Dr Eddie Murphy A marathon mindset
Over 20,000 people took part in this year’s Dublin marathon. Running the marathon is a great achievement. When you run a marathon, people are often most interested in your time – did you do it under four hours? However the real achievement is getting to the starting line and to the finishing line. I have done five marathons and each one was different.
For many people, just getting out of bed and going to work, school or to the shop is their marathon. Someone with depression, illness or disability can face a marathon on a daily basis. What lessons from a marathon mindset could apply to life? Top ten psychological skills for the marathon of life: 1 Belief – believing in yourself is the most important step. Beliefs set the distance or the limits; in life, you don’t want lowered expectations, you want to reach your maximum potential. Like every marathon, setbacks are common and an optimistic mindset will assist in overcoming them.
2 Motivation – there are three types of motivation: passive, external and internal. Passive motivation is when you just sit and wait for inspiration to hit you, waiting until you feel like doing it. External is motivating yourself with the thought of reward on completion of the task. However the most powerful form is internal motivation: this is the inner power that drives your success.
3 Goal-setting – Goals give you power; purpose, optimism, work, empowerment and reward. They will help you to get to the end. In the next three years, what do you hope to achieve? What are your short, medium and longterm goals in life? 4
Positive self-talk – Running is an opportunity for a lot of thoughts to run through our heads. If you are filling your head with negative thoughts, this will transfer to your running and to your life. I use mantras like ‘Go For It!’ and ‘Never Give Up!’ I also think answering the question ‘What would you do if you weren’t afraid?’ with positive actions will bring you into a life of purpose, meaning and engagement. 5
One step at a time – the 42km marathon distance can be overwhelming. Life can be like that too, when we feel that all the responsibilities that we have are like a crushing weight, so we end up swamped by stress. Just like the marathon, we need to tackle our stress, taking on the challenges one step at a time. Just as you can never achieve a marathon in one effort, we can’t manage all our stress, but we can manage it bit by bit.
6 Preparation – you won’t finish a marathon without training, rest, and nutrition. The famous Benjamin Franklin saying ‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ makes total sense. In life, when it comes to getting beyond survival to thriving, we need to work hard in advance. 7
Emotional regulation – whether on the race track, the operating theatre or in the classroom, a calm head is the most desirable mental state. A marathon can be an emotional roller-coaster and getting too ahead of yourself or down on yourself can lead to problems. For example, in my last marathon, at mile 20, I thought it was going smoothly. I was going to run a sub-four-hour marathon without killing myself. Or so I thought, until I looked behind me and saw the four-hour runner marker, who overtook me at mile 21. I tried to remain unemotional but it was a sickening feeling to know I was so close and yet didn’t have the legs to claim a sub four-hour time. But I persisted and kept jogging. As mile 25 came into view, I was only 20 feet behind the marker. I had a second wind and I clawed back the distance and added a sub-four-hour marathon to my personal accomplishment list. This was purely down to keeping my emotional balance. 8 Manage your nerves – being anxious uses up valuable energy. Save your energy and instead work on developing your self-belief and confidence, and nurture a positive mindset by focusing on what is in your control. Don’t waste energy on things that are outside of your control. Take each achievement as a milestone, a chance to build, to learn lessons and to practise training your head to stay in the right place, as well as your legs.
9 Perspective – a realistic perspective of running as well as everything else in life will make you more balanced and calmer. We are not Olympic athletes who have to peak on one given day every four years. We have the luxury of finding another race and have no one to answer to other than ourselves.
10 Optimism – ‘Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are right’ – Henry Ford. Success in any discipline is inextricably linked to a positive mindset. Approaching the marathon, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that by the end of the day, I would have a medal around my neck. The only issue was my finishing time. I was determined to beat my time in my last marathon, but I didn’t put too much pressure on myself to do this. Instead, I just focused on enjoying it. If you stop just focusing on the end goal, then it takes a load off your shoulders. The back and the mind feel lighter without the burden of self-imposed expectation and pressure to perform.
In life as well as marathons, you need to take lots of different paths and know that everything that you need to cross the line is already in you.