“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.” - Jesse Owens
I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of positive thinking lately. It’s something we can all train our minds to do but it starts with recognizing our negative thoughts first. I find mine often take the form of self-doubt.
This quote by Jesse Owens came to mind recently. Every large achievement I’ve ever had has been the culmination of very small achievements, my own “invisible inevitable battles.” Often it’s a matter of convincing myself that I can do this - whether it’s a race, a training run or just getting myself out the door. Sometimes I can pinpoint the moment to minutes at the end of a run, where I ask myself if I can go faster while simultaneously questioning whether I’ll follow through. Every time I do follow through, it’s an internal battle I’ve overcome and one step closer to my goal.
Right now, we didn’t choose to have these new shared goals. A goal to get through this crisis as safely as possible. A goal to get back to life as normal. A goal to see our loved ones. We have hundreds of new goals as a result of this crisis and each one of us is facing our own internal battles every day as we move towards those goals. Don’t lose sight of what you’ve achieved at the end of each day. One day we’ll look back on this crisis and it will be the culmination of each of our internal battles which will have got us through.
