The Monday After: What a quiet afternoon with Marcelo Bielsa taught me about structure, performance, and the freedom to create.

It was early 2002, and we were living in our apartment in Key Biscayne, Florida. I had recently finished my doctorate at Stanford and was working as a professor at the University of Miami’s School of Medicine, splitting my time between clinical practice at the hospital, research and teaching. I had also begun offering meditation based stress reduction seminars in the community. Our daughter Sylvana was just over a year old, and fatherhood was still a new and tender rhythm in my life.

One afternoon, I stepped into the elevator of our building on my way to work and found myself face to face with Marcelo Bielsa, then the head coach of Argentina’s national soccer team. I was stunned, not because of his fame, but because I’ve always been passionate about futbol and excellence in general, and here it was, suddenly, right in front of me. I asked, “Are you Marcelo Bielsa?” He nodded saying si. I smiled and said, “You’ve just been given a red card.” That’s what came naturally out of my mouth, kind of weird but true. He looked at me, confused. I told him that once we stepped off the elevator, he’d need to exit to his right, no questions asked. He half-smiled, maybe unsure whether I was joking, but when we reached the lobby, he actually turned right. We laughed. I introduced myself, told him I specialized in high performance and would love to share a few ideas with him sometime. He looked at me and asked, “Are you serious or pulling my leg?” I said I was serious of course. “I’m going to training now,” he replied. “But I’ll stop by your place later in the late afternoon, if you’re around.” I said I would be.

I seriously never thought he would be true to his word but a few hours later, at the end of a bright, sunlit afternoon, I heard a knock on our door, opened it and there he was, in sweats, neutral expression, full attention. I didn’t know what direction the conversation would take, but I was thrilled, and deeply grateful he’d come.

We moved into the living room, and I remember beginning with questions about his life. He spoke about his family, about his brother, his family, and how he was considered a bit eccentric. There was nothing dramatic in the way he said it, just a quiet awareness of how he was seen. What struck me most was his language: sophisticated, measured, deliberate. He spoke with precision, but not to impress. It was simply how he thought. I remember being surprised by how carefully he chose his words. His pace was slow, reflective, and matched something in me. I had left Colombia when I was fifteen, and by then had done most of my academic life in the United States. By 2002, Spanish had become my second language. I could speak it well, of course, but English often came more naturally. Still, with Bielsa, the rhythm of our Spanish conversation held a kind of grounding familiarity. Afterall, I married a woman from Buenos Aires. He shared a bit more about himself. And then, as if following his main interest, he began to ask about me, my background in sports, and passion for futbol.

In the sacredness of our conversation, Marcelo shared about the challenges he was facing with the Argentinian national team. Some of what he shared I’ll keep to myself, out of respect for him and the confidentiality of that exchange. But what I can say is that as the World Cup in Japan drew near, the pressure on him was not only tactical, but deeply personal. He spoke about the complexities of managing world-class players, players like Batistuta and Crespo, and the impossible task of keeping both his leadership effectiveness and team focus in balance. But it wasn’t the roster decisions that seemed to weigh most heavily on him. What emerged, almost offhandedly, was something more pervasive: the pressure of the Monday after. No matter the outcome, a hard-won victory, a celebrated title, the very next day, the question returned: What now, what is next? The federation, the media, even the fans, none of it allowed room to recognize what had been achieved or the depth of what was being created. But worse than that, he admitted, was that the pressure didn’t come only from others. It also came from within.

What he described wasn’t just pressure, it was the typical pattern reflecting the status quo. The pressure he felt wasn’t a personality flaw or a lack of coping skill. It was the predictable result of living inside a system that ties value to outcomes and identity to short-term results. Even his discipline, the meticulous preparation, the strategic brilliance, the unflinching attention to detail, operated under an internal concept that said: you are only as good as your last result. And as long as that remained the frame, even the greatest of victories offered no relief. They only reset the never-ending pattern, one that not only drives decision-making, but reinforces a frame of high performance that keeps people stuck.

But here’s what’s even more revealing: not only are people not rightfully celebrated for what they’ve created, they’re barely seen for the work itself. The moment of achievement might buy temporary slack, but the attention quickly shifts. The effort, the system, the craft, all of it gets bypassed for the next result. And that’s the real loss. Because the only thing we can all participate in is the creative process, the structure and discipline that gets us from where we are to where we want to be. But instead of valuing that, we elevate the outcomes. And in doing so, we lose sight of what’s actually driving the performance: the quiet strategic design of underlying structures, and the freedom to create from structure, not the fear of failure or success.

I didn’t offer advice. That’s never been my way. I listened, not to fix, but to understand. At the time, I hadn’t yet begun naming things in structural terms. My work with Robert Fritz was only just beginning to take root. But even then, I could sense it: what Marcelo was facing wasn’t about stress management or mindset. It wasn’t psychological. It was structural. He was caught in a concept that demanded outcomes not as milestones of creation, but as justifications, for his worth, for his value as a head coach. And yet, even within that structure, his devotion to the craft was unmistakable. Marcelo’s discipline wasn’t and has never been performative. It was embedded, visible in how he approached the game, the training, the players, the discipline between games. What connected us in that moment was not a philosophy, but a shared orientation that high performance is not a sprint toward approval, but a disciplined practice of taking action from current reality toward desired outcomes, an acquired taste for living in structural tension rather the never ending problem solving approach of winning at any cost.

Looking back, I don’t think Marcelo had fully realized, at that time, that what he was doing, instinctively, was already a kind of high performance most people never see. It wasn’t about chasing applause or proving himself to the world. It was about optimizing the system, the team, the players, the training, even himself, not according to external expectations, but according to an orientation shaped by the tension between vision and current reality, and the practice of disciplined action aligned to what what we want to create. That, to me, is what high performance truly is. Not the common version, the one obsessed with metrics, outcomes, and endless upgrades, but the quieter kind that emerges when we choose to create from the integrity of our values, not the fear of rejection. I want to name this distinction, not just for Marcelo, but for all of us who know what it feels like to live Monday after Monday with something to prove, when what we really want is the freedom to create what we want, sustainably, simply because we want to.