As we navigate the waters of healthy communication and mindset, trying to be impeccable with our word so that others don’t misunderstand our intention, not taking anything personally so as not to judge another’s words or actions without truly knowing their intent, and not making assumptions when we only have a portion of the story, we are inevitably going to fall short of our goals sometimes when trying to adhere to these first 3 agreements.
We are human. We are flawed. We are on a journey.
Certainty and perfection will elude us until the day we die.
That is where the fourth agreement comes in: “Always do your best.”
The definition of your “best” is relative.
It changes from day to day.
It will be different when you have had enough sleep and are feeling healthy than it will be when you have been pulling all-nighters for a week to meet a deadline, fueling your body on vending machine pop tarts and coffee (my actual diet when I prepared for my PhD dissertation).
The timing of this post provided me with the perfect example of when my “best” didn’t look like I had hoped.
I came back from my first work trip in over a year and a half and my “best” quickly devolved over the days that followed my return.
My first day back at home I decided to make up for the lack of exercise I’d had while traveling and attending meetings. I went for a fantastic run outside in the bright, sunny autumn weather.
I felt so good and energized that I made an ambitious to-do list for the weekend to catch up on house/family stuff.
The next day, Saturday, I felt tired. The bright pink sticky note with my self-assigned chores written on it stared at me every time I walked through the kitchen. I ignored its neon-tinted judgment.
I felt guilty at the end of the night when I hadn’t accomplished anything on my list.
But man, was I tired. I guess I hadn’t “trained” my “work travel muscles” in a while.
On Sunday I was determined to get at least one thing done on my list. I mowed the lawn. I chose this because it double-counted as physical activity as well as a house chore. #winning!
But that evening I was even more tired. And grumpy. And I had a headache. And my 7-month old was not entertaining herself.
She did not want to be still and it was too dark to go for a walk so I put her in the baby carrier and vacuumed all the rugs in the house. This kept her quiet (it was a gamble, but it worked) and I was able to (begrudgingly) check another thing off my list. (screw you, POST-lT note!)
But man did I feel like shit.
Monday morning arrived and it was time to get back to my day job to-do lists but I still really felt “off.” I took a (expired) COVID test.
Two lines appeared pretty quickly. Shit.
My ambitions for the week were quickly curtailed. It was going to be a challenging week regardless of this new development of my illness because it was my husband’s turn to head out on a work trip for the rest of the week.
I was physically feeling worse and worse. No good decisions are made when we are not feeling well.
I needed to re-prioritize and depend on the understanding and support of my wonderful work colleagues and boss to redefine what my “best” would look like this week.
The best I could do for myself was to choose rest and hydration over computer screens during the day so that I could be ready to take care of my daughter when our daytime caregiver left at 4:30 p.m. I also made a giant pot of soup that I could heat and eat easily for the rest of the week when I wouldn’t have time to cook (this becomes important later in this post)
My head pounded incessantly all day long and I couldn’t focus on anything anyway, so I honored what my body needed, knowing that this decision would make my recovery and return to normalcy faster than if I put my health aside and tried to push through a “normal” work week.
As cheesy as it sounds, I said gratitudes every day that week for the support of my colleagues who held space for me to prioritize my health, and I said gratitudes for my immune system for fighting off the virus, as I started to feel slightly better day by day.
My “best” took another dip mid-week when the inevitable happened and my daughter woke up with a fever.
It was the first time she’d been sick since she’d been born.
I cried and felt guilty for contaminating her pristine immune system and worried that she would get really sick and end up in the hospital. I fretted over giving her medicine for the first time, afraid I would do it wrong or she’d have a reaction to it. I was barely hanging on between my own illness and the stress and emotions of taking care of her.
The only choice I had was to peel off whatever could be considered “unnecessary” elements of daily life and do my best to take care of her while also trying to continue taking care of myself.
The first night of her illness I brought her up to bed and she would not settle in her crib. I tried soothing her and then putting her back in but every time I put her down she screamed and cried and all I could think was “she doesn’t know what’s going on in her body or why she feels like this. I can’t leave her alone.”
