This isn’t a complaint, nor is it a poor reflection on the closeness of our relationship. We’re two peas in a very weird pod, and talk all the damn time.

But a respectful boundary formed during the years I lived in Australia, when our time difference lingered between 14 to 16 hours depending on the season. Mom was always scared she was either going to wake me up, or interrupt me in the middle of a workday. 

So, for the nearly four years I lived there, she never once called me.

I returned this respect by being sure to always call her every few days.

And now, even though we live in the same time zone, we’ve kept this tradition alive for the last 18 years. Mom never pesters. She never reminds me to call her. She saves up all the things she wants to talk about and waits for the phone call she knows will reliably come.

So when I receive a message like this, I know something is terribly wrong:

👉 Today, I just want to offer a simple reminder to go hug the people you love.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

If I’m being honest, it didn’t take a village. It took an army to wrestle me through my teenage years.

By the time I was 10 years old, I was deep into my first career — competitive figure skating. 

Mom was responsible for waking me up at 4:30am and dragging my groggy butt to the rink. Dad was responsible for building a business that could support actually paying for the expensive sport I had fallen in love with (although Mom was also hugely helpful in this department).

And between those two executive functions stood a team of coaches, choreographers, fitness trainers, ballet instructors, doctors, physical therapists, equipment technicians, and even dressmakers, all under the direction of one remarkable woman:

My head coach, Sharon Martens. “Red”. 

Her hair was red. Her skates were red. And if personalities had colors, hers would most certainly be red. 👇

It takes an inhuman amount of energy to rouse the bodies and spirits of a gaggle of teenagers every day — something Sharon relentlessly pursued for over 50 years.

As beachy Florida kids in the 90s, we gained this iconic coach hot off her run at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. At the time, Sharon was the only “Master” rated figure skating coach in the entire state of Florida — the highest peer-examined teaching credential one could obtain in the sport.

And she was ours.

I’ll try to explain the dynamic of our relationship, although it’s impossible to do it justice:

Figure skating is a fiercely independent sport, especially in Florida, where at the time, there was no community for it. So Sharon had to step up and be that community. She didn’t just create the infrastructure that supported us, she, herself, was the infrastructure.

Her role in our lives extended far beyond coaching us as athletes. She created the culture that guided our attitudes, our decisions, and our commitments, both inside and outside the sport of figure skating.

She shaped us as humans — one gallon of coffee and ungodly-early-morning training session at a time.

So it was pretty out-of-character for her to not show up to the rink a few weeks ago, and leave her skaters hanging.

I had just settled into the classroom for the first day of the summer term at Harvard, where I would be spending the following two weeks teaching executive students and facilitating alumni programs. 

I was going to be burning the candle at both ends. My mother knew this.

So when my phone buzzed with a message that said “please call”, my gut tangled.

I stepped out of the classroom, found a quiet corner, and made the call.

Mom had already composed herself before messaging me, so she calmly broke the news that when Sharon hadn’t arrived at the rink that morning, a friend went to check on her, and found her peacefully passed away, tucked warmly in her bed.

We’ve all received jarring news like this. 

Sharon may have been 79, but she was still working, and I had just seen her for a boisterous lunch on a recent visit to Florida. In fact, she was the one worried about me — after my hip surgery last year, she sent a care package filled with puzzles and coloring books and candy and nail polish and all the things a gal needs to stay busy while bedridden.

(To be fair, she probably felt partially responsible for my decades of hip problems, but hey, hurdling myself into the air at 300 RPMs on a 4mm blade was my choice. She just helped me do it better.)

So I was stunned, and deeply sad.

But I had to quickly pull myself together and go do the thing she did for me all those years ago — coach.

I’ve always believed Sharon shaped my work ethic, gave me a system for tackling problems, and instilled the emotional grit required to perform at the highest level in all areas of my life.

But what I’m now realizing is that perhaps the most important thing she taught me was how to coach — how to motivate, inspire, and be a rigid hard-ass when required.

After I broke my hip as a teen, and suffered complications in the few years that followed, it was clear that my competitive skating career was finally kaput. But skating was my identity, and those who can’t do…. teach. Right?

So I apprenticed under Sharon, and earned my first professional coaching accreditation at the tender age of 16.

I coached figure skating on and off for years, but never felt drawn to it as a full-time career path. Yet, the skills were hugely transferable beyond the sport.

And it took this moment of reflection to realize that, if I had to assign a label to my career, the most constant thread has been… “coach”. 

Every job I’ve ever had, every business I’ve ever owned, every talk I’ve ever given, and every product I’ve ever launched (including this newsletter) required me to understand the goals of the people I served, challenge their assumptions, and help them break through their limits.

I’m not going to tell you that I consciously channel Sharon anytime I’m in a coaching scenario, but she was my coach for a decade. She’s always lived in the back of my mind, and always will.

At the rink, Sharon would force me to challenge my physical constraints. She would sharply rebuke my excuses, and draw my goals into focus. Then she would go to work building the mental resilience I needed to achieve those goals, even if it meant doing things I didn’t want to do, and hearing things I didn’t want to hear.

But once we arrived at competition, the energy shifted. She balanced my nervous stomach knots with a calm “you got this”, and frankly, an unconditional love that felt motherly.

Sharon was, simply, a masterful coach.

And on the morning my beloved coach died, I found myself away at “competition” with a group of 40 executive students. For the previous five months, I had been coaching them on their thesis projects, and today was the day they were presenting their work to their professors and peers.

It was kind of… perfect.

Even though Sharon was suddenly gone, her fingerprints were all over the work I was doing that very day.

I’m at a loss for how to meaningfully pay tribute to the person who shaped me. The first memories that come to mind are of raucous laughter. Even when she was pushing me to my absolute limits, she made it fun.

Which is why I’m so glad her skaters donned red and got together last week to honor that beautiful dichotomy with Sharon’s signature class, aptly named: 

Power. 👊

Sharon’s “Power” class was 45 minutes of pure fitness hell set to pop music with buckets along the dasher boards for puking. There was no room on the ice for snobby princesses. Sharon trained her skaters to kick ass and tell dirty jokes.

Now you know where I get it from.

Thanks for everything, Red. ❤

Hug the people you love, my friends.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)