Rewriting Your Personal Narrative for Growth

A Conversation with Steve Magness, Author of Win the Inside Game

In 2015, I worked with the BBC on a documentary that examined illicit medical practices at the Nike Oregon Project, then the most famous and well-funded distance-running group in the world, led by marathon legend Alberto Salazar. Salazar was subsequently banned, and the Oregon Project dissolved.

One of the sources for that film was a former Oregon Project assistant coach named Steve Magness. Magness, who had previously been one of the top high school milers in the country, was the first person who agreed to speak on camera. That emboldened others to follow. Through that film, I got to know Magness, and continued to follow his work afterward.

He went on to coach both college and professional runners, and has now written several excellent books about performance physiology and psychology. A hallmark of his work, in my opinion, is honesty. His books never promise magical fixes, but always marshal research, stories, and coaching experience to grapple with the messiness of improving performance and wellbeing. His latest book — out today — is Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform.

It delves into how the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, help or hinder us in confronting challenges. It opens with an event that set Magness on a course to become my source, and I invited him to talk about the new book. Our conversation is below.

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David Epstein: You have an unusual and interesting book opening. Can you describe the event in the opening scene?

Steve Magness: I was working at the Nike Oregon Project, and I faced this situation where the coach, Alberto Salazar, had become obsessed over a supplement called L-carnitine that some research had shown improved performance. But it took months and months of taking it before it worked, and we had Olympic Trials coming up shortly. So Alberto was like: let's short-circuit that. Long story short, instead of taking the supplement orally, they [Salazar and a doctor] decided let's take it by injection, because that'll speed things up. And I became the guinea pig. I remember them calling me up and saying, basically, “Hey, we're going to do this on the athletes, but we want to test it on you first.” I was not a super competitive athlete then, but I was still training at a decent level, and could run four minutes and change for a mile, so I was still in shape. And I remember I faced this moment where I started asking questions. Is this all right? Is this safe? And they said, yeah, yeah, it's all good, we'll run some tests, you'll be alright.

DE: But it was banned to take the supplement in that way, right?

SM: It was banned. I didn’t know that, but I had this gut feeling that it was kind of wrong. And I remember going into the stairwell of the Nike building and calling my parents, and then calling my best friend…You're faced with this situation where, do you trust your gut and say: no, timeout, let’s take a step back, or do you just go with all the momentum pushing you toward this? And in that moment, I didn't take a step back. I went with the momentum. I said, okay, I'll rationalize it, and let's go inject this substance into my body.

DE: One of the reasons I thought it was such an interesting way to open the book is that instead of being a boilerplate story where you just do the right thing, you made a choice that both went against your values and the rules of the sport. It isn’t a quick happy ending. And as it turned out there was a bunch of other, let’s say “grey-area” at best medical stuff going on with the team. I remember at one point you were given some unidentified pills taped inside a hollowed-out book to deliver to an athlete. Salazar and the doctor who tested the infusions on you both got banned, and you had to deal with investigations and public criticism for a long time.

SM: Whistleblowing, it was years of my life, and it absolutely sucked at periods, and for sure affected both my mental health at times and the trajectory of my career. But the best outcome was that this information is out in the public, so other people aren’t like 24-year-old Steve jumping into a situation and having no idea what they’re getting into.

DE: I think it spurred a wider conversation not so much about what things were technically banned and what was merely shady or potentially dangerous, but about appropriate conduct by coaches and doctors in the sport more broadly.

One of the reasons you highlight this in the book is because you made a bad decision, but eventually you changed course to align with your values. A major theme in the book is coherence, personal coherence in your own story, and the gaps between one’s expectations for oneself and one’s behavior. And if those gaps are big, it can become bad for wellbeing. Can you talk about that a little?

SM: In many ways, the reason I became a whistleblower was because what happened at the Oregon Project severed my sense of coherence. I was an athlete; I’m for clean sport; I’ll never cheat; and then I’m thrust into this situation where I kind of did go the wrong way for a bit. Making sense of that was a journey to help me live and perform better and get out of a funk. I think we see the same thing when we look at people pursuing their careers or lives, where we have these events that disjoint us, and often we try to compartmentalize them. And research tells us that when we compartmentalize, it might help in the short-term, but over the long-term, it tends to backfire and put us in this kind of survival, self-protection mode, instead of thriving and performing-well mode.

