Super Awesome Runner
Hi, I'm Sam! Running has taught me a lot of things -- how motivation is not a permanent state, how difficult it is to get yourself out of bed and move, and how our brains do their best to keep us comfortable and limited in our action (they have good intentions but often miss the mark).
Each week we'll dive into a lesson learned from running, and sometimes cover a song I'm currently listening to help me get out there and move. Some weeks will have a guest runner on the show talking about their path and what helps them when things are tough.
I (Sam) hold a degree in Neurobiology and have been obsessed with motivation, goals and psychology for nearly a decade now. I am a former spin instructor, a current runner & marathoner, an entrepreneur, and podcaster. It's great to meet you!
Super Awesome Runner
How to transform your goal writing into something that works better
This episode focuses on the transformative power of journaling as a tool for effective goal setting. By envisioning future successes and immersing oneself in the emotions related to achievements, listeners can engage their subconscious and create a roadmap to their aspirations.
You can find the song of the week on the weekly playlist here on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2wxmDClsiebNBJ2B3Jut5u?si=5edd46976ddc4630
Hello and welcome to the Super Awesome Runner podcast.
Sam:If you've been listening for a while, you know that I love running and everything that it's done for me, both on and off the race course. Well, I decided to take my own advice about leaning into what works and pivot this podcast to be more dedicated to running and the lessons I've learned from it. In general, I think fitness is a powerful tool for helping us discover who we are, what we're capable of and just how amazing we can be. The thing that I've always loved about fitness and running is that that same brain that you use to push yourself in a race or even on a training day is the exact same brain that you can use to push yourself at work, on a side project, in a relationship, any other context. We really are capable of amazing things as human beings and we generally just have to learn to believe that first. So I hope you enjoy the transition over to a more running related podcast. If you've been, as I said, if you've been listening for a while, you know that I frequently talk about running anyway, so I can't imagine this is going to be too large of a pivot for you. But I'm excited for 2025 and to lean more into what I really genuinely love and have some runners on the show and just spend a little bit more time talking about all the things that I think running does for us as humans, for us in our brain, the neurobiology behind what keeps us going, what pushes us past those difficult parts of any race, and how we can apply that to our lives outside of racing. If you are joining me on December 31st, I hope you have a really safe and lovely New Year celebration tonight, even if that includes just staying in, because that's pretty much going to be my plan If I'm catching you on the other side of the new year. I hope that it was a very pleasant and safe one and that you are excited for 2025 as I am.
Sam:This episode appropriately enough, I would say is going to be all about goals and goal setting and all the things you know resolutions, all the things that we talk about whenever we flip into a new year. I think goals are a loaded term. You know, setting goals can be a loaded term. Everything on this planet talks about goals, right, I feel like. Companies have goals, organizations have goals, governments have goals. Governments have goals, people have goals. Everyone talks about goals and, as a result, it's kind of lost its meaning. And there's so much written about it, so much talked about it.
Sam:It can be very easy to just sit down, write a set of goals and completely forget about them 20 minutes into the year. Right, I can't tell you the number of times I've sat down written out goals and then never revisited them. I struggle with them, not because I'm setting unrealistic ones or setting goals that I don't care about, but, quite frankly, I'm busy, and we're all busy and life has a bunch of different turns and twists in it. And sitting down on, you know, monday December 30th or Tuesday December 31st to write out goals for an entire year, many of those might not be appropriate and you know you might be a little bit too ambitious with them and they might honestly just kind of make you feel like you don't want to do any of them at all after you see them written all out, because it's really simple to write out what you want to accomplish.
Sam:The real work comes in the actual execution part, whenever you're faced with all of those tiny choices that are going to lead you either closer or further away from your goals. That's where the actual work is, but sitting down to write them is, in my opinion, trivially easy, and sharing them on social media also easy. Like, if that helps you with accountability, that's great. But I think what happens, for me at least, is I'll set a goal, I'll share it, I'll get kudos for setting that goal, and that enough is like triggers your reward center in your brain to make you feel like, oh, I've done it, this is great. Like, look at all this, like external validation I'm getting, and it might actually demotivate you to put in the work, because you've already kind of gotten the gotten the kudos and gotten the likes and gotten the shares about, about your ambitious goals. And people are patting you on the back for having such ambitious goals and it can be very easy to then just walk. So I want to talk instead about how I've had a much more successful relationship with goals over this last year, and this is something that has taken me a long time to figure out, but it works really well for me and I hope that you will find success in it as well.
Sam:It comes down to one word I won't drag this on and it's journaling and it's journaling. Journaling has been a very powerful tool for me for goal setting and, specifically, the prompt that I use whenever I want to think about where I want to be or what goals I want to accomplish is to sit down and, like, go to a blank page and I write the date about a month away from where I am today. So instead of writing you know, monday, december 30th 2024, I might write January 31st 2025. So I'll just shoot forward a month. You might think about writing it a whole year away. That can be a much more you know ambitious journal entry to write. Totally fair, you could even write this five years from now, 10 years from now.
