I met Steve earlier this year at an event a mutual friend hosted in New York City. It was a week before the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Steve was the guest of honor.
If you don’t know him (and I confess, I didn’t), Steve is a four-man bobsled gold medalist from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and Olympic Hall of Famer. He’s also the co-founder and former CEO of Classroom Champions (which has served over 5 million students across North America), a board member, and today, is an executive coach working with CEOs and their teams.
When we were introduced, I remember looking up — and up.
6’2”. Former Olympian. Clearly fit. And me, 5’ 3” with plenty of gumption but not an athletic bone in my body, wondering what point of connection we could possibly have.
I did what I tell all my clients to do — be warm, be curious, and be bold. Instead of slipping into silence and darting away, I started peppering him with questions.
One conversation led to another. I didn’t expect how open he would be. How honest. How much he was willing to share about what winning actually costs — and what it costs you when the winning stops.
I was thrilled when he agreed to do a Substack Live together last week. What came out of that conversation is wisdom and guidance that all leaders need, especially now.
Transforming ambition into mental strength: goal persistence
Most of us think about goals as destinations.
Make VP. Hit the number. Get the gold medal.
Steve thinks about them differently — as a system for mental health.
He calls it goal persistence: the ability to maintain directionality toward something meaningful.
The organization he founded, Classroom Champions, discovered it by accident. They were running a social-emotional learning program in a Florida school district, teaching kids perseverance and goal-setting.
The end-of-year results came back showing 3x improvement in mental health scores compared to other programs. They never set out to improve mental health, but what they taught was helping kids internalize what it felt like to make progress on something that matters.
Turns out a longitudinal study had demonstrated that people with high levels of goal persistence and positive reappraisal have materially less anxiety and depression.
Steve’s takeaway and now mine: goal clarity isn’t a productivity hack. It’s a health practice.
The problem? In sports, goals are obvious. Go faster. Land more shots. But in life and in leadership?
“I want to be a good leader. Okay — what does that mean? And what does that mean to me? And what does that mean to my company and my culture?”
The intricacies are different, Steve shared. These questions led him to become an executive coach, to help leaders make sense of them and not be overtaken by them.
This way of relating to goals was not something I was taught. I’m highly goal-oriented, but I grew up with an all-or-nothing approach. Either go in at all costs or don’t set a target at all for fear of missing it.
It took me years of trial and error and personal reflection to arrive at what Steve’s team teaches at scale: set goals intentionally and build a path towards them that allows for setbacks and pivots, all the while tracking your progress. Through it all, develop the ability to maintain your focus, your motivation, and your commitment to healthy behaviors.
Rather than narrowly viewing goals and the path to them as the end-all be-all, and instead seeing them as a way to build mental fitness. It’s incredibly powerful.
It is how I set goals today, and it’s how I coach my clients, but I didn’t have a name for it. Now I do.
The fuel that gets you there, but then burns you down
And what if you don’t struggle with setting thoughtful goals or with motivation? Maybe the issue isn’t where you are going, but how you do it and what happens when you get there.
Steve described what he calls jet fuel — the internal combustion system of most high-performing people. And its core ingredient?
I am not enough.
Not strong enough. Not fast enough. The team isn’t performing enough. The product isn’t polished enough. This deficiency mindset becomes the engine. It wakes you up. It keeps you moving. It actually works — right up until it doesn’t.
“Then when you actually do the thing,” Steve said, “you never practiced good enough. You never practiced satisfied. And just like anything else in life — if you don’t practice it, how in the world are you going to be good at it?”
The gold medal comes. The IPO closes. The promotion happens. And the person who got you there, the one who ran on jet fuel their whole career, has never once practiced what it feels like to be done.
So they aren’t able to navigate the “done state”.
I recognized myself in this. I’ve been one of those people. The early years of my career: nothing at work was enough. Not what I planned. Not what the team gave. Not what I built. And the cost of that fuel? I didn’t even know I was paying it until the tank ran dry again and again.
If I’m honest, I still struggle with this at times.
If I am tired or feeling overwhelmed, my inner judge takes over, and instead of letting me rest, I feel propelled forward. Sometimes it masquerades as excitement and drive, but when it starts to affect my health (sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation time), I know it’s a sign to recalibrate.
Hearing Steve talk about this reiterated for me how important it is to stay present to what is happening for me. And to start asking the question: “what’s fueling me this moment?”
If it’s jet fuel, it might be time to stop.
