Welcome to The Mental Arena, a newsletter where I share mental performance tools and pressure-tested insights to help you build confidence, strengthen your focus, and develop the mindset to win—in sport and life.

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Focus on What You Can Do

read time 4 minutes

Coach Kelly Kruger walks toward me. When he’s within “assist” distance, he bounce-passes two basketballs.

“VJ, are your arms broken? Are your hands broken? Are your eyes blurry?”

“No, Coach.”

“Then you can work on your ball handling. You can take notes. You can watch game film.”

I place the basketballs on my lap. I place one hand on each wheel. I roll myself into a corner of the gymnasium.

I am sitting in a wheelchair for the first time in my life.

Less than five hours ago, I woke up from surgery to repair a torn meniscus.
My knee is the size of a cantaloupe. Every movement sends a sharp pulse of pain through my leg.

The physical pain I can handle.
It’s the mental pain I don’t know what to do with.

The questions pool, then flood—fast and loud:

A storm rolled in. It’s hovering above me.

On the outside, I’m positive, upbeat even. Inside? I’m cotton candy dropped in a puddle, feeling my identity, my confidence, my sense of self dissolving.

Coach Kruger sees it in my eyes. He walks to the corner of the gym where I’m parked in my chair. He’s not warm-and-fuzzy. He doesn’t validate. The Book of Kruger is a single word: Truth.

I want to make a joke, see if I can force a smile. That would be a first. I’m preparing to ask, “Should I be sitting down for this?” But I look again and decide, “Not the time, not the place, Vera Jo.”

Knee-deep in self-pity, I inhale deeply. Before I exhale fully, the truth arrives.

I don't interrupt his momentary interlude.

Maybe it’s the anesthesia wearing off.
Maybe it’s pride.
Maybe it’s. . .

I stare at him, unsure how to respond. I don’t fully grasp what he’s trying to tell me.

He turns. But before he returns to practice, he delivers a final command:

There are two ways to see your circumstances:

• What’s missing
• Or what’s available

The first keeps you stuck. The second moves you forward.

That was it. No excuses. No drama. Just a simple question that shattered the story I was telling myself:

The Pattern We Fall Into

When something goes wrong, human nature tends to narrow our view.
​
We default to:

• What hurts
• What’s unfair
• What’s missing
• What’s out of our hands

And the more we focus on what we can’t control, the more we feel stuck.

That’s what I call The Dead Zone:
The space between setback and solution, where we tend to lose momentum, confidence, and identity.

You don’t have to feel strong to take decisive action.
You don’t have to have it all together to move forward.

Every moment — even the hardest ones — offers something you can do.

Maybe not everything. But something.

Mental Lesson: Control → Confidence

Mental strength isn’t about having perfect circumstances.
It’s about choosing a productive response among imperfect ones.

Every time you shift from “I can’t” to “Here’s what I can do.”

You train control.
You train clarity.
You train confidence.

Next Rep: Small Shift, Big Impact

Ask yourself right now:

Now ask:

Start there.
Small reps. Full buy-in. Real momentum.
​

Applying This to Life — No Matter Your Role

That question — “What CAN you do?” — isn’t just for athletes in wheelchairs.
It’s for anyone feeling stuck, sidelined, or spiraling.

As an athlete:

You can sit in the corner of your own Dead Zone...
or you can start dribbling.

As a coach:

You might not control the outcome, but you still set the tone.
How you respond teaches your team how to respond.

As a parent:

You don’t need the perfect answer.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is show up with presence, not pressure.

As a leader:

You can’t control resistance, but you can own the response.
Your clarity becomes their confidence.

The roles may look different, but the question stays the same:

Final Buzzer

Coach Kruger didn’t give me sympathy.
He gave me a strategy.

He taught me that growth doesn’t stop when you’re limited — it just shifts.

And sometimes, the most important reps don’t happen under the lights.
They happen in the corner of a gym.
Trying to figure out how to dribble a basketball while sitting in a wheelchair.

You don’t need full strength to make progress.
You just need to find the one thing you can do — and start there.

That’s often the first step you take outside of your Dead Zone.

Challenging you head-on and always in your corner,
​— Coach VJ

Thanks for reading. Your next issue of The Mental Arena drops July 8.

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