak in a meeting. You're very nervous about having a specific phrase you say to yourself when something goes wrong. Something that signals, okay, that happened. Now, here's what's next.
Getting up from your desk and walking to the water cooler before responding to an email that made your stomach drop. These sound small. They are not small. They are your version of Serena's ball bounce.
A signal to yourself that you are in control of what happens next. Then there's Michael Jordan, the short memory. Michael Jordan is widely considered the greatest basketball player of all time. He said something that has stuck with sports coaches ever since.
If I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've have failed over and over and over again. And that is why I succeeded.
What Jordan had was what his coaches called a short memory. Not amnesia. He absolutely reviewed his mistakes and learned from them. But once that review was done, the mistake was done.
By the time he was running back down the court, the miss shot was gone. He was playing the next possession. He practiced this. He had a specific process, acknowledged the mistake, extract the one thing to learn from it, and then consciously redirect his focus to what has happening right there and then.
And then he moved. In your world, this looks like when something goes wrong, you write down one sentence about what happened and one sentence about what you'd do differently. That's it. Then you close the notebook.
You've acknowledged it. You've learned from it. And now it's done. The next meeting is a new possession.
You are not carrying the last one into the room with you. Now, what they both have in common. Here's the thread. Neither Serena or Jordan was trying to pretend nothing went wrong.
Neither of them was performing confidence they didn't feel or trying to eliminate the nerves or waiting until the pressure went away before they showed up fully. They were doing something simpler and more powerful than any of that. They were interrupting the spiral at the moment it started and then redirecting their full attention to one thing, the next move, which is exactly what John Romm did on hole one and two, especially at Augusta. And exactly what Rory did on hole 18 this weekend.
And that's exactly what we're going to give you a tool for right now. I want to give you something you can use this week immediately, not a complicated system, not a 12 step process, just one question. I call it the next shot rule. When something goes wrong, when you have your double bogey moment, instead of asking, why did I mess that up, you ask, what is the next best move I can make right now?
That's it. One question. Not what damage can I repair, not how do I make them forget this happened, not why does this always happen to me? Those questions all point backward.
They are designed by the spiral to keep you in the spiral, but like Alice in Wonderland, who are flowing down the spiral. The next shot rule points forward. It asks your brain to do the one thing it can actually do something about right now. Identify a specific immediate next section.
And that forward focus thinking is what switches the alarm system off. It's the same instinct Serena's ritual triggers and the same shift Jordan made running back down the court. You stop processing the threat and you start planning the move. Let me give you some workplace examples.
You send an email with an error in it. The spiral asks, oh, how bad is this? Who saw it? What do they think of me now?
The next shot rule asks, what's the next best move? Answer, send a brief matter of fact correction. Done. Move on.
You stumble in a presentation. The spiral says, oh, everyone noticed. I've undermined my credibility. They're judging me.
The next shot rule asks, what's the next best move? Answer, pause, take a breath, restate the point cleanly. 90% of your audience will follow you right back in without a second thought. Or your manager publicly questions your work.
The spiral says, oh, this confirms I'm not valued. I should keep my head down. Nothing I do is good enough. The next shot rule asks, what's the next best move?
Answer, maybe it's asking for a private conversation. Maybe it's documenting your actual contribution on the project. Maybe it's doing nothing in that room but quietly filing the observation for later. And then taking a breath before your next interaction.
The point is that you choose. Consciously, what comes next? You're not carried along by the spiral. And for those in a slow spiral, the question is the same.
But the timescale is longer. The next best move might not be about today's meeting. It might be, what is the one thing I can do this week to start showing up the way I used to? One conversation, one decision, one moment where you take the next shot instead of staying stuck, replaying the ones you've missed.
High performers don't skip the feeling. They feel it. They name it. And then they act.
That's the sequence. Acknowledge, don't suppress. But then redirect. I want to say something that I think a lot of people in difficult workplaces need to hear.
One mistake is not your identity. One bad meeting is not your professional worth. One project that missed the mark is not a verdict on your capability. One morning where everything went sideways is not the story of your career.
And one manager who made you feel incompetent or small, that is not the truth about you either. That is the story they needed you to believe. There is a difference. I know this sounds obvious, and yet I'd be willing to bet that somewhere in your professional life you have carried a single moment far longer than it deserved.
Let it reshape you how you showed up. Let it become evidence in a case you were building against yourself. And I want to ask you, what if you treated it the way John Rome treated whole one? Not by dismissing it.
Not by pretending it didn't happen. But by understanding that it was one whole and there are 17 more and the tournament is not over. And the person who wins is not the person who never four-puts. It's the person who four-puts and then birdies.
Scores better than expected. On the next two holes anyway. You don't lose your career because of one bad moment. You lose momentum because you decide that moment means something about you that it doesn't.
Your next shot is available to you right now. What is it? Before we wrap up, I want to give you something specific for this week. This week I want you to notice your spiral moments.
Not to judge them, just to notice them. When something goes wrong or feels like it went wrong, notice the first thought that follows. Is it pointing backward to the mistake, to what it means, to what people think, or forward to the next move? And if you want to go one step further, ask yourself honestly whether the spiral you're in right now is a bad day or whether it's been quietly running in the background for much longer than that.
You don't have to fix anything this week. Just notice because the first step in changing any pattern is seeing it clearly enough to name it. And if you catch yourself mid-spiral, try the question just one time. What is the next best move I can make right now?
And see what happens. Alright my friend, that's our episode for today. The spiral is not a character flaw. It is a very human response to threat.
And it is one you can learn to interrupt. The reset is a skill. The tools are learnable. And the next shot rule is your starting point.
John Rahm began the 2023 Masters with a four-put double bogey on the first hole. He won the whole thing by Sunday evening. Rory McElroy opened this week with a six-shot lead, lost it, clawed it back. And then on the very last hole of the entire tournament, hit his ball so far off course he ended up on a completely different fairway.
He couldn't have even seen the green he needed to finish on. He was two shots ahead, but only just. One bad shot from a potential playoff, the title hanging on every single swing. Think about that for a moment.
The biggest stage in golf, the whole world watching. And the best golfer in the world is standing in the wrong place with no clear line to the finish. He didn't panic. He assessed where he was.
He played the shot available to him. Not the shot he wanted, but the one in front of him. And he won, becoming only the fourth player in Masters history to win the tournament back to back. Not because everything went right, because he kept going when it didn't.
Next week, we're going to go deeper into why. Even when you know your work is good, you can still find yourself drowning in self-doubt at work. And more specifically, we're going to talk about the difference between genuine imposter syndrome and something that was actually done to you. Those are two completely different problems, and they need to completely different solutions.
But between now and then, if today's episode hit home for you, if you've been carrying a bad moment longer than it deserves, or you're in a workplace where it feels like one wrong step defines you forever, I want to talk to you. I offer free clarity calls. It's a real conversation, not a sales pitch, just an honest look at where you are and what your options actually look like. Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is say the thing out loud to someone who isn't going to use it against you.
The link is in the show notes. It takes 30 seconds to book. I'm Peggy McKnight. This is the Career Pivot Accelerator.
I'll see you next week.