DE: You write in the book: “The simple truth is that I didn’t initially do the right thing. That moment would come months later when I finally found the courage to blow the whistle. The Steve who stayed silent and went along and the Steve who spoke up are the same people. But they are also fundamentally different.” Can you explain that?

SM: It’s simple. We need to move from our story of ourself being a children’s book that I’d read to my toddler to a more complex book. There’s research that looks at what’s called self-complexity, meaning the more of the messiness the we can understand — that we do have different roles, and we are going to act in different ways…if you go to church, you're going to act and behave in different ways than if after church you go watch the NFL playoffs with your friends. And those two people are the same person, right? But your environment is inviting different parts of yourself. And what research tells us is: if we understand that that complex sense of self is part of us, then we are more resilient and less in survival-protective mode. That’s part of what I'm trying to get at in this book, is to understand that messiness is part of us. And if we deny that messiness, and we have that simple narrative of, “I'm a good person, I only go this way, blah, blah, blah,” then the moment we go in the other direction and do something counter to that, it’s a problem. We actually have basically a psychological immune system that goes in and it's sort of like: oh, separate that off, there's discord here. But if we accept it, we learn and grow. If we don't, we go more into that defensive, self-protective mode.

DE: There’s an interesting challenge here. Accepting messiness can help us thrive, but we also want coherence, and messiness is a challenge to coherence, is that right? It makes me think of when someone does something bad publicly, and they say: “That’s not who I am. That wasn’t me.” Well, it definitely wasn’t not you either. And I think they’re saying that it was some momentary flash of weakness. But maybe a better way to deal with it would be to recognize: that is me; I don’t like it, but it was me, and if I did it once I can do it again, so what can I learn about how some situation provoked me so that I can do better next time? I wonder if that’s more productive than assuming something you obviously did is a one-off aberration that couldn’t possibly happen again. That doesn’t seem like a learning mindset to me.

SM: There are two ways we can approach something that feels like a disconnect. We can either say “this is not me,” and narrow your sense of self, or we can include what happened in our sense of self: that was obviously me; it was a part of me. Maybe that's not a part I'm proud of, but in this situation, it's still a part of me. So let's look at how our mind would react to those different things. If you deny it, what you're doing is saying that is not something I need to worry about. That is not something I need to deal with, or something I need to learn from, because it’s not part of me, right? If, instead of narrowing, you go in the expansive direction, what you're saying is: yeah, that's part of who I am to some degree, even though I’m not proud of it. But it opens that opportunity up for dealing with things, for learning and growing.

DE: This really reminds me of Dan Pink’s book, The Power of Regret. A main point in the book is that there are three ways to respond to the feeling of regret. You can say “no regrets” and not really learn anything; you can wallow in regret and spiral downward; or, the middle path, you can say: “What is this feeling teaching me that will help me behave differently next time?” It feels similar to what you’re saying, and your own situation, where you took a route you weren’t proud of, but listened to what that feeling was telling you and eventually changed course. You ended up with a more coherent story in the long-run.

SM: There's some fascinating work by psychologists who found that how we tell our story really matters. If we have a failure, or something that we regretted, how we tell that story will impact whether we learn and grow or whether we default toward defensiveness and compartmentalizing. Essentially what the research says is that we want our stories to have what's called growth-oriented themes, meaning you see the challenge and you're saying: Okay, how can I navigate this challenge? Instead of seeing it as: Okay, I went through this situation and I'm just going to move on from it, or I'm going to say no regrets and not take anything forward from it. Generally, if we have growth themes attached, it's not just that we learn something, it's that we literally tend to be happier, healthier, more resilient human beings.

DE: So when we tell our stories to ourselves, especially if something didn’t go as planned, we should look for these growth-oriented themes?

SM: Exactly. And it’s the same thing that occurs in therapy, right? Step one: accept that it occurred, and then what are we going to do with it? How are we going to move forward? And that's what it's all about. It's the same when we look at losing in sports. There's all sorts of research that tells us that if we treat a loss as the worst thing in the world, it makes us angry, resentful, etc. It doesn't make us more motivated. It makes us afraid to be in that situation again. On the other hand, if we accept it, it still sucks, but it allows us to evaluate it and learn and grow. This is why any good coach, what do they say after a loss? Focus on the process. What does the process mean? It means go back, learn from it. What can we take forward? How do we get ready for this situation next time and not treat it like a death in the family?

