Focus on Your Awesome – Run YOUR Race
We are all familiar with the saying that what we focus on is magnified. The things we spend our time thinking about become a reality for us, so why might I ask, do we so often focus on our weaknesses, the things we don’t feel like we’re good at? Let’s change that. We have a lot of awesome going on already.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.
In the Disney recreation of the events of the Triple Crown-winning horse and Secretariate’s incredible underdog triumph–in the movie Secretariate–there is a scene where Secretariate’s owner, Penny Chenery Tweedy is in the stable, nose to nose with her beloved horse who is just overcoming an injury before his big race. No one is certain how he’ll perform because he hasn’t been feeling well. She looks him straight in the eye and she says, “I’ve run my race by not giving up, (she had fought for the horse for funding, she’d put her families fortune on the line, she’s stood up against other horse owners in media discussions, she had stood up against family pressure in order to get Secretariate to this place, to these races.) “Now,” she continued, “it’s your time to run your race.” The movie ends with the Belmont Stakes race, the third and final race of the Triple Crown, in 1973, and Secretariate is expected to go nose to nose with his rival of the year, Shamm. About a minute into the race, these horses are neck and neck taking turns pulling slightly ahead of one another when Secretariate begins a pull away that at first leaves people scared because they don’t believe Secretariate can keep up that pace. They’re afraid he’ll wear down and not be able to keep the pace. Those watching the race go from excitement as the horses start out, to anger that the jockey is letting him go too fast too soon, to almost big-eyed quiet as they watch the impossible. Secretariate never falters, in fact, his stead speed increases as he leaves Shamm what feels like halfway around the course and wins by 25 lengths. Even those who don’t care about horse racing get tears in their eyes when watching the footage of this race because there is something about the power of that horse, running his own race, and pulling so far ahead, doing the impossible, and we get to sit and watch it happen. It’s one of those magical moments in history where your heart is simply caught in your throat and your joy and respect for that beautiful animal crowds out all other emotion. I share this scene with you because when Penny turned over all her expectations, told Secretariate that she had already won her race, now he simply got to run his best race, because he could, I felt a sense of freedom and understanding in my own race. I don’t need to run the same race as Chris Ducker or John Dumas or the other podcasters and online entrepreneurs. I can and should run my own race, born of my own strengths and my own insights and my own definition of success. I get to run my race. Secretariate got to run his race. Penny ran her race. What is your race? When someone says “Run YOUR Race,” what does it feel like to you?
In episode 25 we talked about how when you bike you look where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go – you focus on the route around the rock, not on the rock that you want to miss. Because if you focus on the rock – you’ll hit it. Every time. With this in mind, it seems to me that focusing on our strengths is a way to shine, hone what we’re good at, and spend less time focusing on that...
