What I Stopped Telling Beginners
by Maggie · 12 July 2026 · Psychology & Living
Maggie has led a beginners' running club in Glasgow for nine years and discovered that encouragement rarely helps those who are genuinely afraid of failing. Instead of motivational phrases, she tells new participants they don't have to run today, giving them permission to be slow without shame. Paradoxically, this approach leads most people to run further than they expected.
Maggie has run a beginners' running club in Glasgow every Sunday morning, in every weather, for nine years, and over that time has struck one phrase entirely from her vocabulary: "You can do this." Not because she stopped believing it, but because she noticed it rarely helps anyone who's genuinely afraid.
At first she said it constantly, to anyone who stopped after three hundred meters shaking their head. It rarely worked. What worked instead, she discovered by accident, when a participant, a woman in her early fifties who hadn't run in thirty years, stopped mid-run and said, "I can't." Maggie answered without thinking: "Okay. Then we'll walk." They walked the rest of the route, slowly, talking, and the woman came back the following Sunday.
Since then, Maggie's first words to new participants are: "You don't have to run today." That sounds like the opposite of motivation, but she believes it's the actual key. Most people who show up at a beginners' running club have already given up too many times and feel ashamed of it. Telling them that giving up is allowed today removes the fear of the next failure — and, paradoxically, almost everyone ends up running further than they thought, at some point in the session anyway.
"Motivation is overrated," Maggie says. "What people actually need is permission to be slow without it counting as failure. No motivational slogan can give them that. Only a person walking next to them can."
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