DE: I’m a big fan of explicit reflection, and I think one major job of coaches is to facilitate reflection and help someone in the heat of battle, so to speak, get some perspective.

SM: Absolutely. You and I were both runners and we’ve had a variety of coaches, and I bet you can remember the good ones who, when you come off that track dejected, the good coach helps you get perspective so you can get out of that threat mode. They help you make sense of it, and take some of the burden off of you and say maybe our plan didn’t work and we’ll try this other thing next time. Again, I think it comes down to looking for those growth themes. Something I learned from world-class high jumpers and pole vaulters, when they miss a bar, they have three attempts, and you’ll see them going to their journal or their coach between attempts, and they’ll write down what is the thing I’m going to take to the next attempt? Maybe it’s a faster takeoff or whatever it is — how am I going to translate this into something that helps me in the next attempt. And I think we can all take that approach in our own lives.

DE: To switch gears a little, there’s a part in the book where you talk about a moment in the 19th century where language shifted from “I failed at…” to “I am a failure.” And you tie it to the history of bank credit ratings, which I found fascinating. Can you explain that point?

SM: I came across this kind of obscure book where the author found that if you look at that language change, it was right when bank credit ratings came about. Banks needed to decide if you were worth loaning money to, and out of that we get phrases like “good for nothing,” which meant you’re not going to be able to pay that loan back. And with that shift, as banks and loans became more important, what happened was we shifted our language. “I am a failure” became used more frequently, because if that business opportunity or your crops didn’t come through, what happened? It’s in the bank credit reporting. You’re getting scored and now you’re “good for nothing.” And it’s not that there was no internalizing of failure before that, but successes and failures became more internalized, and a failure becomes an attack on your sense of self.

DE: Last question for you: you write in the book that it can be really helpful for people to diversify their activities, and sources of meaning. It reminded me of back at Sports Illustrated when I’d interview sports psychologists, and they were often telling pro athletes to get some hobby. And I was just reading an article about Jessica Hull, the breakout Australian 1500-meters star who recently took silver in the Paris Olympics, and she mentioned how moving home to train helped her because she had a life outside running and could disconnect after practice. It reminds me of research that found having a hobby that isn’t too closely related to your work improves self-efficacy. I just think that all fits with what you’re saying.

SM: Here's one of my favorite stories that I didn't put in the book, but it gets at exactly what you're talking about: When I was a young athlete, I ran [the mile in] 4:01 in high school, and then I didn't get any better after that. In college, my sophomore year, I got connected with this world-class sports psychologist, and he hung out with me for a day, and he mentioned this world-class runner who had struggled transitioning from a really good college athlete to professional, but then she made her breakthrough and made the Olympics and was one of the best in the world at that time. And he goes: Do you know what led to her breakthrough? Not different training or coaches. He said the answer is pretty simple: knitting. And 20-year-old Steve was like, knitting? He said he suggested she take up a hobby, and she found knitting, and a group of people who loved knitting, and now when she’s done training she doesn’t obsess over it because she’s spending her time knitting. Unfortunately, I didn't take that advice as a 20-year-old because I thought it sounded absurd. I should have been knitting, man! I should have, but now years later it's exactly what the research shows, whether you look at world-class athletes or world-class scientists, they generally have more hobbies. And not just hobbies, but interests and passions. They see themselves in other ways, not just as an athlete, or scientist, but also a mother or father, a creative writer, whatever. If you look at the research, essentially our senses of meaning and status are substitutable to a degree. So if I lose that race, instead of it being an attack on my sense of self, and I have nothing else or no other worth in this world, it still sucks but in the afternoon I'm going to go knit with my friends and have a good time. In some of this research — although this part is young — it’s even reflected in our hormonal profile after we lose. If we have more of this complex self, this diversified sense of meaning, we'll generally see a lower hit of stress hormones than if it's all or nothing.

Thank you for reading. And thanks to Steve for his time. His book, Win the Inside Game, is out today.

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Until next time…

David