Your Life is a Marathon

99-SECOND READ

'Slow and steady, wins the race.'

Robert Llyod

If you were going to do a marathon, you would run or walk it, depending on your fitness level. You wouldn’t sprint it.

That may be an obvious statement, but using this as an analogy for life highlights some important points.

You would do a marathon at a pace that allowed you to reach the end in one piece. You would do this because the point of a marathon is to challenge yourself and feel rewarded by the process. You would know that you needed to find a balance between hitting each milestone at a certain time while having enough energy to get to the next one.

You wouldn’t sprint a marathon because you know you would burn out after a couple of hundred meters.

So let's apply this to life. Society may condition us, now more than ever, to sprint towards all our milestones, particularly the externally measurable ones (big income, nice house, marriage, family, professional success), but sprinting towards these milestones, just like a marathon, causes problems.

• You give everything, don't pace yourself, and keep burning out. This means you must stop and you cannot even continue at a steady pace. You are exhausted and stressed so while you keep working hard, your performance is never optimal.

• You sacrifice your body early on, not keeping enough in the tank to finish in style. By your 30's you've neglected your physical health and well-being, you've made your milestones but you're not in great shape for the next 40+ years

• You sprint so fast to each milestone, that you don't enjoy the journey, and you don't take it in. You're so focused on the next one, you feel unhappy because you don't realise how far you've come.

• You focus only on the milestones and forget about the other things that are going on around you - the people, the experience, the potential to have fun or learn new things.

• You run so fast towards each milestone that you run the wrong way and it's a while before you realise it. You commit too early to a career path or person that won't make you happy long term.

• You are so elite that you reach the milestones so quickly and easily, that you wonder what to do next. Like the top athletes, you can become a victim of your success.

In the past I ran so fast that I took wrong turns without even realising it, I didn’t even question if I was going in the right direction.

Consider the pace you're going at, and how it's serving you. Just like a marathon, people need to go at different paces and adjust to the conditions and factors that make their journey unique to them.

Do you really need to reach ALL those milestones so quickly?

How would it benefit you to pace yourself?

If you've been running a bit too fast, know that you can slow down any time.

Like myself, and many of my clients, it’s constant work not to sprint. You need to develop a mindset that allows you to maintain a steady pace that is right for you. And then, you can reach your full potential and enjoy every step of the journey.

That is what I help people do.

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