THE STORY I'M TELLING MYSELF
If you’re late to the party and just jumping in now, let me catch you up! This is the third installment in a blog series centering around resilience. In the first article I wrote about ideas for how to be more resilient in 2025 and I followed that up with a more in-depth dive into the concept of controlling what you can control. Now, to wrap up this three-part series, let’s take a closer look at another important concept: “The Story I’m Telling Myself.”
I first heard learned of the “Story I’m Telling Myself” (which originated from and was popularized by author Brene Brown) from my good friend and ultrarunner, Jim O’Brien. Jim and I were co-authors of a running journal published in 2021 called Chasing Twilight, and we love to converse about the mental aspect of running and life. When Jim first shared the idea, he told a story that went something like this:
Imagine you’re in a board room and giving a presentation to your boss and a few co-workers about a new strategy you think would be beneficial for your team and the company. During your presentation, your boss is looking down at a paper and writing notes the whole time. The story you are telling yourself is that your boss is uninterested and preoccupied with something else, which is upsetting for you because you worked hard and were excited about the presentation. After the meeting is over, your boss comes over and says “Wow, that was some really great work! I couldn’t stop taking notes because I’m so excited to share this with our other teams and hopefully they will be able to implement it as well.”
The moral of the story (we are telling ourselves) is that our perceptions are influenced by our own biases and experiences, and as such are subject to being flawed. As humans, we love stories, and sometimes the narrative we construct in our mind about a situation is not based in fact. In the example above, the employee misunderstood the body language of their boss and created a narrative around that in their mind. So, rather than accept perception as fact, we must challenge our thoughts and rewrite the stories that aren’t serving us.
How does this relate to running and making us more resilient? I’m glad you asked! It’s important for all of us to spend time examining the stories we are telling ourselves as runners and human beings. Let’s look at a couple examples:
1. “I always fall apart at the end of races.” The story you’re telling yourself might be that you’re on the struggle bus in the final miles of your races. But is that story accurate? Perhaps you haven’t felt as strong as you would like to, but maybe it’s because you mishandled your nutrition, were impacted by the weather, or weren’t as well-trained as you had planned to be going into the race. Just because something happened once, twice, or three times, it doesn’t mean it’s how it is permanently. Rewrite that narrative and focus on your weak spots so that you stick the landing on the next one!
2. “I’m not fast.” I hear this one a lot from friends and runners I coach. The main question here is who makes that determination? Everyone is capable of so much more than they think, and it’s easy to fall into the comparison game trap. You might think you are slow because your running partner or friends on Strava are a lot faster than you. But compared to the rest of the world, you might be one of the fastest runners out there! Something like .01% of the world has run a marathon, which equates to 1 in every 10,000 people. So, it’s time to change the story you’re telling yourself from “I’m slow” to “I’m a 1 in 10,000 runner!” And hey, with a little speedwork you can get even faster!
As we work towards a more resilient 2025, I want to challenge everyone to be careful with the labels they create about themselves and others. It’s good to re-examine the narratives you have crafted about yourself, because they may be outdated or based on too small of a sample size. When we change the stories we tell ourselves and replace them with a more positive framework, the sky is the limit for what we can accomplish. In the notorious words of the late Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
