Milton and the Olympian
By Joyce Bavlinka and Sarah Clinebell
The following was taken from a transcript of a lecture given by Milton Erickson during a psychotherapy forum at Roosevelt University in Chicago, March 6, 1964 entitled “Practical Application of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy in Medicine and Dentistry”.
“Now there is a thing in psychotherapy that I’d like to impress upon you and that concerns this matter of rigidities. People are often rigid in their attitudes. They know certain things, they believe certain things, and you just aren’t going to shake them. And I think that’s best illustrated by a four-minute mile.
The four-minute mile stood for years and years and years and years, and everybody proved conclusively that the four-minute mile could not be broken, until Roger Bannister figured it out that the four-minute mile meant 240 seconds, and if he could run a mile in 239 and 99/100 seconds, he would break the four-minute mile.
And so he broke that rigid bit of thinking that had controlled runners for a long, long time, and since then the four-minute mile has been broken at least 80 times. Very, very shortly after Roger Bannister broke it somebody else broke it, and then another and then another, and so on and so on, just as soon as one man had exploded by 1/100 of a second.
There was an Olympic champion shot putter who was stuck in high school at exactly 58 feet. For a whole year his coach said “You can do better than 58 feet!” but he couldn’t do better than 58 feet, and his father brought him to me and said “Do something to this guy. You’ve got to break his psychological block.”
And what did I do to him? I pointed out to him that no matter how bad his psychological block was he could accidentally get that shotput 58 feet and 1/100 of an inch, and that breaks 58 feet. He went on to place third in the Olympics with a shotput of over 61 feet. He also said that after I got him to break the 58 feet by 1/100 of an inch, he set a national high school record. I’ve forgotten what that was, but it was well over 58 feet.”
References
Erickson and Rosen (1982). My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson. W.W. Norton and Company. (pages 102-106).
