Why Did You Stay?
Not why you started. Why you stayed.
For years I’ve asked people about beginnings — why they started something, and what made them say yes.
This week my guest, Jill Muhe, asked me a different question, one I hadn’t heard framed quite like this before. Not why did you play. Why did you stay?
Jill spent a decade on the professional beach volleyball tour, indoor volleyball before that, and basketball before that — with the boys, because her dad didn’t think the girls’ league was competitive enough. She’s been an athletic trainer, a head college coach, and by her own count, she’s retired three separate times.
When I asked what kept her going through all of it, she flipped the question back on itself. Sport is hard. You get yelled at, you’re exhausted, your shoulders are banged up. There are a thousand easier things you could be doing at 5:30 in the morning than standing in a weight room.
So why stay? Because something on the inside was being tagged — some intrinsic motivator, some part of you that lit up and said, this, again, please.
I think about my own why-did-you-stay moments. Golf, for years, chasing something I couldn’t always name. Motherhood, in the hardest seasons, when nobody was clapping. Building Live Your June, some weeks screaming into a void with no metrics to prove it’s working.
Jill told me a story that’s been living in my head since we recorded. She walked off the sand after a brutal loss, completely done — retired, finished. Her husband’s response wasn’t a lecture or a pep talk. He just asked if she wanted to go to In-N-Out. They went, ate, and didn’t talk about volleyball once.
By the time the burger was gone, the fit had passed on its own. She wasn’t done after all.
That’s the whole intervention — permission to fall apart for exactly as long as it takes, and a question asked at the right moment to bring you back.
I don’t give myself that kind of permission very often. I tend to skip straight past the fit and go directly to shame for having one.
Jill’s work now is called Beyond the Game, and it’s built around a question most transition conversations skip entirely. Not what job will you get, not who are you without the jersey, but what environment do you actually perform best in. Because the drive doesn’t disappear when the uniform comes off — the ecosystem does.
We carry the drive into the next chapter and leave the structure behind, then wonder why we’re exhausted, grinding at something that used to feel aligned and now just feels like grinding.
Jill has a phrase she keeps coming back to: forward is a pace. Not a speed — a pace. Some days you crawl, some days you sprint, and both count as long as you’re still moving.
That’s been true of every transition I’ve lived, from leaving competitive golf, to becoming a mother, to starting a business with no map.
Not everyone gets that kind of intervention when they need it. Sometimes you have to be the one who asks yourself the question, and give yourself the same grace you'd give someone else.
🎧 Listen to my full conversation with Jill on Journey to June.
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