The Four Tendencies {Triathlon Edition}

I’m a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin‘s work and listen to her podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, every week. She researches, writes, and blogs about happiness and habits and created the Four Tendencies to help people identify how they handle expectations, both internal and external.

One of the first stories Gretchen shares about handling expectations (or habits) is one where she was listening to a friend tell her that she could attend every cross country practice in high school without a problem. Yet, as an adult, she couldn’t get to the gym. Gretchen realized there was something about that external expectation that made it easy to comply in high school yet the internal expectation that made it difficult to complete the same activity later as an adult. Thus she set out to research how people handle internal and external expectations and created four categories of ways people handle expectations.

• An Upholder meets inner and outer expectations without a problem.
• A Questioner will meet inner and outer expectations without a problem only after they have questioned if the task is worth doing by turning it into an inner expectation.
• An Obliger will meet outer expectations without a problem yet has trouble meeting inner expectations.
• A Rebel does whatever they want and does not want to be told what to do.

Take the quiz at https://quiz.gretchenrubin.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=popoutmenu to see which tendency you are!

Relating to Triathlon and Training

The Four Tendencies only focus on a small portion of your personality yet can serve an important part of creating and fostering training habits. I’ll dive into each tendency over the next few weeks exploring how it relates to Triathlon and Training and how you can make the most out of your tendency! Here is a quick snapshot of how I see the Four Tendencies:

• Upholder – these would be type A athletes – they don’t have a problem completing solo workouts or scheduled group training sessions.
• Questioner – theses would be type A/B athletes – they’ll complete solo or group workouts yet only if the workout makes sense to them.
• Obliger – this is the largest group of the population overall and believe they might be more of the newcomers to the sport versus the veterans – they’ll complete a group run without a problem yet struggle to complete a solo swim the very next day.
• Rebel – these would be athletes who don’t follow a training plan – they do whatever type of workout they want, when they want.

Which tendency are you?! I’m a Questioner and will dive being a Questioner next week!