Over the past week I have had a tutorial in how powerful our minds actually are in influencing our success (or lack of it). I hope that I can convince you of that fact if you don't already believe it.
Growing up I always heard people say things like 'you can do anything if you set your mind to it' or 'you need to have an optimistic view on things', but I always shrugged them off skeptically. For the latter my response would be that optimists fail to see the whole picture and just simply ignore reality, and for the former I would argue that anybody who had tried to staple water to a tree probably wouldn't agree with that statement. I had a pretty good attitude right? Only in the past couple years have I been able to get over these hurdles because of life experience- I want to add that there are A LOT of things I've learned only from life experience.
I could go on and on right now about how I became an optimist, but the short version of the story is that I spent a summer working as a counselor at a Bible camp and I came back ready to see the good in just about everything, and it was such a relief! I've concluded that you can find something bad about EVERYTHING and something good about EVERYTHING. It may go without saying, but pessimists generally see the bad side, while optimists generally see the good side (or try to anyway). I've applied this to racing in so many different ways, because as runners we are incredibly pessimistic about our running (and athletes all across the board are like this as well) in that there is always something to fix, tweak, improve, or work on. How often do we finish a race with overall satisfaction? How often do we finish the race and say 'well it was good but it could have been better if I did this or that'? I would gander that the second question is the more common.
Here's an idea: sometimes it's OK to be purely happy with a race, see the good in it, and move on. We could dwell on the negatives all day, or we could see them as a means of improvement.
Now there's one step further than an optimist: a dreamer. I still cringe at that word, even now. I used to look down upon dreamers as not being rational, but rather being emotional about things. What's the point of setting completely unattainable goals? Why set the bar so incredibly high that you can hardly see it? These are the 'you can do anything if you set your mind to it' people, and they always bothered me. Now I consider myself one.
To sum up my feelings now, consider this saying: 'If your goals don't scare or intimidate you a little, you probably haven't set them high enough'. Think about that. Comfortable goals are easy to set, but when you set a goal that shakes your core a little, isn't that a truly unique feeling? You can either decide to give up or move on from there. If you give up, you settle back to comfortable goals and you might never reach your true potential. But if you shoot for the stars, you might end up going farther and ending up on some random undiscovered planet with life unlike anything you've ever seen!
Ok, that was a little dramatic I admit, but seriously! I remember my freshman year I came in with modest high school times, and I would look at the UND record board and wonder to myself what kind of freaks of nature could ever get down to those kinds of times. Now that I'm in a position to break a few of them, I look back and I wish I could say to myself 'Go get it!'. I wish I would have been a dreamer who believed that the power of mind could change how you view things.
I've had some great conversations with teammates in the week about this topic. If people put their mind to something and do everything in their power to complete it, they either hit their goal or inspire others to do the same; either way it is a win for somebody. We talked about how some coaches out there don't have a great conceptual grasp of what they are coaching, but it doesn't matter because they can inspire athletes to believe that they can be great. If a coach knows everything ever about the sport but doesn't build a program where the athletes believe they can be successful, the program will likely fail. However, if the coach can convince them they can be great, they can. It's all about convincing, because like I already said: once you've given up, you stop growing. Consider this saying: 'Whether you say you can or can't, you're right'. I really believe this saying now.
After Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier (the one people said was physiologically impossible), multiple people did it within the next year. It was a MENTAL barrier.
Once the American and French revolutions began to take shape and democratic ideas made it into the mainstream, people all over the world began fighting for rights. It's not that rights didn't exist, but rather that there was a MENTAL barrier to allowing them into society.
I just want to leave one last point to try to tie up all this rambling. We had our conference track meet this past weekend in Flagstaff, Arizona, which sits at an altitude of around 7,000 feet. This is important because physical activity becomes incredibly difficult at that high of altitude, even to the point where the NCAA has altitude conversations to tell you how fast your time in Flagstaff would be if you ran at sea level. This poses an obvious physical barrier, but a not-so-obvious mental barrier. Going to a place knowing that the air will affect you and how you perform makes it hard to stay optimistic. In fact, for the first couple days I would sit in my bed and try to feel how the air was affecting me, as if I was trying to manufacture something out of nothing. To make a long story short, almost all of our distance runners competed amazing at the meet, even though we have no altitude training. Our coach gave us no excuse for not running well at altitude, because he knew that we could push through the mental barrier. Some teams can't, but we did. We exceeded expectations.
And just think, without the mindset of simply chasing after dreams and hoping for the best, we might have had a much different result.
Set the bar high and keep chugging until you hit it. And once you hit it, put it higher and start over. Pretty soon you'll look down and hardly recognize the speck of dust that was you when you first started.
Blessings,
-Nate Peterson
P.S. I remember when my biggest goal was to run under 4:20 in the mile someday. My latest mile converted to a 4:06. If only you could see my goals now that I've become a dreamer.
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