Who We Are — Session 2: The Story You Tell Yourself

Last week we asked the foundation question: who are you apart from the sport?

This week I want to go one level deeper. Because the answer to that question — the one you carry in your head — is a story. And stories can be true or false, helpful or limiting, building or destroying.

What story are you telling yourself about who you are?

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Renewing of your mind. The transformation Paul describes starts in the mind — in the story being told about who you are and what you’re capable of. The pattern of this world, in an athletic context, tells a specific story: you are what you produce. The good performances confirm you. The bad ones indict you. The mind shaped by that pattern is a mind that is perpetually at the mercy of the scoreboard.

The renewed mind tells a different story. Not a naive story that ignores the performance. An honest story that includes the performance without being defined by it. The story of a person who competes fully, who cares about results, and who is also larger than the results and not ultimately determined by them.

What story are you telling yourself? Most athletes can answer this question accurately if they pay attention to the internal monologue after a bad game. What do you say to yourself? That tells you the story.

If the story is limiting — if it says things like I’m not good enough or I always fail under pressure or this is just who I am — it is worth examining whether that story is actually true, or whether it is the pattern of the world being applied to your identity in ways that don’t serve you or honor what you actually are.

The internal monologue after failure is the diagnostic. The honest examination of whether the story is true is the work.