Delusional forgiveness and the art of moving forward
I have to recalibrate a lot. It’s humbling to admit it. But it’s the truth. I’m still learning how to practice good enough.
Steve developed a concept to help him. It came after a difficult period of depression, nine years after winning gold.
He calls it delusional forgiveness.
“It doesn’t mean that you ignore the thing you did,” he told us. “It means holding on to that — learn from it, recognize it — and then the next thing you do matters.”
Acknowledge it. Learn from it. Move. That’s it.
I always go back to the example of how we celebrate toddlers who stumble, fall, and pick themselves back up as they learn how to walk and run. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we get it stuck in our heads that it isn’t OK to make mistakes. And yet mistakes are essential to both the learning process and to achieving success.
When we demand perfection, we set ourselves up to procrastinate, be difficult to collaborate with, and feel downtrodden and disappointed when we inevitably miss the mark on our way to finding the answer.
This happened to me in my last job. When I became overwhelmed, I became hypervigilant. I wanted details on everything and asked for 3x as much work on every project as was actually necessary. I drove myself and my entire team crazy. Overthinking and overwhelm became my new normal.
Only when I paused and began to assess which work was actually high risk and couldn’t afford to fail did I realize that most of the work just needed to move forward, even if there would be missteps. Those were just part of the learning process.
Put more simply, delusional forgiveness is just another form of unconditional love. The ability to value yourself as worthy just as you are.
It’s what I practice now, and it’s how I choose to see the mistakes I've made before. I think it’s what’s allowing me to make this my most creative and energizing season of life and work, even though I’m older, slower, and much more creaky.
A new definition of hope that every team needs
Steve reframed hope in a way I think every leader needs right now. He got the definition from Dr. Quintina Bearchief-Adolpho — a mental health practitioner he worked with in a First Nations community in Canada. Her definition:
My actions today will make my tomorrow better.
Not a wish. Not a prayer. An operating principle. A choice made repeatedly, even when the circumstances are hard.
Steve contrasted this with James Clear’s Atomic Habits approach. He has great respect for Clear — but pushes back on the idea that systems matter more than goals.
“A journey without a destination is wandering. And if all you have is systems and habits but no goal for those habits to fulfill, you’re going to wind up on a treadmill to nowhere.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. I agree with Steve. Systems alone won’t get you there. Success with meaning comes only when you have the full equation:
Meaningful Goal + Effective Systems = Meaningful Success
That’s the root of what’s made every moment in my career feel great. Hope is the belief you can make it happen. Reframing hope as a reflection of your thoughtful choices (setting goals well, creating strong systems, taking action) transforms what can sometimes feel like an amorphous platitude into a strategic and essential tool.
In a moment when uncertainty looms larger than ever, with geopolitical changes by the hour and increasing AI pressure (existential and immediate), people need hope in order to move forward. Teams need it more than ever in order to stay coherent and aligned. You can only do that as a leader if you create it for yourself first.
Fireproof, not fixed
The last concept Steve shared is the one I keep returning to.
He doesn’t talk about resilience as something you build after the crisis hits. He talks about fireproofing — the practice you maintain so that when the fire comes, you don’t burn down.
“The fire is going to come. The question is: how do you help yourself be in a position so that when it comes, you are fireproof.”
For Steve, after his own depression, standing five steps from a light rail in Calgary, making the right choice: fireproofing became a daily commitment.
Exercise. Sleep. Clean eating. Guarding the mental habits that led him toward that edge. His phone is set to black and white most of the day. He reads at night with a red filter so he can process the world without getting hijacked by it.
He has ADHD, compounded by concussions from years of bobsled. He’s buried two teammates who took their own lives. He served on the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee Board during the Larry Nassar gymnastics scandal, sitting in a room where he had formal power, watching it be powerless to stop the abuse.
Those experiences, especially the last one, forced him to hold authority and helplessness at the same time. The dichotomy was impossible to reconcile, and it taught him something profound about what we can and cannot control. It gave him permission to stop burning himself down over what sits outside of his agency and to focus on what he can control.
His framework: goals, awareness, control, decisions. Practice it until it’s automatic. So when the temperature rises, and it will, you already know what to do.
What I’m taking away
I asked Steve what he sees in the people who make it versus those who don’t, whether in the Olympic arena or the C-suite boardroom.
His answer: “The people who are willing to put the goal above today.”
