“The Field of Life”: Developing an athletic mindset for the arts, and for life
Mental skills coach Steve Magness offers a treasure trove of tips
When I was young, my mother gave me a solid, under-utilized piece of advice.
“Run your own race.”
In a world obsessed with comparison, we can quickly lose our spark because any action taken outside of conformity can be viewed as a failure or mistake. When this is echoed back to us by society, or friends, or family, or a spouse, the magic making us truly individual fades.
I was a kid who often went against the status-quo. As an adult, not much has changed. And from the time I was little, my mother gave me an effective antidote against the anxiety that comes when the path you take feels like unbridled frontier.
“Run your own race.” This saying popped into my mind when I scrolled to a podcast on my social media feed. I don’t do podcasts. My mind is too rebellious. It quickly wanders to pastures far away from what I should be focused on when people talk for extended periods of time. I missed the majority of lectures in school, even though I was there. It’s not that I don’t care. It is simply very hard for me to be a passive learner, or passive with anything.
I think, I learn, I live, “on my feet.” Generally, I like to actively pursue the truth I’m looking for, not lean back as someone tells it to me.
But this podcast caught my attention because it does have to do with something that greatly interests me, sports. In this particular instance, sports psychology.
“Performance is Performance"
Mel Robbins, a popular author and podcaster, hosted champion runner and mental skills coach Steve Magness on her show. For over an hour, they held my full interest. And while sports and competition was a running theme throughout the episode, both Robbins and Magness quickly relate his advice to any field of study, and even life itself.
That’s what Magness’ book, Win the Inside Game, is about.
Life, the arts, sports, competition, business—it can be daunting to realize, but I find it beautiful—all of these things, every thing is interconnected. What we can learn about sports, if we have the right teacher, shows us what we can learn about ourselves and our own goals.
Magness learned this while chatting with Taylor Swift’s drummer. He spends a lot of time training athletes, but he’s since widened his client pool to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and even artists. Swift’s drummer helped him realize a musician’s preparation for a gig isn’t much different from an athlete’s warm-up routine before a game.
“Performance is performance,” he says.
The Competitive Nature of Art
I visited yet another dentist recently who claimed he could help my TMJD issues (thousands of dollars later and even worse pain proved I was all but swindled yet again). When he found out about my career in the creative arts, he mentioned his daughter. She quit theatre because it was “too competitive.” While it’s easy to laugh off this notion of theatre kids being cut throat, her assessment was spot on. The competitive nature of performing arts institutions isn’t much different than the competitive environment found on the football field or an ice hockey rink. It just presents itself in different ways.
The competitive nature of the arts was always one of my favorite things. And really, when something isn’t competitive enough, I move on.
Over the course of the conversation, Magness reveals a treasure trove of actionable advice and tips we can implement immediately, no matter our station in life.
I rarely recommend contemporary self-help books because they’re full of pop psychology that reduces humans to algorithms and data. My stomach turns when the souls and universes of humanity are boiled down to nothing more than numbers on a graph.
A Hero’s Journey
Magness is not the type of man who thinks this way. Yes, his book is full of science-backed studies to back up his claims. But he’s not a man so highly hyperspecialized in one field, all other fields appear beneath him. Magness is the rare, integrated man these days—he’s a man of principle.
Just as he scored his dream job coaching endurance runners, he blew the whistle on one of the largest sporting goods companies in the world, Nike, and the performance-enhancing products the company was allegedly involved in distributing to its athletes involved in the former Nike Oregon Project.
For over a decade, his life was turned upside down. But now, he’s coaching award-winning marathon runners like Sara Hall and is a best-selling author.
Maybe that’s why none of those stuffy, pearl-clutching, tea-totaling professors ever held my attention, they don’t live the words they speak. Ivory towers don’t impress those of us fighting and working our way through the trenches of life.
Magness wouldn’t admit it, but he’s running a hero's journey. That’s the type of guy I’ll gladly give my attention to for however long he’ll let me.
Tips for Your Life’s Journey
I’ve put together some of the tips I found most intriguing and possibly the most helpful below, along with my own thoughts of course. I’ve also added in a bit of my own insight (I can’t help myself).
I hope you enjoy the article and check out the video, and I hope these pointers help you in your own life’s journey. We could all learn how to treat ourselves a bit better, and we could always use another tool in our bag of tricks to help us manage stress better.