Sam:The point is that you want to set yourself, set your context sometime in the future and write that date out at the top of the page so that you can see that you are writing a journal entry in the future. But then, as you write, you're going to write in present tense. So then I want you to imagine that it's January 31st 2025 and really let yourself kind of be tricked into thinking that that is the date today and write about you know where you are with your journey. Let's say that you have a goal of running a 50 minute 10k. I want you to think about having done that, whenever you're writing your January 31st goal or maybe that's a June goal, or maybe that's an end of the year goal and think about how it feels to have accomplished it. Think about how good it's going to feel whenever you hit that goal and write about it. Right, you know, pretend that you had just finished the race and you got the time that you wanted.
Sam:Write, you know, pretend that you had just finished the race and you got the time that you wanted and specifically talk about. You know the emotions that come up, the pride, the joy. You know the effort, how difficult it was to push yourself that last kilometer, that last mile, and just that feeling of you know, overwhelm. Whenever you cross the finish line, you look down on your watch or you saw the official time mark you at like 4950, like you just made the cutoff. And then I want you to write about all the training that you did to reach that goal, so you can kind of work your way backwards and say, wow, you know, I'm really proud of myself. I did all my hill workouts, I did all my speed workouts, I did tempo runs, I joined a running club to keep me accountable. I ate really well. I've been sleeping really well. I've been getting eight hours of sleep on average every single night. I threw out, you know, sugary processed foods, because that tended to make me feel worse whenever I went out for a run in the morning and just go nuts with all the details of the things that you did.
Sam:You know, again, in this mindset, you're writing from the future and you're looking back into the past. All of this, however, has not technically taken place. There's a lot of things that are happening under the hood here. Number one you are basically giving your subconscious a problem to solve, and our subconscious is literally the part of our brain that we don't have access to in a conscious effort. So there's not thought that is necessarily attributed to this part, because thought only comes from the newer part of our brain. Our internal chatter is a very, very advanced evolutionary advantage that we developed much more recently compared to the much deeper part of our brain that doesn't have words associated or or doesn't have thought. But that's what, you know, helps you walk without thinking about walking. That's what helps you drive without thinking about driving. That's what helps you run without thinking about running. You know that is the system that, if you want to, you know, put one foot in front of the other. Like it just happens, it's this magical, enormous engine in your skull that manages a lot of systems without you having to actively think about them. So that's your subconscious.
Sam:And if you've ever had a difficult problem to solve, let's say, like you're in math or your job or some kind of a complex project, and you're thinking about the problem. You're thinking about a problem and you're quite literally thinking about it, right? So your internal chatter is going and you're trying to solve it and you decide at some point I just need to walk away, I need to take a coffee break, need to go for a walk, or I'm going to go. You know it's late, I need to shower, get ready for bed, and then you have an aha moment or a shower moment that's like a term that I've heard before that I really love and that shower moment comes to you just out of nowhere, right, you weren't even thinking about the problem, but then, all of a sudden, the solution presents itself and it bubbles up to your conscious mind and your thoughts take over, and now it's setting words to it and you think, oh, that's how I'm going to solve it, or that's an interesting approach, if that's ever happened to you. That is that marvel of your subconscious having installed a problem for it to work on and then, whenever it's ready, it like bubbles it up into your conscious thought and turns it into words and something that you can understand.
Sam:So whenever you are journaling in the future and you are writing about all of these things that you know, this goal that you've accomplished and how good you feel, and you're really tapping into as much as you can that imagination center in your brain and you're letting yourself feel the things, because emotion is a very powerful tool for us as humans you're basically creating that problem for your subconscious to solve and you're installing this problem into the backdrop of your mind of I have a goal of running a sub 50 minute 10K and I don't know how to do it necessarily yet. I have a loose idea of how I'm gonna do it, but I don't know exactly how I'm gonna do it. And then you just let it like sit there and simmer. If you come back to this journal entry throughout the next month, throughout the next year, throughout the next six months, whatever that time period is, and you reread it and you think about a little bit more. You're going to be training yourself to make those kind of unconscious decisions that will get you closer to hitting that goal. It sounds wild, but it really does end up kind of.
Sam:You're basically creating a roadmap to this future state, and you're not doing it through conscious thought. You're doing it through subconscious thought because you've you've planted this idea in your brain that you have already done it and you have this like loose roadmap of how you did it again, through the tempo runs to the eating better, sleeping better, taking better care of your body. Maybe you talked about how you joined a gym to do strength training or start doing pushups every day and core exercises every day. Whatever the case may be, as you go forward in this year, that is like kind of being installed in the backdrop of your activities. So whenever you are presented with a sugary treat versus an apple, you might pick the apple, and you might not even know that you're consciously picking the apple, but you just feel a sense of like I'm going to eat the apple, like that's going to make me feel better.
