People can be driven and motivated by a wide variety of reasons, some of which tend to be positive, and some of which tend to be negative. Both can be extremely powerful forces.

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Running is one of my favourite forms of exercise. It’s a great physical and mental outlet. We live near the Bow River in Calgary and I’m fortunate to have excellent access to amazing running routes. I can practically run indefinitely East or West along the Bow. When I’m in Toronto, I typically stay with my parents and also have great access to running routes in the Cedarvale ravine and along the Kay Gardner Beltline. Both these routes are typically quite busy with other runners, people walking, and some cyclists.

There’s a generally followed, unspoken rule of running etiquette, which is that when you pass by another runner, you give them a short nod and/or a smile and a small wave.* It’s a nicety, for sure. I am definitely a regular ‘waver’ along the trail. So, what do you do when you give someone a polite small and wave… and they completely ignore you. Direct eye contact was made for sure. But they just keep on going. As insane as this sounds, this used to piss me off. My self talk would be something along the lines of… “what is fucking wrong with this person? They can’t wave back?”.

One day, after getting no response to a smile and wave, I was reminded of an important principle: you can’t control someone else’s actions. You can only control your own. Am I waving at someone because I need a wave back? Or because it feels like a nice thing to do when I’m out for a run? Is the wave for me? Or is it for them? Once I remembered the wave is for me, I stopped caring about whether I got a return wave or not.

This is a micro-example of an important theme. A lot of time and mental energy can be exhausted worrying about someone else’s response or actions, which you can’t control. Sometimes it helps to ask yourself: are you doing it for you? Or are you doing it for them? So long as you feel good about your own actions, you can feel less emotionally invested in the response (or lack thereof).

Here are a few other common, perhaps more relatable, examples: You send out a well thought out note on a topic you care about. No one responds. You make a post online. No on ‘likes’ it. You give someone advice or feedback. They ignore it. You request a meeting with someone. They decline. In each case, you can choose to be upset with the response (or lack of), or you can be satisfied with your own actions.

*Amusingly, in Calgary, this occurs probably 75% of the time based on my non-scientific anecdotal observations. In Toronto, that number is probably closer to 50% or maybe a bit below.

We, humans, seem to love setting goals and objectives for ourselves. Particularly challenging ones. There’s a real satisfaction that comes from setting out to accomplish something, putting in a lot of effort and work, and seeing those efforts pay off through the successful achievement of that goal or objective. In general, I believe it’s a really positive practice. This type of big goal setting occurs in both our professional and personal lives. Professional goals might include striving for a promotion, attempting to hit a really big sales target, releasing an amazing new product feature that beats out the competition, earning an award for a song you produced, etc. etc. Personal goals might include finishing a 100 km bike ride, learning a new language, completing a PhD, having kids, visiting every national park, etc. etc.

There is one slightly risky way of approaching big goals and objectives though, which is to expect the singular act of achievement to result in some type of universal salvation. I’m being a little hyperbolic, but I’m guessing most people have experienced some type of this self-talk, even if a little less extreme:

• If I get promoted, finally I’ll be happy.
• If I hit my savings goal of $[x], finally I’ll have enough.
• If I release that amazing new feature, we’ll beat the competition.
• Once the COVID lockdown is lifted, my stress and anxiety will go away (circa 2021…)
• If I get married, our challenges will go away.
• If I finish my degree, my grandparents will respect me.

The reality of course, is that even achieving an extremely lofty, difficult, and amazing goal, rarely results in some type of panacea. As a result, when we obsess over the goal, and spend a huge amount of our attention and energy focused on it, we run the risk of setting ourselves up for disappointment. And depending how much stock we’ve put into the importance of that goal, it can be pretty devastating. “I got the promotion… and I still hate my job. What’s going on?”

This concept always conjures up the following image (and personal experience) for me: you’re running a race, and it’s really challenging. You’ve put what feels like your maximum effort to get yourself to the finish line. Then, when you think you’re 100 metres away from the end, you realize you misread the last marker, and you still have 3 km to go. You’re devastated, and struggle to finish the race, because you’ve hinged all your efforts on getting to what you believed was the finish line. The obsession with the endpoint, has potentially robbed you of your ability to succeed.

It’s important not to overly obsess about the endpoints. And why the cliché phrase exists, “the journey is more important than the destination”. If you can find genuine satisfaction in the efforts and energy you put into all the things that lead up to that endpoint (i.e., training, working hard, practicing, planning, etc.), you inevitably build more resilience and are better prepared to handle setbacks, or a (naturally) shifting goal post. Who cares if you didn’t get the award? You know you vastly improved your skills.