I’ve linked to Mel Robbins’ full podcast interview below, as well as Magness’ book. I plan on reading it soon.
Emphasize the Internal, not the External
This quote by Magness pulled me into the interview:
“When we prioritize and emphasize the external more than the internal, it is, and I quote, ‘universally detrimental’ to our well being.”
I knew then he wouldn’t be espousing some trendy mind hack, but digging into universal truths.
Aristotle’s view of the dangers of honor come to mind when Magness talks about the dangers of focusing on the external. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out that a life pursuing public honor is superior to a life of pleasure, but still inferior to the pursuit of the supreme good of the virtues because honor so heavily depends on the whims and opinions of others.
“Cultured people…men of affairs identify the good with honour, because this is (broadly speaking) the goal of political life. Yet it appears to be too superficial to be the required answer. Honour is felt to depend more on those who confer than on him who receives it; and we feel instinctively that the good is something proper to its possessor and not easily taken from him.”
Likewise, Magness makes several points that seem to be counterintuitive to the athlete’s life, or a goal-oriented life in general. But by cultivating character from within, we develop skills and a philosophical framework others can’t take away from us. And this provides for us during the peaks and the valleys.
For Magness, the cultivation of virtue is key, not focusing on the end game itself.
Take Your Eye off the Prize, Sometimes
The cultivation of virtue leads me to another important point Magness made. While training one of his athletes, she realized her focus on winning the championship she was training for stole her “peace.” Knowing she was off-course, she changed her mindset. Instead of focusing on her end goal, she embraced the process. She embraced the process of training, the processes of her emotions, and the moments before her race.
This allowed her to compete freely and fluidly. Athletes and artists often refer to this subconscious state as a “flow state.” But it’s applicable to anyone.
Accessing this flow state allowed her to dominate on the track. Whatever your “track” is, learning how to tap into the passion and purpose that caused you to do it in the first place, not some end material goal, will take you far.
He drove home his point by stating, “The way you set the record isn’t to obsess over the record.”
I know the trendy self-help podcasts are really into discipline right now, and it’s an important virtue. I consider passion to be an important virtue as well. You can have all the discipline in the world, but a lack of passion will turn you into a robot.
We need more humanity, not robots.
I often repeat to myself when I feel the need to defend myself against people who think they have all the answers, and therefore feel the need to lecture me on all the wrong ways I’m living my life.
“Confidence whispers.”
Those who are loudest are the most insecure.
Like the quiet nature of true confidence, to Magness, effort is much the same way.
“Real effort is quiet,” he remarked.
Keep a Journal
One part of Magness’ training his clientele overwhelmingly responds to is keeping what he calls an “Evidence Journal."
The key to developing self-confidence, no matter your age, is by "stacking small wins.” By doing this, we rewire a common internal issue, a negative inner-dialogue.
By keeping an evidence journal of our wins every day, whether it’s showing up to a practice and giving it 100%, getting in our workout despite a bad day, or maintaining composure when exposed to a situation or rhetoric that used to negatively affect us, we can slowly begin to rewire bad internal dialogue with a positive inner-voice. Then, in the bigger moments when the inner-voice can help or hinder the outcome of a situation, we’ve set ourselves up for success, not failure, because our inner-voice is a cheerleader, a teammate, not an enemy.
Keeping a journal like this can help us with other insights as well. Magness mentions studies show people who are well-rounded in life, with different interests and hobbies, are the most successful. Whether we like it or not, we have to take breaks from our obsession, whether it’s a sport or art form, business, or job.
If you get a rejection letter from a publisher or miss a game-winning goal, it’s important to turn your attention to other parts of your life that give you purpose. It could be a hobby, like drawing, or maybe you’re a pet owner and Fido could use a lengthy walk.
Making notes of small wins like, “Looked like an idiot in a meeting today but still moved my body for thirty minutes when I got home,” can be huge for quality of life. Creating emotional distance and taking our bodies and minds out of life or death scenarios and reorienting oneself with the present moment and reality is beneficial to flourishing and reaching one’s goals.
The Art of Clear Thinking
Another person with a vastly different job spoke about the importance of a positive inner-dialogue in his book The Art of Clear Thinking. Fighter pilot Hasard Lee headed up a military training program for future fighter pilots and when many of the program participants showed less than stellar performances initially, he was confused. When he looked into it more, he realized most of the participants were operating with a horribly negative dialogue, making their mock missions self-defeating even before their initial take-off.
