With Sabastian Sawe breaking the two-hour marathon, Steve Magness notes, we’ve got a new self-help story that will dominate public speaking for decades to come, like Bannister’s breaking the four-minute mile:
After Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier, John Landy got under the mark just 46 days later. The next year 3 more men got under. And within 2.5 years, there were 10 runner who were now sub-4 milers.
But perhaps most interesting is that of the first five men to break 4 minutes for the mile, three were British. And they all shared a coach: Franz Stampfl. A year after Bannister broke the barrier, Stampfl’s athletes Chris Chattaway and Brian Hewson would become the 4th and 5th men to go sub-4. Chattaway was actually one of the original pacers in Bannister’s attempt. The other pace and training partner, Chris Brasher, went on to win Gold at the 1956 Olympics in the steeplechase.
For a belief effect to take hold, it has to feel real.
When we see someone we train with (or have competed against) who isn’t too dissimilar from us do something that once seemed crazy, we start to think, “If he or she can, why not me?” Famed psychologist Albert Bandura spent his career studying a type of inner confidence he called self-efficacy. The most powerful contributor was what he called mastery experiences, where you go into the arena and do the thing. You gain experience through the work, and that experience gives you evidence that you have a shot.
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Most people get this backwards. They wait until they feel sure before they act. But confidence isn’t something you summon. It’s something you accumulate. The more reps you put in, the more faith you gain in your respective craft, and in yourself. It is not blind or delusional faith. It is faith based on a concrete body of evidence—and it’s the only kind that holds up when it matters.
Another major contributor to self-efficacy is vicarious experience. It occurs when you watch someone like you attain your goal successfully. Bandura emphasized that the impact depends heavily on perceived similarity. It’s the Bannister effect to a T. His training partners saw what he did every day and thought, “We’re keeping up with him… maybe we can do it too.”
Bannister’s coach Franz Stampfl put it this way, “Effort is really a mental image. The basis of athletic coaching must be to make the state of mind so strong that a world record performance is reduced to the level of instinct.” While the trio of marathoners (Sawe, Kejelcha, and Kiplimo) who smashed records on Sunday weren’t training partners, they had raced each other numerous times. In fact, Kejelcha had a 2-1 lead over Sawe in the half-marathon. And Kiplimo had finished 2nd to Sawe at last year’s London marathon. So if someone you’ve competed with closely is going for it, you say “I’ve run with them before, so why not.” And this explains how you get three guys breaking a world-record in one race.
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Research? shows that role models can either inspire or discourage us. The difference comes from whether you see a role model or worthy rival’s success as achievable. Meaning, the more a role model or worthy rival seems like you (or perhaps comes from a background that allows you to say “this could be me”), the more likely that role model or worthy rival inspires. If, however, the role model or worthy rival is too distant, we create all sorts of reasons for why that couldn’t be us, and we psych ourselves out.
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Belief effects do have a ceiling. We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say. In a fascinating study on cyclists who were deceived while doing a time trial, the researchers put a fake avatar and racing splits as being 2% faster than their personal best. They beat their own personal bests. But when they bumped that up to 5%, their performance crashed. It was too far of a stretch. The brain unlocks reserves up to a believable margin and shuts down past it.
There’s one other separate mechanism that plays a role here that goes deeper than belief. Henk Aarts and Peter Gollwitzer’s research on goal contagion found that watching someone pursue a goal makes you automatically adopt it yourself, often without realizing it. Goal contagion is the unconscious cousin to belief effects. And just like its close relative, it also runs on proximity. The closer the model of the goal, the stronger the pull. If you watch a random stranger run hard, you might catch a tiny bit of contagion. But if you watch your training partner go to the well in a workout, the contagion is massive. The brain adopts the goals of people it considers “us,” which is the exact biological mechanism behind why training groups elevate individual performance.
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Find the people doing what you want to do. Get close enough to feel it. The “impossible” becomes more possible when it’s standing next to you. And then give yourself the personal evidence—from practice, from prior experiences—that you can make the jump if things come together.
You don’t need to feel ready. What you need is a body of evidence: your own hard work and people around you who show you’ve got a chance.
Presumably goal contagion could also apply to the determination to earn a lot of money by performance enhancing drugs (plus hard work and talent)
“We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say.”
Magness has a tendency to generalize too far from very limited evidence.
If wishing/manifestation always worked like Aladdin’s Lamp, of course we would see everyone re-making the world into their own versions of the Arabian Nights.
Conversely, if mainstream scholars were honest about paranormal topics, Steve Magness would not have a “performance coaching” racket where he can spout pseudo-materialist claptrap. (Conveniently, Magness does not name any names, he just implies that “some in the self-help world” are wrong and he is right.) Without getting too close to “Project Stargate” territory, and demanding biological and medical evidence of extreme athletic performance, we can still build a scholarly case that “manifestation” does work for athletic performance. But Magness has a master’s degree, a very selective grasp of the relevant literature, and a high degree of motivation to position himself as an expert so he can transition from athlete to coach.
He cited Effects of deception on exercise performance: implications for determinants of fatigue in humans, which was a study with a sample size of 9, so I don’t think Jessica Utts has to worry about getting overshadowed quite yet.