09/05/2026
This morning I drove ninety minutes to watch my son play middle school football.
All the way up here, metal was blasting out of my badass momma minivan stereo to gear up my son as he mentally prepared for the game.
Air-drumming every fill and thankfully air-screaming every lyric so my eyes didn’t entirely start twitching.
Every other song actually having a rhythm that brought me back to my own teenage angst years — so I got it. My head was nodding to the beat, my whole body syncing up before I’d even noticed it happening.
That’s the thing about rhythm — it finds your nervous system before your mind catches up.
It drizzled on and off the whole second half of the game — never enough to send anyone running for the car. What kind of we**ie would we Mainers be if we did that?!
Drizzling just often enough to remind you the sky was deciding what today will bring. It didn’t matter. The energy watching your kid do what he loves is electric regardless of what the clouds were up to. You could feel it in your chest before you could name it — that lean-forward, heart-open feeling that has nothing to do with the weather.
That’s what good networking actually feels like.
Not the sterile, sunny-day version we’ve been sold — everyone poised, saying the polished thing, holding their breath so nothing messy slips out.
The real version has a little weather in it.
A little unpredictability.
And none of that dampens the excitement — if anything, it’s part of what makes the room feel alive. Your body knows the difference between a room that’s performing and a room that’s actually present. It shows up as a felt sense before it ever shows up as a thought.
Watching that game, I kept noticing how nobody was checking the sky. We just put our hoods up. Everyone’s eyes were on the field — on the plays coming together, the energy building each time the ball moved.
The drizzle was just texture. The game was the point.
I think we forget that networking can have that same charge.
A room full of people genuinely leaning in, energized by where the conversation is headed — not despite a little unpolished realness, but because of it. Bodies settle into that kind of room. Shoulders drop. Breath deepens. That’s coherence, not coincidence.
That’s the room I try to build every month with the Pitch? Please! Gatherings.
It’s not about pitching under pressure — we aren’t the players on the field feeling that rush at the snap of the ball, or the adrenaline that shoots through your veins right when you kick a field goal.
We are the MVPs on the sidelines cheering on our players who don’t make it to the field if we don’t get them there.
It’s about showing up, staying present through whatever the “weather” is that day — regulated enough to actually be there for it — and getting swept up in what’s actually happening between people.
If that sounds like your kind of game, come sit on the sideline with us this month. We make the best cheering section.
