My friend Agnes Le has come up with a great motivational technique: Write a blog post about an important accomplishment before you actually do it. For lack of a better term, I'm calling this "pre-blogging."
Last week Agnes ran the 50-kilometer (30+ miles) Villa de Madrid race, her first ultramarathon effort after several months of intensive training. She reflected back on the experience in a great blog post, and as she makes clear, the process was about much more than running a race:
I have a confession. The past 4 months, I have been focusing on ChiRunning and marathons (and talked non-stop about them, some people would say, hahaha). There is however, a "head fake", defined so beautifully by Randy Pausch in "The Last Lecture." If you have not seen his truly moving video (free on the internet) or read the book, you should not miss it. Randy describes a "head fake" as indirect learning, "when you teach somebody something by having them think they’re learning something else". In other words, key lessons people don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process.
Well, this hasn't been simply about ChiRunning and marathons, but much more. It’s about life and how to achieve your dreams.
Agnes goes on to talk eloquently about the most important lessons she learned along the way--well worth a read--and then she adds a twist:
I have another big confession to make. I wrote this entry blog three days before I ran the ultramarathon (I made some revisions today). Yes, I cheated hahaha. But who said that you could not trick your brain? See, it’s about visualizing success and acting as if it happened. I made it a reality. The professional athletes do it. These are powerful techniques to train your brain. Your brain does not like incoherence. It will find a way to bridge the gap between your imagination and reality, if you let it.
I love it. I'm reminded--yet again--of a paraphrase of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises: "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come." And of recent neuroscience research that suggests that our performance is affected by emotions and internalized stereotypes that impact our faith in our own abilities. In other words, our beliefs about our likely success or failure can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Congratulations, Agnes, and thanks for the inspiration.
Photo by Morton Liebach.
