Steve Magness is an exercise physiologist who has served as a performance coach to athletes in the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL, plus the U.S. military and numerous companies. He co-hosts the podcast Farewell and is co-founder of The Growth Equation. He has written for The Atlantic, Runner’s World, and Sports Illustrated, as well as been featured in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and on NPR.
What’s the big idea?
A lot about modern lifestyles limits our ability to perform at our best. We are often stuck in survival mode, let our sense of self fuse to accomplishment, and rely on superficial relationships. Our feet land on the foundations of sustainable excellence when we win the inner battle against our own self-sabotage.
Below, Steve shares five key insights from his new book, Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform. Listen to the audio version—read by Steve himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. We are all experts at self-sabotage.
I have worked with Olympians, medalists, and professional athletes from every major sport. Rule number one is to help them get out of their own way. Think back to middle school or high school, and chances are you did this too.
You self-sabotage. Maybe it was during that big exam when you didn’t study as much as you should have. Afterwards, you brushed it off and said, “Ah, if I had studied, that B would have been an A.” Or maybe you were the cool kid in gym class who didn’t put in the effort. Why didn’t you try? Because if you went out there, you might get beaten at basketball or track by the nerd. You’d look bad and lose your status. The essence of self-sabotage is protecting our sense of self.
You are still doing this now. Maybe in your work life, where you procrastinate on that speech. We all self-sabotage because trying and giving our all exposes us, makes us confront whether we are good enough. I call our instinct to protect our sense of self living in survival mode. It is a state of heightened threat perception and self-preservation. It is when our motivation shifts from approach to avoidance. It is when we move from seeing things as a challenge to a threat. The self-protective mechanism prioritizes the immediate quick fix of getting rid of the anxiety instead of long-term growth.
It is not entirely our fault that we feel this overwhelming threat or sensation of survival mode. Three key attributes of our modern world nudge us toward it:
First, societally, we do a poor job fulfilling basic psychological needs. When we don’t feel significance, direction, or belonging, our brain moves from security mode to threat mode. Our modern world does a poor job giving people direction, making them feel significant, and experiencing belonging.
“The essence of self-sabotage is protecting our sense of self.”
Second, we have overemphasized the external. We rely on external validation to make us feel worthy. We define success narrowly through accomplishments. It is as if we are reaching for candy instead of vegetables in terms of fulfilling our need for status and success.
Third, our information environment makes us feel like threats are everywhere. Look no further than your parent or grandparent who is convinced that it is too dangerous even to go for a walk. The information we consume shapes our expectations for how the world works, shifting our internal biology and behaviors. When we are inundated with a message that the world is threatening, we start to believe it. To fulfill our potential, we need to get out of survival mode.
2. Sustainable excellence is about balancing exploration and commitment.
We are often told that if we want to succeed, we must go all in. We need to be obsessed and burn the boats. But reality doesn’t match this advice for most of us. Going all in is more likely to push us toward survival mode, to experience fear instead of a challenge.
One study on over 5,000 entrepreneurs found that those who kept their day jobs were more likely to succeed than those who quit their day jobs. Similarly, researchers found that Nobel-winning scientists were more likely to have hobbies and outside interests than those who were a rung or two below. If we look at elite athletes, we often think that early specialization and singular focus are the key, but research paints a different picture. Those who make it to the top have a more diverse sampling. It is why Wayne Gretzky once said, “No one told me to do it,” when talking about his playing days. Even the poster child for youth sport, Tiger Woods, once said, “Don’t force your kids into sports. I never was. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters.”
We often see commitment and forget exploration. We think we must go narrow and exploit our talents before going broad and getting breadth. But research, again, points the other direction. When a group of Northwestern University researchers looked at hot streaks or productive periods among artists, directors, and scientists, they found a pattern. They tended to explore and then exploit. This means that they went broad before they took that broad knowledge and narrowed it down to a specific field or activity.
Exploration or breadth is a kind of play. We don’t understand or know where the boundaries are around us. We’re testing, dabbling, following our interests, and can pivot in another direction. When committed, we often get cemented in a narrow niche. We can see this in one-hit wonders, when an artist or author has a lot of success but then can’t follow it up. When researchers looked at this phenomenon, they found that authors who were given an award for their creativity were more likely to suffer from the one-hit wonder phenomenon. They were less likely to put out a successful second act because they were protecting their identity.
Recognition shifted the author’s identity. They weren’t just a writer anymore. They were now a creative. Their story had changed. When we narrow too far, or move from committed to married, we start protecting our identity, limiting our ability to explore. As we age, we move away from exploration, but exploration is what stokes intrinsic motivation. It allows us to light the fire that sustains us and eventually turn that knowledge into something applicable. We need more play. We need recess for adults.
3. Build your home field advantage.
Home teams play better. They have a friendly audience. But there’s more to it than that. Research shows that, from sports to work, our environment invites actions and behaviors.
When our phone is on our desk (even if it is off) we are more distracted and less productive. Part of our brain is devoted to paying attention to that rectangular box and thinking, “I’ve got to focus on this in case it buzzes.” Our environment signals to our brain what to pay attention to and even who to be.
