I’m Larry Salvatoriello. I’m a mental performance coach.
I spent fifteen years building a company. By every measure I’d been handed as a kid, it worked.
And I sat in the middle of it feeling nothing.
Not sad. Flatter than that.
Before that, I lost my sport to an injury I never had looked at. Baseball wasn’t something I did. It was the floor I stood on. When it went, I didn’t lose a game. I lost the answer to who am I, and I had no second answer ready.
So I did what people do. I took the next available one. I worked. I climbed. I built the outside and called it a life.
I’ve since watched the same thing happen to a lot of accomplished people, in boardrooms instead of dugouts.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe.
You were never lost. You were buried.
Under rules you never wrote. Under a definition of success you inherited before you were old enough to argue with it. Under a version of you that got rewarded so consistently you mistook it for you.
None of it ever came off. It only accumulated.
Which means the work isn’t adding. It’s clearing.
I work with three groups, and they’re the same problem at different moments. Founders and executives who already made the climb. Athletes, in season and after, whose structure ends earlier than almost anyone’s. And young adults, who are being handed the trade right now and haven’t been told it’s a trade.
One note on how I work. I’m not clinically trained and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. When something looks compelling, I run it past my partner at CORE Performance Labs, Dr. Donald Shrump, who can evaluate the underlying science and tell me when it’s premature. He’s told me that more than once.
If what you’re carrying is heavier than a question, real depression, grief you can’t put down, anything that has you frightened for yourself, that isn’t a coaching problem. Start with a doctor or a therapist. This work sits alongside that, never instead of it.
Every week: one idea, and one thing to do with it.
