For most of my career, an open hour on my calendar felt like a problem to solve.

I’d schedule the meeting. Take the client. Start the project. Say yes to the opportunity. An empty afternoon wasn’t possibility. It was unused capacity.

That mindset has served me well for a long time. It helped me build a coaching business I genuinely love. It introduced me to extraordinary people. It taught me the value of showing up consistently and saying yes before I felt completely ready.

The funny thing about success is that it trains you to keep repeating the very things that made you successful. Sometimes that’s exactly the problem.

My calendar is full. My business is healthy. The work is meaningful. And yet, over the past few months, I’ve realized that every open hour of my life already has a purpose before it even arrives. Every gap gets assigned a task. Every quiet afternoon becomes an opportunity to squeeze in one more meeting, one more project, one more thing.

So this summer, I’m running a little experiment.

I’m creating space.

Not because I have less to do. Quite the opposite.Because I’m beginning to suspect that growth requires a different skill than the one that got me here.

I’m making room to write. Room to think. Room for different kinds of coaching clients. Room for projects that haven’t introduced themselves yet.

What has surprised me most isn’t how difficult it has been to clear the calendar.

It’s how difficult it has been not to immediately fill it back up.

Around the same time, I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours watching the World Cup. One thing keeps catching my attention. The best players don’t spend most of the match with the ball. They spend it creating space. Moving into it. Protecting it. Waiting for it. They’re constantly positioning themselves for what comes next.

Watching them has made me realize that space isn’t the absence of action.

Space is preparation.

I think ambitious people have a complicated relationship with empty space because we mistake it for underperformance. A quiet week feels suspicious. An unscheduled morning feels wasteful. We rush to book the meeting, answer the email, or say yes to the opportunity because doing something feels more responsible than leaving room for something we can’t yet name.

But maybe that’s backwards.

Maybe the point of creating space isn’t to fill it.

Maybe it’s to let something find you.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that creativity, clarity, and growth rarely arrive when every inch of our lives is occupied. They arrive when we’ve left enough room to notice them.

That’s true in business.

It’s true in relationships.

It’s true in life.

Perhaps that’s why the best soccer players spend so much of the game creating space instead of chasing the ball. They understand that what happens next depends entirely on the room they’ve created before it arrives.

Coaching Corner

Take a look at your calendar this week.

Not to see how busy you are.

To see how much room you’ve left for something unexpected.

Could you protect one afternoon instead of filling it? Could you take the long walk without a podcast? Could you leave one conversation unscheduled? Could you resist the urge to solve the problem of empty space?

Because sometimes the most strategic thing you can do isn’t add something.

It leaves room for what hasn’t arrived yet.

I’ve started to believe that space is an act of trust. Trust that not every hour needs to be productive. Trust that not every opportunity needs to be accepted. Trust that if you’ve built something meaningful, you don’t have to grip it tighter every year. Sometimes the next chapter doesn’t arrive because we chased it. Sometimes it arrives because, for the first time in a long time, there was somewhere for it to land.