The Standing Season: How To Keep Working When Nothing Is Happening
The storm gets all the attention. It is dramatic, it has a clear villain, and people rally around you while you are in it. Somebody gets cut, laid off, diagnosed, left - and the phone rings for about two weeks.
Then it goes quiet. And that quiet is the part nobody warns you about.
In the framework I built through my playing career I call it the standing season: the stretch after the storm where you are doing the work, nothing is visibly wrong, and nothing is visibly happening either. You are not getting worse. You are not getting better in any way you can point at. You are just standing.
It is the least photogenic season, it is the longest one, and it is where almost everybody quits.
Why it is harder than the storm
Three reasons, and they compound.
There is no adrenaline. A crisis comes with fuel. You can run on anger and urgency for months. Standing season has none of that - it just asks you to be steady, which is a much harder thing to be.
Nobody is watching. Support shows up for a disaster. It does not show up for month seven of a job search. People assume that because you are not in obvious crisis, you are fine.
There is no feedback. This is the real killer. You put in the work and nothing comes back. No signal that you are close, no signal that you are wasting your time. Human beings are genuinely bad at continuing without feedback - it is not a willpower defect, it is how we are built.
Five things that actually help
1. Name the season out loud
Half the suffering in a standing season comes from expecting harvest results. You are doing planting-season work and grading yourself against a harvest, and so every week reads as failure.
Say it plainly: I am in a standing season. The work I am doing right now is not supposed to be producing visible results yet. That single sentence takes an enormous amount of weight off, because it changes the standard you are holding yourself to from an unfair one to an accurate one.
2. Measure inputs, because outputs are not yours
You do not control whether the call comes, whether the offer lands, whether the treatment works, whether the business turns. Those are outputs and they arrive on a schedule you do not set.
You do control what went in. So track that instead - workouts completed, applications sent, calls made, pages written, days you did the thing you said you would do. Keep it somewhere you can see it.
This is not a motivational trick. It is giving your brain the feedback the situation is refusing to give it. Without data, your mind will invent some, and what it invents is always this is never going to work.
3. Shrink the unit
When the horizon is unclear, stop looking at the horizon. Nobody can sustain I will do this indefinitely with no evidence. Everybody can do today.
One rep. One call. One session. Then tomorrow, one more. The people who last are not the ones with more willpower - they are the ones who reduced the question to something small enough to answer.
4. Keep two or three people close
You need somebody who will check on you at month seven, when it has stopped being news. That usually will not happen by itself - people assume silence means you are fine.
So ask. Tell two or three people plainly: I am in a long stretch, it is going to be quiet, please keep checking on me. That is not weakness. That is building a support system on purpose instead of hoping one shows up.
5. Keep something in your life that pays off quickly
If every single thing you are doing has a payoff that is months away, you will run dry. Keep one thing with a short feedback loop - a workout you finish, a meal you cook, a room you clean, a skill where you can see progress in a week.
It sounds trivial next to the big thing you are waiting on. It is not. It is the thing that keeps your sense of being effective alive while the big thing is silent.
The question underneath all of it
Eventually the standing season asks you a question that has no comfortable answer: what if it never works?
I am not going to pretend there is a guarantee. Some things do not work out. I got released enough times to know that persistence is not a magic word, and I would be doing you no favors telling you otherwise.
Here is what I settled on instead. My faith carried me here - I could not always see the plan, but I decided the silence was not proof there was no plan. And practically, I decided I would rather be the person who kept working and found out, than the person who quit early and spent the rest of his life wondering.
That is a decision, not a feeling. You do not have to feel confident to make it. You just have to make it again tomorrow.
What was actually happening
Looking back, I had this completely backwards while I was living it. I thought the standing seasons were the interruptions and my career was the real thing.
It was the opposite. Those flat stretches - training with nobody calling, no evidence any of it would pay off - are where whatever I have was actually built. The championships were the visible part. They were not the part that made me.
And when the harvest came, it came through a door I did not know existed, in a country I had never thought about, in a league I barely knew. It came because I was still standing when it showed up.
That is the only real reason to keep going through a season like this. Not because you are guaranteed a specific outcome. Because you have to be standing to catch the one you were not expecting.
Keep going.
- Rasheed 'Showtime' Bailey
The full four-season framework is here.