Not always the most talented. Not the most polished. The ones who are clear enough on why to absorb the discomfort of right now.
That’s not a performance principle. That’s a life principle.
And it’s ME Work — the internal operating system that makes everything else downstream possible. When we are clear about our internal motivations and how we make decisions, that’s when we can lead others well.
For me, it’s all about how I juggle the different priorities that drive me forward: my business, my creative pursuits, my family, my community, and my health.
And it’s hard.
Right now, it means going to bed earlier and missing time with my family in the evenings. But I know (and they know) that improving my sleep is how I will show up better for all of us.
The short-term pain of missing a movie night is worth it if I want to show up the next day ready for our morning routine, patient when there’s a hiccup in the schedule, and fully present for more emotionally charged conversations, which happen a lot more when there are two teens in the house.
I loved this conversation with Steve. Much of what he shared was a new framing for what I’ve discovered, honed, and use. But it was also a reminder that if you’re committed to growing and improving, the process is never-ending, and that’s a good thing. It means you’ll always have something to learn and to hone.
If this conversation sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what landed most. Drop it in the comments below.
And if you want more from Steve, follow him at SteveMessler.substack.com (his newsletter is launching soon) or find him on his website SteveMesler.net
Thanks for joining me this week,
Conversation Timestamp Guide
00:00 — Welcome and introduction Kathy introduces Steve Mesler: Olympic gold medalist, co-founder of Classroom Champions, former CEO, board member, and executive coach.
04:30 — Goal persistence explained Steve defines goal persistence and how Classroom Champions accidentally discovered its link to mental health outcomes through a Florida school district study.
08:00 — Goal clarity as the foundation Why you need goal clarity before you can have goal persistence — and why it’s harder in life than in sport.
09:30 — Framing fear as excitement Steve’s technique for reframing internal states: nervous, afraid, and excited feel identical in the body. You choose what to call it.
11:30 — Steve’s path to bobsled From national champion track athlete to being banned from the University of Florida’s training room — and the couch in Gainesville where a new path began.
15:30 — The Stockdale Paradox and becoming a new person How Steve applied Good to Great’s Stockdale Paradox to decide he was done getting injured — and didn’t miss a single race in 10 years.
18:30 — Jet fuel: the high achiever’s toxic engine The concept of running on “not good enough” and what happens when the achievement finally arrives — and you’ve never practiced satisfaction.
25:00 — After the gold: what happens when the goal is gone Post-pinnacle disorientation — in sport, business, and life. Why people who sell their company are often not happy.
30:00 — Steve’s depression and the moment that changed everything Nine years after winning gold: the weight of buried teammates, the gymnastics scandal, a flat organization, new fatherhood — and the light rail in Calgary.
33:00 — “My brain was broken, just like my hamstring” How Steve found a way to frame depression as an injury — and eventually as a gift.
36:00 — Delusional forgiveness The practice of learning from failure without staying trapped in it — and why it’s essential for forward momentum.
37:30 — Hope as an operating principle Dr. Quintana Adolfo’s definition of hope: “My actions today will make my tomorrow better.” And why Steve believes leaders who can instill this are done with the hard part.
40:00 — Goals vs. systems: pushing back on Atomic Habits Why Steve believes a journey without a destination is just wandering — and what the neuroscience of dopamine and serotonin has to do with it.
42:00 — How to get comfortable spending most of your day uncomfortable Clarity on the goal makes discomfort manageable. Steve’s example: protecting his four-year-old son.
44:30 — The Big Five goals framework Career, wealth, relationships, lifestyle, health — and why the goals you haven’t examined in relationships and health are quietly shaping your work decisions every day.
46:30 — The daughter who calls her dad Steve’s long-term relationship goal with his 8-year-old: being one of her first calls when she gets her heart broken at 25 — and how that goal shapes how he parents today.
47:30 — Leading through layoffs and AI disruption How leaders under board pressure can still foster hope in their teams — and why assumptions about what your people are actually afraid of are almost always wrong.
51:00 — Caring for yourself during restructuring You have to put your own mask on first. Exercise, sleep, nutrition — these aren’t soft. They’re how you make better decisions when the pressure peaks.
56:00 — Fireproof, not fixed The practice of building your system before the crisis hits — so that when the fire comes, you don’t burn down.
01:00:00 — Close: “This too shall pass” Steve’s final word on navigating hard seasons: the high passes and the low passes. What matters is staying clear, staying intentional, and trusting the practice.
