I’ve spent a lifetime helping people perform up to their potential. First, in the narrow world of running, where I coached at every level from high school to college to the pros. And later, in my work helping elite performers of all kinds navigate their mental barriers. I love it. It’s a puzzle to see that someone is capable of more, but then have to try to figure out how to convince their mind and body to let go of the reigns.
All along the way, I’ve kept a few simple notebooks filled with lessons that guide my practice. Around my birthday every year, I take those scribbles and see what one make the list in a word document I created way back in 2008 that I referred to as “my cheat sheet guide to coaching.” They are the principles and ideas that I want to hold on to.
With that, it’s that time of year again. I wanted to share 15 of those principles that made the cut. They’re ideas to help you show up and live and perform at your best, over the long haul.
1. Raise the floor. Don’t Just worry about the ceiling.
When trying to improve, most of us go for the lift-the-ceiling approach, judging ourselves by our best performance ever. In track, we define ourselves by our personal best. But, those best days, when everything aligns are often the easiest time to perform. And, if we’re honest, at higher levels of performance they become fewer and farther between.
Years ago, with the help of a few runners I was coaching, we started focusing on the opposite side: your floor. What can you show up and do almost no-matter what? Can you still run a 4:05 mile on a day when nothing is clicking, instead of falling apart to run 4:15. That’s the floor. Having a minimum standard for yourself that no matter what, I can show up and perform pretty good.
Over time, the goal is to raise that floor. Or as one sports psychologist put it to me, instead of thinking about your personal best, think about improving the average of your 5 best times that season.
One of the runners I was coaching, Brian Barraza, put it like this, “When you raise the floor, it allows for those days when everything is clicking to exceed expectations,” he told me one day after practice. As I watched this idea percolate through the athletes, I noticed a trend. Those who raised their floors had an inner confidence about them. What once seemed crazy to contemplate was now the norm.
2. Don’t worry about being the best. Be the best at getting better
Tom House is a former major league baseball player who, after his playing career finished, became obsessed with solving a different problem: how to throw. In his illustrious coaching career, he’s worked with many of the greatest in history. Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Drew Brees, Tom Brady; it didn’t matter if you were throwing a baseball or a football, House was there to help. When he looked at the commonalities between the greats, he noted they were all “Addicted to the process. Winning is a byproduct. They get addicted to the process because it’s what they can control.”
When I relayed that success often pulls us toward outcomes and the external, and the greats seem to have the ability to keep this at bay, he replied, “Yes, they stay in the process better than anyone. Wins only take them out of the process for moments.” The people who master their craft and pursue it for a long time are able to stay intrinsically driven and point their rage to master on the process of getting better. They don’t get lost in the pull of success and accolades. They don’t get lost chasing despite achieving more than most could imagine.
3. The 24-hour rule
My high school coach had a simple but profound rule: no matter what happened, win or loss, joy or disappointment, the next day you get back to work. We called it the 24-hour rule. You had 24 hours to feel it all. Then it was time to move forward. The rule was never “suck it up.” You got a full day to feel the thing, fully, so it didn’t quietly leak into everything that came after.
There’s a difference between feeling it and festering in it. Researchers have found that resilient is tied to an efficient termination of the stress response. One way to do this is to give yourself the constraint. It’s not that 24-hours is a law. Sometimes it’s 5 minutes, 5 hours, or even 5 days or longer. The point is to have some sort of signal that tells you to return to the work. This gives your brain permission to move on, and let go, just enough, of the thing that stings. So that a failure or loss doesn’t transform into an endless cycle of rumination.
4. Confidence demands evidence
We don’t get confidence from telling ourselves we’re great or being our best hype man. Confidence demands evidence: proof that you can handle the task in front of you. As Chris Paul put it, “Reps remove doubt.”
The point is to do the work. Put yourself in situations in practice or training that prepare you for whatever you’re going to face. You aren’t looking for a guarantee that you can handle it. You are collecting enough receipts so that no matter what is thrown your way, you realize you have a shot. It’s why great performers rehearse what to do when everything goes wrong, or develop multiple different tools to navigate the same problem. When stress is trying to convince you to throw in the towel because it’s hopeless, you pull the receipts and give yourself a hopeful future.
