Performing on the big stage — presence, pressure, and the privilege of the moment.

There’s a moment right before you bowl on the big stage. The ball feels heavier than it did in warm-up. The lights are hot. Really hot. Every person in the building goes quiet, waiting to see what you’ll do with it.

I’ve stood in that moment more times than I can count. And the biggest lesson it ever taught me had nothing to do with my swing.

Push play. Don’t try.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know starting out: showing up as yourself in a big moment isn’t about summoning something extra. It’s about letting go of everything that isn’t already yours. You’ve practiced. You’ve drilled it a thousand times when no one was watching. The big moment doesn’t need you to become someone new. It just needs you to be who you already trained to be.

I think of it like pushing play on a song you already know every word to. You don’t try to sing it. You just sing it. That’s the whole secret. Not trying harder. Not trying at all. Just being what you’ve already built.

The cost of trying to be bigger

We are told, from the time we’re kids, to try harder. Dig deeper. Give more. And there’s a place for that, in practice, in the years of work before the moment ever arrives. But I didn’t understand at the beginning that on the big stage, “try harder” is the wrong instruction entirely.

Trying to be bigger than you are, reaching for something outside of your preparation because the moment feels like it demands more of you, costs you the one thing that actually wins: your rhythm. Your presence. The you that got you there in the first place. I’ve watched it happen to bowlers, and I’ve felt it happen to me. You start performing for the moment instead of just being in it, and something that felt automatic in practice suddenly feels foreign under the lights.

Less trying. More being. That’s the whole shift.

I never let anyone dim my shine

Here’s the other side of it, the one I get asked about less, and honestly, I don’t have a story about shrinking. I never allowed anyone to dim my shine. Not a competitor, not a bad round, not a room that made me feel like I should take up less space. If anything, my work has always been on the other side of that line: staying full-sized instead of ballooning past it, not talking myself out of who I already am.

That’s worth naming, because I think a lot of us assume the two failure modes, playing too small and playing too big, are equally common. They’re not, not for everyone. Some of you have spent your whole life being told to shrink, and your work is reclaiming the space you were always allowed to take. Some of you have never had that problem, and your work is staying inside your own size instead of inflating past it under pressure. Know which one is actually yours. Don’t borrow a lesson that isn’t.

What keeps you standing in the middle

So how do you stay grounded when the moment wants to pull you in either direction, smaller or bigger than you actually are?

You remember where you come from. You remember the hard work it took to get here, all the reps nobody saw, all the mornings before anyone else was awake. You remember the rough patches, the seasons that didn’t go your way, the fight it took just to still be standing in this moment at all.

That memory is the anchor. It’s not a pep talk. It’s proof. Proof that you already know how to do this, because you did the work that makes doing it possible. The big stage isn’t asking you to be more than that proof, or less than it. It’s asking you to trust it.

The privilege of the moment

I used to think pressure was something to survive. Now I think of it differently. Pressure is what happens when something matters. And getting to feel it, standing in that quiet room with your name about to be called, is a privilege most people never get.

Don’t shrink from it. Don’t inflate past it. Just be what you’ve practiced, and push play.