Getting Started with Traffic Lights

I recently welcomed a new crop of talented young bowlers to Team Canada’s youth teams. While there were a few returning faces, we did what we always do in our first team meeting: review the Traffic Lights mindset system.

Since this is my first blog of 2026, and possibly your first time reading one of them, I wanted to take the opportunity to review the mindset system that I’ve been coaching for years.

Green / Yellow / Red

As its name implies, the Traffic Lights system uses a simple colour-coded method of identifying your mental state at any given moment:

• Green: This is when all systems are go. What athletes would call being “in the zone” or the “flow state” as coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
• Yellow: The state of grinding. You’re still performing, executing and generally functioning at an acceptable level, but you’re not achieving peak performance.
• Red: This is when the wheels fall off. Athletes choke, parents completely lose their shit, and writers like me stare hopelessly at a blank screen.

Green means go

Being in the green is when things feel automatic. You feel thoughtless but completely focused. In tune with everything while filtering out what doesn’t matter.

Depending on the situation, it’s not even something that’s perfectly enjoyable in the moment (think of a marathon runner) but something you look back on with fondness.

As a parent, it’s knowing exactly what your toddler needs to pre-empt a meltdown when things start to spiral.

In sport, it’s feeling like everything has slowed down and you can play entirely by feel; you’re completely in control of what’s going on.

At work, it’s being fully in tune with your client’s needs, or channeling the perfect language for a presentation, or absolutely nailing those TPS reports.

Whatever the context, the green state is you at your best.

Yellow is grinding

Most of the time, we operate in a sub-optimal state. Don’t let those morning routine experts and efficiency gurus fool you, there’s no hack to escape the grind forever.

In reality, what we want is to recognize when we’re in the yellow, and what we can do to try to get back in the green.

That same parent with a toddler starting to spiral? You end up begging / cajoling / bribing your kid to do what you’re asking, and you’re both left unsatisfied with the result.

As an athlete, it’s overanalyzing, playing scared, or trying too hard. It can show up as too much intensity or not enough. In either case, you’re making mistakes, just getting by and not performing to your potential.

At work, it’s grinding through a proposal, slogging through your cold calls without any real hope of success, or sitting in on a meeting for which you are neither fully prepared nor engaged.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but sometimes it is and you can’t quite figure out why. That’s where some self-reflection comes in, and what the Traffic Lights system is all about.

Seeing red

The red state is when you’re simply not in a functional or productive state.

Parents will join their kid’s spiral into a zone of emotional dysregulation. They’ll start to yell, make threats, or give up.

Athletes choke, quit or lose their cool at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.

For writers, the red looks like writer’s block. In sales, it might look like a lot of “planning” to put off a round of cold calls. For a manager, it’s missing meetings or avoiding a difficult conversation with a report.

The red state can take many forms but the common thread is that you are unable to do the tasks you’re supposed to be doing.

More importantly, the red is being unable to perform tasks that you’d be able to handle easily from a green mindset.

Understanding your lights

Whether you’re a content creator, an accountant, an athlete, or anything else – if your performance matters to you, these colours are important.

What’s your green?

Understanding your green is more than just recognizing when you’re in a flow state. It’s recognizing your behaviours and conditions that lead up to it. It’s different for everyone. In competition, one athlete might be chatty in their green state while another is quiet.

It also varies by activity. The key is to examine how you feel, what you do, and the circumstances that surround a green session for you.

Here’s an example

Let’s take my writing. When in a creative state – outlining, planning or piecing things together – I prefer to work standing up. I pace, I pause to walk around, I fiddle with things on my desk. I often like some music or background noise.

When I’ve got the planning and creative process sorted out, it’s time to really get down to a longer period of deep work. I prefer to sit down for this and work in silence. The sound of keys tapping is music to my ears.

So, my green state for creative and planning activities involves standing and being able to move around (there’s science behind that but that’s another story). My green state for deeper writing work is sitting down in silence.

Think about your green state

What conditions do you like to set for yourself to perform at your best – before a meeting, or a training session, or every day life?

What’s your yellow?

Yellow is the bridge between green and red, and the goal is to avoid the red state. In order to do that you really need to understand what triggers your yellow state. Once again, the context really matters.

A Slack message asking for a quick call might put you in the yellow while you’re in the middle of something important, but wouldn’t bother you at all while catching up on emails.

Yellow as a coach

When I first went back to coaching for Team Canada, I hadn’t coached in a live competition in over six years so I was feeling unsure of myself when I stepped into that space again. I was nervous and pretty excited.

Knowing that my green feelings as a coach lean more into anticipation over excitement and calm confidence over nerves, I realized that I’d have to work my way into feeling that way again.

What to do

Yellow is the pre-cursor to the red, but it’s also a quick transition to the green if you know what to do. Start by identifying your behaviours and triggers in the yellow.

• What’s your body language like? Are you more or less talkative than in the green? What thoughts are going through your head?
• What happened that changed your mindset? A bit of bad luck? A technical glitch? A simple mistake that you or someone else made? Maybe it was a question you weren’t fully prepared for.

You can dig deep into this area to find plenty of causes and signs that you are sub-optimal. Then you can take action to get back into the green, or at least manage this state of grinding.

If left unchecked, you’ll slide into the red which is much harder to get out of.

What’s your red?

We’ve all been there. Life sucks, work sucks, and you don’t wanna do it any more. That’s the red.

Being in the red might be canceling some meetings because you just can’t handle sitting in another one. It might be taking a walk or needing 20 minutes behind a closed door so you can regroup for another round of “2,000,000 Questions” with your toddler.

It’s a temporary state but how long it lasts will depend on you and your mental toolkit. You can use some time and mental tools to help you rebound into the yellow or even straight to the green.

An important reminder…

It’s important to distinguish the difference between a red state and a longer term problem like burnout. When the state is no longer temporary, or it’s happening with increasing frequency, then it’s not about the tools, but about your overall mental health.

In this blog we’ll talk mostly about the mindset tools and ways to navigate the ups and downs to improve performance using the Traffic Lights system, but always with the bigger picture of mental health in mind.

Think about it

And now, I’ll leave it up to you to to consider what your different states might look like, in different areas of your life. Please comment below with a “Green” experience or moment, like the one I’ve described in this blog.