5. Reframe anxiety as excitement
In a study out of Loughborough University, researchers found that elite swimmers experienced the same amount of anxiety as everyone else, but they were more likely to interpret that anxiety as facilitative instead of debilitative. Often, we focus on the intensity of our feelings, but that’s much harder than simply changing the direction. When we reframe stress as something that is enhancing, that it’s our body preparing for a difficult but conquerable challenge, we’re more likely to engage instead of detach.
The signals we experience from anxiety and excitement have a large degree of overlap. Our framing or interpretation of them can alter their meaning and our subsequent behavior.
6. Feelings are messengers, not dictators
The old model of toughness taught us that emotions should be ignored or suppressed. Shun what you feel and push through. The old model falls short. Feelings are messengers that nudge. They are our body saying “Hmm… something is different,” before sending us on a quest to figure out why. Emotions move us from nudge to shove. They bias us toward a particular response. But they don’t control us.
Our goal is to keep them as messengers. Signals that we can hear and then choose whether we think that information is valuable, needs an action behind it, or simply to let float on by. Hear the message, then decide. You don’t have to obey it to move.
7. Toughness is having a calm conversation, not bulldozing through
When the inevitable discomfort rears its head during a performance, often our reaction is to panic and question whether or not we can make it to the finish line. If this panic sets in, our race is often done. On the other hand, when a race is going well, we get the same signal that we are starting to hurt. But instead of going immediately from “this hurts” to “Oh god, I don’t know if I can make it to the finish,” we have space for a conversation. Our inner dialogue often goes something like, “It’s okay. I expect to hurt; this is what I signed up for. Just keep pushing; you’ll be fine.” In other words, we accept the pain and push forward. Yes, the race still hurts, but we prevent our minds from going into panic mode, which leads to a visible strain and falling apart in a race.
I call this having a calm conversation. It’s at the heart of toughness. We need to create just enough space so that we’re in charge and can decide what to do, the self-talk we use, or where our attention goes.. Creating toughness, therefore, isn’t about gritting your teeth and forcing your way through pain. Instead, it’s to embrace it.
8. Find a way to stay in control
Uncontrollable stress tends to lead straight to survival mode. We start looking for a way to protect ourselves and our ego. When it feels like we can’t do anything about the stress in front of us, why try mode is the logical conclusion for our brain. If we don’t feel like we have any control over the situation, it’s probably best to faint or play dead, and hope it all goes away.
You’ve got to find ways to maintain a sense of control. It’s what allows us to be tough. Sometimes, that’s by developing a simple routine so that even in chaotic situations you have something to fall back on that’s familiar. Other times, it’s about breaking downa performance into the next action you can take. A marathon might feel overwhelming, but if you can convince yourself to stay on pace until the next water station, it seems doable.
9. Joy and fun are performance enhancers
We mistake being serious for being dedicated. They are not the same thing. Jess McClain lived it. She got the “dream” of a pro contract and stepped away. “It’s a fun-sucker when it’s all about pace and you’re focusing on splits every 200 meters.”
She came back on her own terms, working a full-time job, and became top American at Boston twice, then took fourth at the 2024 Olympic Trials. Her mission now? “To keep it fun... And I’m having a total blast.” Maybe, just maybe, the point is actually to have fun. And when you do, the results have a way of taking care of themselves.
You can be dedicated and still have a blast putting in the work. You can find the boring, monotonous training ‘fun’ in a strange way. The major mistake I made in my own competitive career in running was letting the fun slip away. I always had put in the work, but when I was at my best I had fun doing it. I’d laugh and joke with my teammates, while doing an ungodly amount of running. But at some point, I mistook the work as being all that mattered, and doubled down on that. My performance plummeted.
Hold on to and protect that joy. It’s what kept you in the thing in the first place.
10. Rig your environment to make it easy to do the thing
Objects invite action. They act as a communication system to our brain. Ecological psychology tells us that our perception is linked to the environment we occupy. The objects in our space are like a cheat code for the brain, allowing us to get to a behavior much quicker and smoother. If we see a chair, the motor program for sitting lights up before we’ve even taken our first step toward the chair. Our brain paves the way, nudging us toward the action.
