How should I handle my doubts?

~ NAU Athlete, Justin Keyes, Bryan Clay, 2025

For awhile now, I have been working with a very good 5k runner who has been experiencing an issue late in his races. When things start to get hard and a gap starts to form, or he gets passed, he “suddenly goes lactic.” Having watched many of his races this is obviously true. His form changes from springy and fluid to heavy and forced in just a few seconds.

I have long suspected that many sudden, apparently physical issues within hard efforts have a psychological element – maybe even a psychological cause. This suspicion has been supported by the observations of practitioners of a therapeutic approach called Internal Family Systems, which I have been learning and applying to my work over the past couple of years.

Internal Family Systems (which is supported by copious research and success stories) views a single person as a multitude of “parts.” If you have seen the movie, Inside Out, yes, in a sense you could interpret the multitude of thoughts and emotions that you experience like the multitude of emotions represented by animated characters inside the main character. Each is viewed as a distinct personality with their own agenda.

At first this lens can appear somewhat fantastical and juvenile, but when we reflect on what it’s actually like to be a person one can see that it speaks to something true. After all, don’t you have a version of yourself that is light-hearted, a version that gets tense, a version that is loving, a version that is impatient, and so on?

Internal Family Systems claims that regardless of how one of our parts shows up it has a good intention. At first this can be hard to believe if the consequences of a part’s actions appear negative – like getting locked up in a race for example – but when we talk with the part and explore the part’s rationale there is always a good and well-intended reason for why it is reacting the way that it is.

I suspect that the 5k runner who I introduced to you earlier is being locked up by a part of himself that thinks it is helping him. Our job is to find the part, explore this part’s beliefs, understand it’s fears and it’s rationale and hope that we can arrive in a place where this part will want to help in a different way: one that will allow this person to run freely when things get hard inside of his races. We have been working on this for about 6 weeks now, and we have reason to believe that we are making progress.

Now, you surely noticed that the question this week is, “how can I handle my pre-race doubts?” At first pre-race doubts might not seem related to locking up inside a race, but it is. I also see pre-race doubts as just one part of a person, with an agenda – a part who believes that it’s job is to cause you to doubt a positive outcome for your race (or season, or career).

Doubts have been showing up for this 5k runner. Prior to his races, and in regular life also, there is a voice in his mind that tells him that he is wasting his time investing so much of his life in his running career. The doubting voice says he is not going to accomplish his goals and that the race that he is currently entered in is being paced too fast for him.

Doubts like these are very common. In fact, it seems to me that pre-race doubts are one of the most common sources of weather that runners experience. Recently, I asked the NAU team to share with me what weather they experience inside a race. Everyone who responded referred to doubts.

So, if doubts are a part trying to help? How exactly do these parts see doubting as helping and how can we work with that? Here is an example from a typical conversation to walk you through the process that I use:

Athlete: Before my race I am flooded with doubts that I am going to accomplish my goal.

Me: Where do you feel those doubts in your body?

Athlete: In my head.

Me: Let’s direct your attention toward your head. Is there anything else that you notice?

Athlete: It feels really tight and I get the sense of an orange color to it.

Me: Let’s ask the feeling in your head what it wants you to know.

Athlete: [pauses for a moment and sends my question toward the feeling in his head, then he waits to see what answer naturally arises in his awareness] It says that it doesn’t think that I can maintain the position that coach says I should be able to hold in this race. It keeps telling me that I am going to fall off, like in all the races before.

Me: Can you ask this part what its intentions are by telling you this?

Athlete: [pause] It says that it is trying to warn me, so that I can do something about that – like know that the race is going to be hard, and keeping that position is going to be hard, and so be ready.

Me: Can you ask this part what it is afraid would happen if it didn’t warn you?

Athlete: [pauses] It says that if it didn’t warn me I would be caught by surprise when it got hard, or when I’m not able to hold onto the pace. I would also be extra disappointed after the race if I had expected to be able to hold on to the pace, but couldn’t do it after all. I would be less disappointed if I never expected myself to be able to do it.

