There's a safety that comes with believing you can't do something. But not happiness.

​When I was a junior in high school, our new football coach loaded us up in pickup trucks and drove us 13 miles out into the rural Ohio farm country and told us to "run home." I guess he wanted to make a lasting first impression.

Well that he did.

I walked every step of those 13 miles home. That day, I decided I could never and WOULD never be a runner. At least not if it involved any form of mile in its plural versions.

For most of my life, the belief that I couldn't be a runner served me well. No matter how many runners I encountered, and no matter how much I knew running would probably make me feel better about myself and about life in general - because it sure seemed to be having that effect on other runners - it didn't matter - because running was something I just couldn't do.

Then, seven years ago, I went for an 8-mile run. I ran almost all of it. In one 2-hour run a decades old belief became a decades old myth.

I think that's when I started understanding something about life. Knowing you can do something isn't always such a great thing. Because suddenly, on those days when I planned to run but didn't, it was because I chose not to, and not because I couldn't do it.

When you choose not to do the things you know are in your best interest - things you know you CAN do - well, you experience a whole different kind of agony with that than you do not doing them because you truly believe you can't.

It's a whole new restlessness going to bed at night knowing I skipped running because I chose to skip it, and not because I believed I wasn't capable of running.

And here's the thing, you can't make that discovery about running without making that discovery about other areas in your life.

You suddenly start examining all of these other areas in your life where you know you aren't doing the things that help you see yourself and your life in the best light. You suddenly have to start wrestling with the question, am I not doing these things because I can't do them, or because I won't?

I look back and realize there's sort of a surface level contentment that comes with living life opposed to choices you know are best for you. Contentment that relies on you convincing yourself you're just not capable of those choices. But inside - inside there is nothing but discontent.

But then when you start making those choices, it flips. Some days the pain of a run is written all over my face. The hard choices sometimes look very hard on the surface. But there's a certain flood of peace and fulfillment going on inside.

And there's suddenly a hope - a hope that someday soon, the inside and the outside are going to meet in this peace.

There's a certain gaining of control of your happiness that you start to experience.

There is no doubt there's a safety that comes with believing you can't do something. But safe doesn't always equal happy.

I'm not sure it ever does.