We can take advantage of this by utilizing objects as reminders, or tying an environment to a specific behavior. A notebook on your desk invites creative thinking or writing. While phones invite scrolling. If you want to improve your likelihood of exercise, consider placing your running shoes by the front door so you see them every day. We can create mental nudges via our environment. They are often the key to the consistency that elite performers need.
11. Sometimes, we need to let go.
We try to work hard every day, proclaiming #NoDaysOff, when we know that the body needs rest and recovery to adapt and grow stronger. We work on the weekends and at all hours of the night, when research tells us that entrepreneurs are more creative when rested, and working on the weekends decreases our intrinsic motivation and harms our performance over the long haul. We go against what is best thanks to our own insecurity. We can’t stop working, afraid we will miss out or fall behind. It takes true confidence and security to step away.
The most resilient individuals are able to go all-in, to commit to the hard work when it matters most, but they are equally able to step away when it’s clear that additional hard work would actually hurt rather than help. The performance is what matters, not their insecurities or needs to prove that they are committed. Letting go takes courage. It means having confidence that what feels like a short term loss (stepping away) will result in a long term gain.
12. Be a minimalist to be a maximalist
A good friend and mentor, Dr. Mike Joyner, has a simple philosophy on life: you need to worry about the things that matter and focus on them. In other words, to be a maximalist, you have to be a minimalist. You eliminate the things that, while they might make you ‘busy,’ don’t actually contribute to your core goals. Cut the fat, focus on what matters, and don’t get lost in the world of doing work for work’s sake.
13. Learn How to Lose Well
Coming to terms with failure and saying we must “fail forward” is trendy in Silicon Valley culture, but we need more than slogans about embracing failure. We need to learn how to lose well—to shift from seeing any sign of failure as a threat to our sense of self to something we can deal with and learn from. The modern world inundates us with signs of losing, that we aren’t measuring up. And many of them occur in a public forum. We don’t have to be athletes playing in front of thousands to feel the burden. From Facebook to TikTok to Instagram, our failures are on public display. Combine that with the fact that we’ve moved from playing a local to a global game, and it’s nearly impossible to measure up. We are all losing at something on a public stage. We are all having our status constantly questioned. We must learn how to lose well.
Contrary to what’s often proclaimed, accepting a loss doesn’t make you fragile. It hastens your trip from disappointment to being able to do something about the thing. It allows you to see things clearer, to move from a tantrum-throwing child to a space where we can make sense of and learn from defeat. No one enjoys getting their butts kicked, but learning how to lose better doesn’t mean we aren’t passionate or don’t care. It allows us to perform at our best. From a place of love and striving to get better, instead of fear, shutting down, and a lingering negative emotional hit.
14. Sometimes, discomfort is the point.
We tend to handle discomfort by trying to minimize or eliminate it. We take that hint of anxiety as a sign that we need to avoid whatever was causing it. We retreat to texting someone instead of calling because we have phone anxiety. While avoidance works in the short term, it repetitively sends the signal to your brain that this item that I’m avoiding is dangerous and threatening. Your brain takes notes and learns that it should unleash its full battery of strategies to get you to stop doing the angst-provoking activity.
The best performers are skilled at figuring out how to navigate discomfort. They aren’t avoiding it. And they aren’t trying to bulldoze through it, like old-school models of toughness promoted. They simply embrace it, which means sitting with their feelings and emotions, trying to see if they should listen to the warning of danger or let it pass by. It meant understanding that sometimes the doubts and voices screaming at them to stop were worthwhile, and other times they were more like a crazy aunt on Facebook going on and on about whatever conspiracy she saw on YouTube.
15. A complex sense of self is a resilient self
In one study, participants were given a test that they were told was predictive of career success. Little did they know, the test was rigged, with many of the questions unsolvable. After the test, experimenters told the participants some variation of, “You didn’t do as well as we usually expect students to do, so I guess that was pretty tough for you.” They were invoking failure, and the emotional sting that comes with it. The students who saw themselves as bright coming in, now faced an academic telling them that they weren’t as smart as they thought. And their future was dim. But the real point of the exercise came next.