And so I held her until midnight and tried once more to put her down. No dice.
I tried to escape again at 3am but she stirred the second I moved an inch.
I was still in the clothes I’d been wearing all day. My contacts were still stuck in my eyes. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I had left every single light on downstairs. There were dishes in the sink (we have had a 5-year streak of not leaving dishes in the sink overnight!). The big pot of chicken soup I had heated earlier for dinner remained on the stove. Fortunately I had at least turned off the burner, but the soup remained outside of the refrigerator where it would ultimately meet its demise, taking away the convenient food source I had prepared for the rest of the week.
There was nothing I could do about any of this. I needed to stay with my baby and nothing else mattered.
My best in that moment was letting go of the unnecessary stuff that would ordinarily seem important and know that I was exactly where I was supposed to be in that moment.
And in that moment I was at my best.
I reflected on this the next day when I went downstairs to see the catastrophe I had left in my wake, and when I dumped what would have been another 5 meals worth of “flu fighter chicken soup” into the garbage (still breaks my heart, and yes I did have the momentary, “I mean, maybe it’s still good??” thought but I definitely wouldn’t have been at my “best” if I listened to THAT voice!)
I realized that the decisions we make in these stressful moments, when our “best” doesn’t look anything like what we had planned or envisioned, are easy to make when we know our values.
My values don’t include keeping the house spotless or worrying about wasting a pot of soup or forcing my sick 7-month old to be a “big girl” and sleep in her own bed.
My number one value is “health” — my health, and the health of those whom I love.
Knowing this and adhering to it sets a boundary around any societal rhetoric that may threaten to lure me into behaviors that are not aligned with my values.
Initially when I got sick I told a friend that I would have to “try and move as many of my work calls as possible this week” so I could “sneak in a few naps.”
She replied, “Or, you know, you could NOT work, because you have COVID. Why are we normalizing working while we’re sick?”
Between receiving her comment and anchoring in my own values, I felt empowered to shift my definition of what my “best” would be that week.
I wouldn’t be my “best” at work, but I would be taking the steps I needed to ensure that I could be back to my best in that environment as soon as possible.
This mentality can be applied to any situation.
Maybe you have a training plan for a marathon but the day you’re supposed to do your long run you’re just not feeling it. Something is nagging in your calf. Your goal was to complete the marathon and remain healthy during training. Having this as the goal/value you set for yourself, rather than ignore your body’s signal that something is wrong, you decide pivot, take a rest day or do a shorter run and make up the distance after you’ve been fully assessed.
You are doing your best by staying true to what YOU have defined as the most important part of a process.
At the end of the day, we just want to be able to lay our heads on our pillows and, rather than admonish ourselves for not being perfect or checking every item off on our list or saying all of the right things, we want to be able to say that we did our best under the circumstances we were given at any point in time.
When we make intentional decisions about how we define our “best” when conditions aren’t optimal, it makes it a lot easier to accept the outcome.
This isn’t the same as settling, or giving up easily.
It’s about reassessing our priorities and creating conditions that support our long-term growth and development.
It’s about acknowledging that there are always going to be circumstances outside of our control, but we can continue to do our best regardless of those circumstances.
If fact, “doing our best” is ALL we can do when faced with uncertainty.
A good way to practice accepting the range of “best” in our lives is to find something every single night before you close your eyes that you can feel proud of.
It can be as simple as, “I met my goal of drinking 5 glasses of water today,” or “I was able to brush off that mistake I made and not let it completely derail my day,” or “I chose to take that call from a friend who really needed to talk even though it meant that I didn’t get to take my run at lunchtime.”
There is always something we can find within our day that demonstrates to us how we showed up and did the best we could.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, as long as we use our warrior hearts to try our best to adhere to the first three agreements we can accept where we are on this journey and embrace it while also showing up to fight for our version of our best each and every day.
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This wraps up the series of blog posts on The Four Agreements. I highly recommend getting the book by don Miguel Ruiz. It’s an easy one to keep returning to over time and it’s a great one to gift to others as well (possibly passive aggressive in some circumstances, but hey, maybe they’ll get the message!)