1 tool to explore motivation outside of body-transformation
What do you uncover in yourself when you remove the need to exercise for body transformation? If you stopped being motivated by becoming a certain shape, or good enough, or the best, what would happen? Would you keep running? Why or why not?
We're unraveling from these things while we train this season, but I’m going to save you from a season of hard training in vain:
You’ll feel a lot like how you feel now the day after you cross this finish line or finish that program if you don’t seek to reorganize your self-worth, self-acceptance, and self-celebration (put those things front and center with running as your practice arena.)
There are incredible things to access in the sport of running and I don’t want you to miss out on them because you’re hyper-focused on the shape of your body in order to climb some sort of caste system.
(Side note: nuance exists. It’s ok to recognize that you still want to change your body and run more intuitively. Get curious. Stay kind.)
So, if not body-transformation, then what? My big-picture answer is Intuitive Running (but more on that later.) In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a fun little tool that can help you start to envision what a future relationship to running might look like.
If you’re feeling tension in your running, I like to think that that means you’re on the cusp of a new chapter, a new season, a new way of relating to yourself and your movement. This tool can help give shape to what’s already forming…
Enter: The Miracle Question.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy uses a series of questions to help clients reimagine their present and future. One of the questions in the line up is the “miracle question.”
The Miracle Question (or "the problem is gone" question) is intended to help clients envision and describe in detail how the future will be different if/when their “problem” is no longer present.
"If you woke up tomorrow, and a miracle happened so that you now have X and no longer Y, what be different? How/why would that make a difference in your life?"
Try the Miracle Question to reimagine a new relationship with running.
Grab a pen and paper and set a timer for 10 minutes to answer the Miracle Question:
"If you woke up tomorrow, and a miracle happened so that you now have X and no longer Y, what be different?
How/why would that make a difference in your relationship to running?
Is it possible for you to experiment with your insight this week and live as if the problem were actually gone?
Drilling down to the heart of your answer might expose what you want to hear from other people. What is it that you want to hear from other people? Can you start by telling yourself those things this week?