They were given a second chance. Take the test again with some time to regroup and practice if they wanted. Researchers found that those with greater self-complexity, practiced more regardless of what they felt or were told by the researchers. Those who scored lower on self-complexity, practiced less, and it was more dependent on their mood and what the researchers told them. In other words, when everything around them was telling them they weren’t good enough, they listened. They stopped trying. The authors gave the conclusion away in the studies title, “Effort or Escape: Self-concept Structure Determines Self-Regulatory Behavior.” Those low in self-complexity hit the escape button.”
There’s a time and place for single-minded obsession. But if it’s not accompanied by a robust sense of self that is bigger than whatever you’re pursuing, you are going to be in trouble. You are priming your brain to freak out. You need just enough complexity, just enough of other things in life that keep every failure from being a personal existential crisis.
—Steve Magness
Workout Deep Dive: Alabama and Nick Saban’s 110 yard runs.
In the new Nick Saban documentary, there’s a part where they talk about one of the hard workouts they do. 110 yard repeats with 45 seconds rest. With the skill players running under 15 seconds, mid skill under 16, and bigs under 18. They ended up running 26 of them.
Now, often this is described as an old school workout. It’s one of those we hear about that really ‘toughens’ athletes up. And is frequently accompanied by some notion of if the entire team doesn’t make the cut off, everyone runs again.
But to me, it’s the perfect example of how we can make a workout create productive or unproductive fatigue. And one that too often, football folks miss out on.
How would a track coach run this workout? Let’s start with what we’re after in this type of session, and then the mistake team sports makes.
The purpose of the workout: Conditioning…
But that’s a nebulous term that doesn’t really mean anything. What’s the point of 110 yard runs with relatively short recovery? It’s an endurance workout.But the relative short length of the repeats, mean we can run at faster speeds. And the relatively short/partial recovery makes it an aerobic workout (our anaerobic system doesn’t have time to recover in 45sec). So it becomes what we often call in track a more specific endurance workout. Meaning, you are running speeds that are closer to what you’d experience on game/race day. But the recovery and rep length is manipulated in such a way to challenge your aerobic system.
Think of it like this. If we ran 110 yards faster (12-13sec), we’d need much longer recovery and now it’s a speed endurance session. If we wanted a more aerobic support kind of workout, we’d lengthen it out (400m reps) and slow it down a little.
So given that it’s more of a specific endurance type session, especially for skilled players, what we’re after is a pace that they can handle from start to finish without completely falling apart.
Why? If we start to slow drastically with too many reps left, we’re not getting the bang for our buck on specific endurance. We’re now running much slower than game speeds, instead of just a touch slower. And that fatigue prevents our cardiovascular system and local muscular/mitochondria systems from having the continual pressure on them to adapt aerobically. And in addition we end up poor habits on how to navigate fatigue, our mechanics fall apart and we go into a kind of survival slop of a running style.
Thus why I call it a just manageable challenge. Now, some workouts, you want breakdown or to push that lactate up so high they have to manage. That’s a different style of workout. That’s not 110s with short workouts. And you manipulate the workout so the falling apart is only the final part.
So how do many team sport folks get it wrong?
1. They think that they are Alabama. In elite college teams, fitness is more homogenized. They can kind of get away with generic time targets (though I still think more individualization is needed.) So they set three targets by position, it works for most, and they get away with it. The lower the level, the more widespread fitness is. Think of it like this, on a college track team, maybe everyone is spread from 3:56 mile to 4:10. For even a HS varsity team they may spread from 4:05 to 4:45. Meaning a 15 second 100m is appropriate for some, not so much for others. It’s similar when comparing elite football or team sports versus lower level. The fitness differential becomes wider the lower we go.
So what? Group people by ability, instead of positions. Sure, positions do this alright in some cases. But you need to take more care in dividing up groups so that each one is challenged appropriately. And then give them a target that should be hard but manageable.