“Things in our environment tell us who we should be and how to act.”
Research has found that when we have pictures of family on our desk at work, we work harder and behave better. Psychologists have found that we commit fewer ethical violations at work when our family is staring back at us. Objects are cheat codes for our brains. They tell us what role to play. We see this all the time in sports when an athlete puts on a jersey and becomes a different competitor. It’s Aaron Judge, who says that when he becomes player 99 on the baseball field, he is different from the Aaron he is at home. It’s Kobe Bryant becoming Black Mamba.
Research shows that having a gun around makes us more aggressive and shifts our perception. We are more likely to mistake someone holding a banana or phone for a weapon because our brains use objects as cheat codes. Things in our environment tell us who we should be and how to act.
When psychologists primed students and reminded them that they were athletes, they performed worse on a math test. Their athletic identity took over their educational or student identity. Psychologists found a similar effect when they reminded students of how they were different via ethnicity. They cooperated less with other students. Instead, if they were reminded that they attended the same college, cooperation increased.
The space we occupy tells us whether we belong, whether we are accepted, and if we can let our guard down. Researchers have found that letting someone decorate their office improved their negotiation skills by up to 60 percent. When we feel at home, we perform better.
4. Find balance between caring deeply and letting go.
You can’t perform well if you don’t care. But ironically, caring deeply often gets in the way for high performers. Take legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. In the middle of his career, he reached the top. He was the best in the world. And then, he just quit. He couldn’t take any more. He was the machine, but the machine had broken him.
That lasted until his good friend and fellow skateboarder Randy Mullen told him to “risk not winning.” Hawk came back with an unbridled enthusiasm for the sport. He said, “When I returned to competing, I had a totally different approach to what I was doing. I started getting more creative. I could still make it fun, and I could still do it for a living.” He risked not winning. After returning, he nailed his legendary 900 trick.
Sometimes when we care too deeply, we narrow ourselves. We become attached and fuse with the pursuit. There’s not much space between who we are and what we’re doing. When our pursuits become self-defining, our ego takes over. We start seeing every performance as proving ourselves again and again. When we fall short, it is no longer that we failed at the task; it becomes, “I am a failure.”
“Care deeply without it becoming all-consuming.”
We should not stop caring, but we need to learn how to let go—just a little—to rebalance the equation. By creating just enough distance between ourselves and our pursuits, we can perform out of desire rather than obligation. This is the paradox of trying. Legendary sprint coach Tom Tellez, who coached Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, and many other Olympic medalists, once told me that people often misunderstand trying and effort. They believe it is loud when it is actually quiet. We need to embrace that mindset.
We should not go all in and cement ourselves to the pursuit. We should understand the reality of trying. Think of it like a sprinter. They need to put an enormous amount of force into the ground, but if they try harder, they often tense up and run slower. Sprinters must put in maximum effort while trying to stay relaxed. Think of Usain Bolt flying down the track, but his cheeks are bouncing because his face is as relaxed as possible. That’s the trick to running the 100-meter dash, and that’s the trick of life. Care deeply without it becoming all-consuming.
5. Belong instead of fit in.
Belonging is a superpower. It makes the daunting seem manageable. It changes our perception of tasks and challenges. A University of Virginia study found that when they put people at the bottom of a steep hill with a friend, they said the hill was seven degrees shallower than when they stood there by themselves. Other researchers have run the same type of experiment with a variety of tasks, from judging how long a distance is to lifting heavy weights or boxes. When we have a friend nearby, the distance seems shorter, and the boxes weigh less. It changes our perception of difficulty.
Other researchers put people into an fMRI machine to scan their brains and then put a hot, painful probe on their skin or something scary nearby. When participants had a significant other holding their hands, fear and pain centers in their brain were less activated than when no one else was around. The stronger the relationship, the stronger the effect.
Social baseline theory tells us that we outsource much of our emotional regulation. We do this to minimize risk and conserve energy. We share the load. When we have help from trusted others, our brains predict what we are capable of and can handle change. We can take more risks and go further into the depths of fatigue.
But there’s a catch: The connection has to be real. In modern society, genuine connection and belonging are often replaced with a kind of superficial fitting in. We look at friends on social media instead of deep connections. We acquire genuine belonging when we expand our sense of self by letting others in.
When the U.S. military studied bonding among their outfits, they found it happened during the in-between times when soldiers were shooting the shit, experiencing shared boredom, and getting to know each other. Those moments helped create a genuine connection. It’s no different in workplace culture. Watercooler talk often leads the way. It’s not idle chit-chat, but rather a chance to see Joe, the accountant, as not just an accountant. He is a father with two sons and a daughter, who likes Game of Thrones and enjoys playing pickleball. We come to see people as complex instead of two-dimensional caricatures.
To better handle difficult tasks, we need more genuine belonging and connection to replace superficial fitting in. This will alter our perception of the world and what we’re capable of.
To listen to the audio version read by author Steve Magness, download the Next Big Idea App today:
