The Story of Cliff Young

Hello again, everyone. Thank you for joining us at jlc, the Jorgenstein Learning center for Everyday Leadership Conversations. Some time ago, we did a little podcast about self talk and how your self talk actually defines your performance. It makes your beliefs produce performance. Many times we don't produce or perform to our capabilities. We perform to our beliefs. So there's a little story I'm going to tell you about a gentleman that had an interesting experience. He ran a long race. And at the end of that, Colleen and Julie are going to weigh in on what they think about that story. So this gentleman was a sheep farmer, and he showed up to run a race. And there were people from all over the world running the race. It was 547.3 miles long. It was in Australia from Sydney to Melbourne. And when he showed up to run the race, he came and was dressed in somewhat an unusual style. He had on bib overalls and muck boots because that's what he wore on his farm. And when he got there, he noticed that all the other runners were dressed in really beautiful running shoes and running outfits and they looked like something out of a magazine. And he showed up to sign up for the race, and the people thought he was going to be part of the gallery and watch it. And it took him a few minutes to convince the people that, yeah, no, I want to run the race. I'm looking forward to running the race. So after he got through all of that and he signed up for the race, next day came and they started the race, and he showed up at the starting line and he took off with everybody else. Well, he kind of had an unusual running style. He kind of, you know, did a little shuffle as he was going through his run. And this race was supposed to take almost seven days to run from that 543.7km. And as this unfolded, everybody left this gentleman behind. His name was Cliff Young. And Cliff is now by himself running along, and everyone else is almost out of sight pretty quickly. Well, as it turns out, that night everybody laid down to sleep. They were going to run 18 hours sleep for six and do it again the next day and do it again. They had a very good plan. Cliff didn't have a plan. So when he fell asleep that night, he only slept for a couple hours and he got up and started running again. As it turned out, he did that every day, just slept for a couple hours and went back out running. By the time we hit the fifth day of the race, 14 hours into the fifth day, he was approaching the finish line. No one else was around. Cliffy thought everybody had finished. He didn't realize that there was no one else around. He finished the race and was astounded to find out that he had won the race. A couple of side notes. He won $10,000. He gave it away. He didn't run for the money. He just wanted to see if he could do it. He said he'd never run a marathon before. So he was really excited about learning how to do an ultra marathon. And everybody's quite excited about Cliff. And what was not revealed until the end of the race is that Cliff was 61 years old and the rest of the runners average age was 23. So not only did he win the race, he took two days off the race. This story is an example of someone who didn't know the truth. The truth is, takes almost seven days. The truth is you're too old to run. The truth is you haven't done any training, so you really shouldn't be out here with all these other great people. So this is an example of how a gentleman who chose to run in the race used his self talk about completing the race and winning the race unbeknownst to the other runners. And he performed to a different belief than the other runners because they had a very different belief than Cliff had. That's the story. Colleen, how does that land on you?

I love that story. I think it is a great example of, you know, just sometimes on how you're your own worst enemy. How many times our own thinking can limit our ability to really achieve things, perhaps that we're really kind of interested and curious about. I mean, he showed up, you know, just in his best glosses, in his best overalls, thinking, hey, this is a run, I'm going to give it a go. You know, not at all with that limited thinking of I'm not good enough, I'm not young enough, I don't have enough experience. And he didn't have any of that self talk going on. He was just all in a space of curiosity really and learning. He wanted to show up and learn what it was about, throw his hat in the ring and give it a go.

Well, that's great. How can I run an ultramarathon? What will this look like, Julie? What are you thinking about this guy?

Yeah. I really love this idea of persistence. And the idea was to finish the race. And there was no thought to, I'm exhausted or, you know, like Colleen said, I'm not good enough. Once he saw everybody else, it was just like, I'm going to run the race and so I'm going to go and I'm going to sleep and I'm going to go and I'm going to go to sleep. And when we stay in that space of in the present moment and not get into our self talk to limit us, we can do anything that we want.

That's really good. Our own self talk tends to be so limiting it just stops us from getting to the next place. So story about Cliff Young, an ultra marathon runner. He chose to run the race and had no idea what it was going to be like nor who he was going to be competing against. So ladies and gentlemen, remember this little piece that Julie and Colleen laid on the table. We tend to perform to our beliefs, not to our capabilities and we create our beliefs through our self talk. Thank you for joining us at jlc. Hope you enjoyed the Cliff Young story. You can find out lots about him. There's many side stories about Cliff and find who he married as a result of his notoriety. There's a very interesting set of side stories to Cliff Young. Just one of those truly wonderful stories. Thank you so much for being with us. If you want to hear more or learn more about self talk beliefs, come see us@gojlc.com thank you gang.