Sam:So that is why I really love this journaling technique, because you aren't necessarily just writing out a laundry list of things you want to do. You are focusing on something that is really important to you. You're putting it out ahead of you, but then you're writing in a present tense tone and almost a past tense tone, if you're talking about something way in the future of all the things that you know, you felt along the way, your journey, how you imagine it going, and you're just creating that little roadmap and that problem set for your subconscious mind to take over. And truly, I've had so much success doing this that I just marvel at it. And sometimes I will go back and you know, let's say that that date crosses and let's say I hit my goal, either on it or before that date, and I'll read through it and I will be blown away at the number of things that I effectively got right.
Sam:I was writing from a position of a future state which was really kind of a past state which then ends up becoming my current future state. If was really kind of a past state which then ends up becoming my current future state, if that makes sense. I think this is such a powerful way to connect with a version of you that you want to be, and it gets back to the podcast episode about identity. It touches on that a little bit because you are creating this version of yourself, this identity, construct of yourself, sometime in the future. It is powerful because you're programming your subconscious and you're teaching it all the things that you would like to be and how you would like to get there. It offers your brain, you know, a kind of a path to reach that point and it anchors it, like something becomes a little bit more real because there's this version of you that exists in the future that you've already written about and written from a perspective of, and now you will make those choices that kind of lead you to it.
Sam:I mentioned that you can go back and reread it as often as you like and absolutely do that. But what I have found is even more powerful is to often rewrite it multiple times and maybe have a different take on it. But ultimately it's just you're coming back to that same goal that you have about running a sub 50 10k and you're adding a little bit more detail, you're adding more color, maybe you're changing the date of when it happens, but writing it specifically is part of the magic, because you are forcing your brain into a bit of a conversation with the page. Thoughts are nebulous, they're just impulses in your brain and they can go a mile a minute, super fast. You can get lost in thought. It's difficult to remember all the different pieces moving around in your head, but whenever you write them down it really does force an organization to occur. It forces you to communicate basically with yourself through written word and through sentence structure and through all of the power of language. So writing it just helps you to cement that idea. It becomes literally more concrete. You are putting it from electrical impulses in your brain into actual physical ink and paper out in the world. That is the magic of writing it over and over. And it does become a little bit more real the more that you do it and the more that you train yourself on doing that. So that's why I think journaling and goal setting is such a powerful combination.
Sam:So, in summary, think of a goal that matters to you, open up to a new page, write the date in the future of when you've accomplished that goal, and then allow yourself to be really imaginative and creative and write from the future in a present tense tone about how you feel having accomplished the goal. What did you do to accomplish it? How proud of yourself are you. You know you can even take a moment and close your eyes and let yourself really sink into the feelings and the emotions of this moment Because, as I said earlier in the show, emotions are a very powerful vehicle for our bodies. We spend a lot of time in a state of emotion, right, we feel happy, we feel sad, we feel anger, we feel excited, we feel anxious, we feel nervous, we feel something. Most of the time. It's very rare that we are in a neutral state. So attaching feelings to your words and to your thoughts on the paper is going to help you really sink deep into your subconscious and into your brain. On the paper is going to help you really sink deep into your subconscious and into your brain and your body systems. So spend some time journaling about it, add as much detail as you can you don't have to know all the answers of how you're going to do it, but I bet you have a loose idea of how you're going to do it and then, as you need a reminder for this goal, rewrite the page. It could even be a word for word copy. It could be a little bit different, but it is going to help you cement this roadmap for yourself and come back to this goal and make you reaffirm that this is, in fact, important and you are getting closer to it. Let me know what you think. If you've attempted this, you can reach out to me at super awesome runner, on threads or on Instagram. I'd really love to know what your goals are.
Sam:How this journaling exercise went for you. Did you find it to be a bit odd? Do you love it? It's very similar to setting a vision board. Basically, vision boards have that power because you are setting, you're turning thoughts into a physical object out in front of you, and that really does just feel more real, versus having something be strictly only in your mind, where we can dismiss it much more easily silly and fake. And I kept wanting to like asterisk everything because I knew I wasn't writing. You know, I knew I was writing basically fiction for myself, but now that I've done it for at least a couple of years, I really love it and I use it all the time, and I used it in this last year whenever I was training for the marathon.
Sam:I would write about my experience having finished the marathon and how good I felt and all the training that I did and how proud of myself I am, to the point that whenever I was in the race actively, I had such a strong feeling of like I have already finished this race.
Sam:Now I just need to catch up to the timeline where I've done it it. You know, it was like a interstellar moment of this has already happened and now I'm just connecting across space. Time for me to feel it firsthand, versus just this, like this sense, this intuition that I have and as, as you know, as you, if you've been listening to the show, I did, in fact, finish the marathon. It wasn't exactly what I planned, but I still found a way to cross that finish line and ultimately, that was the goal that mattered most to me. So journaling became a really important part of my training for that, and hopefully it is useful for you too. All that said, I hope you have a wonderful and safe New Year's and I hope 2025 is everything that you want it to be, and let's get after it. I will see you next week, as always, take care.
