"The further I get away from coaching, the more I know I made the right decision. You almost forget how wonderful family life is"

Distance furnishes perspective. When the noise of a profession fades, subtler sounds grow audible: laughter at the dinner table, the cadence of a child’s story, the quiet solidarity of a shared evening. High-pressure work like coaching compresses life into game plans and film sessions, blurring the edges of everything else. Stepping away clarifies priorities and confirms choices not through argument but through relief, an exhale that keeps lengthening.

The line about “forgetting” how wonderful family life is reveals something insidious about relentless careers: they don’t simply steal time; they recalibrate memory. Urgency crowds out delight. Adrenaline becomes a lens, making ordinary moments seem small, until you rediscover that their smallness is what makes them sacred. Presence has a texture you can’t simulate with efficiency, unhurried attention, inside jokes that only exist because you were there for their beginnings, the trust built not by grand gestures but by steady availability.

There’s also the matter of identity. Coaching, like many callings, offers a clear scoreboard. Wins, rankings, accolades, tangible affirmations. Family offers a different economy: quiet investments, delayed returns, a scoreboard that never lights up but determines the meaning of your days. Choosing to leave a pinnacle is not rejection of excellence; it’s a redefinition of it. Success becomes measured less by applause and more by the health of relationships that will outlast any season.

The conviction deepening “the further I get away” suggests that wisdom often arrives in reverse: hindsight braided with gratitude. Time away doesn’t romanticize the past; it restores the center. It acknowledges that vocation has seasons and that love needs margins. In a culture that celebrates perpetual motion, there is courage in stillness and in choosing to be interruptible. Family life, reclaimed, is not an escape from significance; it is where significance learns to breathe. Stepping away didn’t shrink the world, it put it back in proportion.