The Green Mindset

You’ll find a new inner running strength just by thinking differently, explains Declan Coyle

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had some amazing insights into life. One simple observation of his was “If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”

The Green Platform is an inner platform that co-exists within every runner with its opposite, the Red Platform. During your run, your best friend is the encouraging voice coming from the Green Platform, and your worst enemy is the belittling voice coming from the Red Platform.

There are only two massive forces influencing the quality of our running; positive and negative thoughts. And as they say, what we think about we bring about.

I cannot control many of the situations that come about in a run or indeed in my life but I can control how I respond to what happens to me. The quality of my run for better or for worse depends on which inner platform I choose to run on; the constructive Green Platform or the destructive Red Platform.

Here are my five steps to get you on The Green Platform:

STEP 1: Experience fully what happens to you

During a run you feel you want to give up or some other runner skips past you, making you look slow and pretty useless.You want to give up, but it is important to detach from such thoughts and give yourself a clap on the back for actually bothering to put your gear on and get out and run in the first place.

STEP 2: The power to choose in the white space

White Space is the place between stimulus and response where we have the power to choose our response. The great psychologist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl called it: “The last and the greatest of the human freedoms.” If someone calls you a hurtful name or criticises your work, you can choose to enter a white space instead of making an instant response which only belittles you as a person.

STEP 3: On which platform will I land?

We can choose to land on the Red Platform, the platform of the victim, where we complain and blame other people. This is where we allow ourselves to poison our thoughts, stories, images and beliefs. At this moment during a race we begin to doubt ourselves and create the space where fear can creep in and sabotage our run.

The alternative is to opt for the can-do Green Platform on which you have positive thoughts, stories, images and beliefs. It’s where we see ourselves achieving what we want to create and attract into our lives. We see ourselves finishing the race and being the best that we can be in the process. We see the runner flying past merely as an invitation to dig deeper and find a new personal best.

The hope is that with awareness and conscious choosing, over time the Green Platform becomes your automatic default platform of choice during your run and for life in general.

STEP 4: The outcome

The outcome on the Red Platform is misery and self-created suffering while on the Green Platform it is peace, joy and happiness.

We cannot control what happens in the race or how well other people run but we can totally control how we run and what we do about what happens to us.

STEP 5: The quality of my life

The outcome determines the quality of my life now. To paraphrase Lao Tzu, “If you run on The Green Platform, the rest will fall into place.”

As you set out on a New Year, bring that hidden treasure of optimism and ‘can do’ spirit with you. If you make an excuse to train it is much more rewarding than making an excuse NOT to train.

Once you flip your mindset to the positive side, the Green Platform will be yours to enjoy and your life will be seriously enriched as you work, rest and play.

Declan Coyle’s book The Green Platform is on sale in all good bookshops.