When he worked with the students on rewiring their negative inner-dialogues into positive ones, performance results soared, especially under high pressure situations.
It’s important to have a support system around you. Athletes often keep their circles small, and for good reason. When you live a life outside of convention, most people aren’t going to “get” you. I only just recently stopped trying to justify my existence to others. Having a small, trusted group of people, whether friends or family, can help you take your mind off of tough times and remind you of your inherent worth as a human, regardless of the status of your success at the time.
He makes a simple but powerful point. When you’re going through the ringer, sometimes you just need a hug.
If you are really trying to apply yourself to “the field of life,” as Robbins eloquently puts it in the interview, find a couple trustworthy, inner-circle people who will give you hugs, not lectures, when things veer off course.
Journaling can help you gain insight into these aspects of your life, and more.
Remember, says Magness, “Consistency over intensity.” That’s a key to success in any field.
Who do you want to be?
It’s a deceivingly simple question, and Magness poses it to everyone he works with, whether athlete or artist.
At first, I thought I answered it wrong. I was thinking the answer given was supposed to deal with the here and now. But when asked this, I can’t simply say “a successful writer and musician,” because quite frankly, that answer simply doesn’t encompass what I want my life in its entirety to represent.
This, every single day, is what I strive to represent. It’s a Marcus Aurelius quote that is something of a motto for me. The words popped into my head immediately when Magness asked the question to listeners.
“To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.”
Surprisingly, I didn’t answer incorrectly (take that, almost every teacher I’ve ever had). I was actually onto something in the same vein as his first recommendation: Don’t focus on the external. Focus on the internal.
His response to this question is, Live with your thoughts.
Learn all you can about your inner-world and make it your friend, not your enemy.
The answers you come up with to this question will change over time and come to represent not just the work you do, or the goals you want to achieve—it will come to represent the essence of who you are.
And that is something no one can ever take away from you.
He asked himself this very question before pressing the Send button after writing his whistleblowing email.
Continuing to ask this question helps ensure you live principally, rather than by consensus, whim, or fantasy.
Don’t Watch the Clock
This section contains my own advice (as I wrote in the introduction to this article, I can’t help myself).
I get fired up when athletes tell stories about their games and competitions. Magness’ anecdote about attempting a sub-4 minute mile was no exception.
He missed the record by a second, and I found myself talking over the podcast when he mentioned he kept looking at the clock as he was running.
When he said that, I impulsively blurted out, “Don’t look at the clock!”
Now, he’s a wildly successful athlete and coach. I'm sure there’s a damn good reason as to why guys look at the clock when attempting a sub-4 minute mile.
But, in 1980, when the Americans beat the notoriously talented Russians at their own game, hockey, in the Olympics, the clock was a reason the U.S. team gained a competitive edge over their Soviet rivals, thus paving the way for one of sports’ greatest stories, The Miracle on Ice.
Vladislav Tretiak was the Russians’ trusted star goalie. He was a seasoned veteran, but he made a crucial mistake in the series that caused him to get benched: he looked at the clock. Tretiak admitted in a documentary I watched some time ago, he never looked at the clock. It’s a common rule across hockey, and even other sports like football (unless you’re a quarterback). But in this game, when he made a passing glance at the time ticking away, he let a goal in.
The coaches pulled him and the Americans pulled off a gold medal win.
I get timing can be everything in sports, and sometimes in life. But overall, I think we get too caught up in the time that passes as we age. We give time limits to things based on nothing but arbitrary societal consensus.
In reality, the clock of life is no match for the force of your will.
Whether you’re an artist, athlete, businessman, or human, if you build your life properly, you’ll never truly retire from whatever it is that sets your soul on fire.
So, as you build your world with some of this advice, remember, what matters more than anything is not the ticking of hands, but of heart.
Whatever goals you have, at whatever age, understand that the drum of your own heartbeat eclipses the will of any clock. So get to work running your own race in this field of life. And as you apply these tips and advice, remember, don’t watch the clock.
The only competition you have is who you were yesterday.
There’s a lot more in the video and his book, so check out Steve Magness’ chat with Mel Robbins below, and enjoy!
Here’s a link to Magness’ latest book:
Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform
And if you’ve got any tips for applying an athletic mindset to other realms of life, please share in the comments 🙂
Fascinating article about training. Real food for thought for me, since I'm not very disciplined.