Steve Magness was one of the whistleblowers who brought down Nike’s Alberto Salazar. It was a decision that would cost Steve a decade of his life. It also led him to study the true science of great performance. Kelly talks to Steve about his terrific new book, “Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform.” 

You went from being a guy that let Nike executives experiment with your own body to being a whistleblower that helped change that culture. And that’s important to understand you are the same guy who did both things. 

“What I try and get across from this is that if we live in fantasy land, where it’s good or evil, then we don’t ever deal with the actual nuance and substance of real life. We don’t wrestle with the fact that I was the same person who had a liter of substance injected into my body and I’m the same person who blew the whistle and led to people getting banned from sport for the betterment of sport. And overall, I think a very good thing is that those people are the same. And in order to deal with that, you have to understand that messiness is something that is fundamental to all of us. But if we ignore it and we avoid it, I don’t think we ever get to the point where we can display our courage because we’re stuck in protecting this fantasy of good versus evil.” 

It’s also important to understand how the stories we tell ourselves effect the story of our lives. 

“Absolutely. I mean, humans are storytelling machines. It’s what made us great and different from everybody else. But I think what happens is when we feel anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, you know, maybe not like we belong in places. What happens is our stories get simpler and simpler. It’s stress narrows us. And what happens is we cease to see that struggle is often where the meaning is found. The discomfort is often the thing that leads to perspective. But when you’re in the thick of it, when you’re in the midst of it, your brain essentially simplifies.” 

Ultimately, you’re talk about returning to a place of internal motivation – which includes a sense of exploration and play. 

“I’ve got a toddler. If you look around, what is she a pro at? Exploration. Because all it is is figuring out a world. And if she fails, she gets up because she doesn’t understand that failure is ‘bad.’ It’s just like I stumbled, brushed myself off, and I go explore something else or explore it again. And I think as adults, what happens is we get these protective mechanisms that tell us to avoid failure because it represents you. And when we live in that space, we stop playing, we stop exploring. And there’s all sorts of research that shows this from whether we’re talking performances like yours, or if we’re talking sciences, we’re talking athletes – we tend to narrow, narrow, narrow as we grow older. But what we often need is to go back to that exploration mode, not just for creativity, but also because exploration is at the heart of developing intrinsic motivation. Play is by definition intrinsic motivation. It’s what we did as kids. And if we lose that and we don’t keep stoking that fire, then what ends up happening is our motivation shifts over the long haul to be more about those external things. But, If it’s too much about the external, then every audition becomes that life or death moment or every improv situation becomes like, did I nail this or am I complete disaster? And no one performs well in that situation.” 

Photo Credit: Hillary Montgomery