Me: What is this part afraid would happen if you were caught by surprise?

Athlete: I would be way more disappointed than if I hadn’t been prepared to fail in the first place.

Me: Does that make sense to you?

Athlete: yeah

Me: So, this part that is doubting has a few intentions: it is trying to prepare you for the race to be hard and it is trying to reduce your expectations that you are going to accomplish your goal so that you are less disappointed if/ when you don’t.

Athlete: yeah.

Me: How do you feel toward this part?

Athlete: Well, I feel a bit annoyed because the doubts get really strong and I actually think that they increase the likelihood that I’m going to have a bad race. But, I also didn’t realize that they had good intentions, so I guess I sorta feel grateful to this part for caring. I didn’t realize that it was trying to help me.

Me: Can you share the gratitude that you feel with that part of you?

Athlete: yeah, it feels a bit better.

Me: Since it’s shared its fears with you, can you ask it if there is a different way that it would like to help you?

Athlete [pause] it says that it would like to help me stay focused when things get hard in the race.

Me: How does that sound to you?

Athlete: Sounds good!

In summary: This athlete experiences both pre-race and inside the race doubts. Upon kind and curious exploration we learned that the doubting part is doubting in order to try to get him ready for the hard parts of the races. We also learned that the doubting part is trying to protect him from the excessive disappointment that this part fears he would experience if he did not reach his goal that day by causing him to anticipate his failure in advance.

Notice, that we did not argue with the doubting part about the athlete’s capability of accomplishing his goal (he is very capable), nor did we try to make it stop what it is doing or go away. We noticed some annoyance toward the doubting part, but we let that be also. We did offer the part gratitude for caring and we did ask it what it might like to do to help instead.

With respect to the wide array of methods available, which are intended to relieve difficult pre-race thoughts and feelings, I have found this method to be the most effective by a long way. The power of this method lies in the acceptance inherent within it. Acceptance enables an athlete’s energy to be used toward their goals instead of in opposition to one’s state – an opposition which usually backfires anyway. In time, acceptance transforms previously difficult states into ones that more readily serves the athletes goals.

Here are the basic steps to working with doubting parts, or any other un-preferred states which arise:

1. Ask yourself, where do you feel the difficult emotion in your body?
2. Is there anything else that you notice about it (sometimes athletes see their emotions as characters, shapes, or colors)?
3. Ask the emotion, what do you want me to know? Just direct the question toward the feeling and stay open to what pops into your mind (use this method of listening to hear answers to all of the questions to follow).
4. Regardless of what the emotion says, ask it, what is your intention by telling me this?
5. Next ask it, what are you afraid would happen if you didn’t tell me this?

Just like talking with a person who you are trying to understand, you will probably see this part of you in a different light once you learn what its intentions are. These emotions always have good intentions, although they are usually mistaken regarding the best way to accomplish those intentions.

Remember, this emotion is a part of you, just like the members of your family are members of your family. We never exclude anyone in our family and the same goes for parts of ourselves. We also don’t need to argue with the part of ourself about how they should see or what they should do. We simply understand and thank them for caring. With greater understanding of one another most families harmonize naturally, the same goes for our parts.

6. Say to the emotion, thank you for caring so much. Could you come along and help me focus on my race?

The athlete at the beginning of this piece is utilizing this approach regularly. As are several others. Will he lock up in his upcoming 5k? Who knows! But, if you’re wondering, feel free to ask in June, which is when we’ll find out.

Doubts can feel scary to athletes because the fear that accompanies them can make them feel true. Also, some athletes believe that if they are prepared they should not have doubts. But, the presence of doubts in no way predicts disappointment or a lack of preparedness. More so, doubts are a recognition of the limits of our own control and an opportunity to open to all possible unfoldings. Even unfoldings that exceed an athlete’s hopes.

A good friend shared this quote by Saint Augustine with me recently:

“Faith is not where doubts end. Faith is where they are transformed into wonder.” Wonder when you see how capable you are, and at how life can go your way.