The Belief Effect...Actually

What Sawe, Bannister, and 70 years of research say about how belief actually moves performance

We’ve got a new self-help story that will dominate public speaking for decades to come. For years, Bannister breaking 4 and then a flood of runners getting under the mark afterwards has been a favorite inspirational nugget. It highlights the belief effect. That once we see something is possible, the difficult becomes more manageable.

With Sabastian Sawe breaking the 2 hour marathon, I have no doubt that more will do so soon (I mean Kejelcha followed a dozen seconds later to do so already!), and that it’ll be a mainstay in the corporate speaking world.

But, the actual power of beliefs isn’t so straightforward. And the real story is more helpful than the ‘just believe in yourself’ variety.

Barriers loom large in our minds. The old tales—everyone thought it was impossible, someone would die if they ran that fast, the human body just isn’t capable—are, or at least can be, nothing more than myths. But the psychological toll of chasing a barrier, and the freeing effect of getting through it, are very real.

After Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier, John Landy got under the mark just 46 days later. The next year 3 more men got under. And within 2.5 years, there were 10 runner who were now sub-4 milers.

But perhaps most interesting is that of the first five men to break 4 minutes for the mile, three were British. And they all shared a coach: Franz Stampfl. A year after Bannister broke the barrier, Stampfl’s athletes Chris Chattaway and Brian Hewson would become the 4th and 5th men to go sub-4. Chattaway was actually one of the original pacers in Bannister’s attempt. The other pace and training partner, Chris Brasher, went on to win Gold at the 1956 Olympics in the steeplechase.

For a belief effect to take hold, it has to feel real.

When we see someone we train with (or have competed against) who isn’t too dissimilar from us do something that once seemed crazy, we start to think, “If he or she can, why not me?” Famed psychologist Albert Bandura spent his career studying a type of inner confidence he called self-efficacy. The most powerful contributor was what he called mastery experiences, where you go into the arena and do the thing. You gain experience through the work, and that experience gives you evidence that you have a shot.

After the groundbreaking marathon this past weekend, Sawe was asked about his mindset. Here’s what he said: “I didn’t believe, but I was well prepared. The training I’ve done, the results have come now.”

Most people get this backwards. They wait until they feel sure before they act. But confidence isn’t something you summon. It’s something you accumulate. The more reps you put in, the more faith you gain in your respective craft, and in yourself. It is not blind or delusional faith. It is faith based on a concrete body of evidence—and it’s the only kind that holds up when it matters.

Another major contributor to self-efficacy is vicarious experience. It occurs when you watch someone like you attain your goal successfully. Bandura emphasized that the impact depends heavily on perceived similarity. It’s the Bannister effect to a T. His training partners saw what he did every day and thought, “We’re keeping up with him... maybe we can do it too.”

Bannister’s coach Franz Stampfl put it this way, “Effort is really a mental image. The basis of athletic coaching must be to make the state of mind so strong that a world record performance is reduced to the level of instinct.” While the trio of marathoners (Sawe, Kejelcha, and Kiplimo) who smashed records on Sunday weren’t training partners, they had raced each other numerous times. In fact, Kejelcha had a 2-1 lead over Sawe in the half-marathon. And Kiplimo had finished 2nd to Sawe at last year’s London marathon. So if someone you’ve competed with closely is going for it, you say “I’ve run with them before, so why not.” And this explains how you get three guys breaking a world-record in one race.

I bet we’ll see more runners break the 2-hour barrier in the coming years. But the important part isn’t that more people will run absurdly fast marathons (though it’ll be neat to watch). It’s what these breakthroughs teach us about how belief works, and in ways that extend beyond sport.

​Research​ shows that role models can either inspire or discourage us. The difference comes from whether you see a role model or worthy rival’s success as achievable. Meaning, the more a role model or worthy rival seems like you (or perhaps comes from a background that allows you to say “this could be me”), the more likely that role model or worthy rival inspires. If, however, the role model or worthy rival is too distant, we create all sorts of reasons for why that couldn’t be us, and we psych ourselves out.

In other words, we need to feel like it’s real and possible. Whether it’s by seeing a role model or training partner or in comparing against what you’ve done in the past, it needs to be close enough to feel real, like you have a shot.

One of the reasons this holds true is that we know from research on students and athletes, that we learn and persist more when we see someone struggle just enough versus if we see them perform perfectly. When someone makes the work seem effortless and easy, we start to come up with reasons why they are different or better. But, when we see the person struggle, go through good and bad workouts, and still succeed, it shows us they are human like us. It’s what occurred with Bannister. Just weeks before the barrier was broken, Bannister was stuck. His traditional 400m repeat workouts had stopped getting faster. He couldn’t break through. So much so that his coach Stampfl told him to take a few days and hike in the mountains to take his mind off the workouts. Struggle humanizes, and it also enhances the belief effect when that person finally does break through.

The athlete who watches a teammate struggle through a tough workout and finish gets more belief out of it than the athlete who watches a teammate cruise through. Seeing the difficulty and the recovery is what tells your brain "I can do this too." It's why the most underrated thing your training partner does is fail in front of you and keep going.

It’s not that Sawe breaks 2 hours and a flood of runners suddenly think it’s possible. It’s that he’s opened up a new path. One that is still insanely difficult, that takes the right mixture of talent, hard work and faith. But if you’re close enough, it makes the once impossible seem a touch less so. It’s the same for the rest of us, whether we’re trying to run a 3 hour marathon, finally finish that book, start a business, parent a first child, or whatever your new horizon may be. In all of these cases, belief effects are real.

Belief effects do have a ceiling. We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say. In a fascinating study on cyclists who were deceived while doing a time trial, the researchers put a fake avatar and racing splits as being 2% faster than their personal best. They beat their own personal bests. But when they bumped that up to 5%, their performance crashed. It was too far of a stretch. The brain unlocks reserves up to a believable margin and shuts down past it.

There’s one other separate mechanism that plays a role here that goes deeper than belief. Henk Aarts and Peter Gollwitzer’s research on goal contagion found that watching someone pursue a goal makes you automatically adopt it yourself, often without realizing it. Goal contagion is the unconscious cousin to belief effects. And just like its close relative, it also runs on proximity. The closer the model of the goal, the stronger the pull. If you watch a random stranger run hard, you might catch a tiny bit of contagion. But if you watch your training partner go to the well in a workout, the contagion is massive. The brain adopts the goals of people it considers “us,” which is the exact biological mechanism behind why training groups elevate individual performance. Which not coincidentally, Bannister, Sawe, and the rest all demonstrate this brilliantly. They all trained with fellow world class performers. Sometimes, belief runs on the people standing next to you.

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The big leap you’re looking for in your work, your craft, or your relationships will come from two sources: the experiences you have and the people around you. It’s the two prongs of Bandura’s self-efficacy.

Find the people doing what you want to do. Get close enough to feel it. The “impossible” becomes more possible when it’s standing next to you. And then give yourself the personal evidence—from practice, from prior experiences—that you can make the jump if things come together.

You don’t need to feel ready. What you need is a body of evidence: your own hard work and people around you who show you’ve got a chance.

Barriers are hard to break. It doesn’t happen without belief. In sport. And in life.

-Steve

Author of Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game.