And instead of seeing a failure to hit that target as some lack of effort, see it as information. Sure, some folks give in to the fatigue, but your goal is to understand why. Is it lack of care, endurance capacity, fatigue, etc. If you pay attention, you can tell the difference between a kid navigating genuine fatigue and one sandbagging it. The goal is to adjust the targets based on that information, so that each time you run this workout, you are more dialed into challenging them appropriately. The way I think about these workouts is how should someone look at rep 10, 15, 20, etc. I predict. And if that prediction is off, it often means I didn’t set the workout parameters up right.
Another way to think of this, if you want the team doing it together. Is how do I manipulate the workout variables to make it just manageable for more folks. So for example, whether slower athletes what I’d do is maybe split it into two or three sets. They sit out a rep mid-workout so they can have a little more recovery. Why? The slower folks have worse aerobic systems. They don’t recover at the same rates as the fitter folks.
To give you a concrete example, way back in high school we’d occasionally run a similar workout to this. We’d do 100 meter repeats, but we’d do them with only 15 seconds rest. For our top group, we’d try to run them at mile pace or better (~15sec). And we’d do anywhere up to 40ish of them, often split into sets of 12 to 20 with a slightly longer break.
So maybe something like 2x 16x100m in 15sec with 15sec rest with 2-3 min between sets. Again, we weren’t football players. But you can see how the highly developed aerobic system allowed us to recover so much faster in a similar workout.
Too often, we just adjust the speed and don’t account for the recovery differences.
2. Stop with the if everyone doesn’t make it, the whole team runs again nonsense.
If that’s your mindset then you are NOT training for an adaptation. I get the temptation, but just stop. You are NOT ‘conditioning’ them anymore.
Why? You are punishing folks who are correctly riding that line, and potentially overtraining people who did the workout right, just because someone else ran slower. Think f it like this, if someone is appropriately doing 20x110 yard in 14.5, and the last couple they are just trying to struggle. They’ve nailed the workout. But then because of someone else, they then have to survive 4, 5, 6, or whatever more. Their mechanics get sloppier, you’ve pushed it from a challenging aerobic workout to one where it’s just fighting unproductive fatigue.
Football conditioning is a copycat game. High school coaches are going to see this and copy it. Stop. Pause. And ask:
What’s the point, what adaptation am I after? What’s the appropriate stimulus and level of fatigue to reach that?
What tool am I training psychologically?
How do I manipulate the variables (speed, recovery, groupings, reps, sets) to get the productive adaptations I want.
Again, I wrote a book called Do Hard Things. This isn’t about softening up workouts. It’s about learning to treat fatigue with the respect it deserves. You want to create productive fatigue, not the mindless variety. Productive fatigue is the entire point of running training. On every workout you want to create the right kind of fatigue that allows you to challenge the mind and body in a way it adapts.
Most of the time that’s a just manageable challenge. On rare occasions, you want to go to the well and do what I call a “See God Workout.” But even here, those workouts are well designed. To push people to the point of having to handle a ton of fatigue, but in a way that doesn’t risk injury or full breakdown.
That’s the art of coaching. It’s the point of middle-distance training, where you have to face ungodly amounts of discomfort in the final stretch. But we have to be smart in how we build our workouts to get to that level. Don’t do mindless hard work. Make it intentional.
Quotes I’m Pondering:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
— Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926)
“Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.”
— Daniel Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence” (1989)
Go Deeper. Research and Ideas to Explore More:
What kind of goals actually move the needle? A meta-analysis of 27 studies on goal setting in sport found process goals had a much larger effect on performance than outcome ones.
Can you talk yourself into seeing stress as fuel? A meta-analysis of randomized trials found stress reappraisal and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions gave a small but real boost to performance. Combining approaches worked best.
Chambliss spent years embedded with swimmers, from club level up to the Olympics. His classic paper, The Mundanity of Excellence, is free to read and worth every minute.
Ideas Worth Considering
Science and art are complementary. The interest that seems unrelated might be the one that sparks the interest for your life’s defining work.
(For more, see the full Instagram carousel).
Thanks for reading. I’m experimenting with giving more content here to make it the hub of performance. A place where we go deep on everything, from mental to physical, to help you strive for excellence. Let me know what you like, or what you think might be a helpful segment.
-Steve
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“Reframe anxiety as excitement” - Damn, Steve. Dropping wonderful insight this morning 🫂💚.
Happy birthday, Steve!