Your best needs to take into account all parts of you.
This is what I came up with today. I have a lot going on this week. I always have a lot going on, but right now, it’s extra. I have a task to complete that requires a lot of cognition. A lot of frontal lobe neocortex action. Heady shit. One of those. And I realized that I was about to hold myself to an expectation of completing this to the ultimate perfection at any cost. At all costs.
At any cost means at the cost of my physical health, my emotional balance, my time for all the other tasks I have in my day, my relationship with my daughter, and perhaps most significantly, at the cost of my spiritual health.
You could argue that spiritual health is the intersection of spiritual and emotional balance. It’s that space between doing and being. It’s so easy to ignore your spiritual self, the voice that sometimes doesn’t rise above a whisper. I’d argue most of us don’t even consider that we have a spiritual self.
Mine is a teenager. She’s keyed in, she’s intense, she feels things deeply. She likes Christmas lights year round and listening to Radiohead and making stuff with her hands. She’s a culmination, a whole person. She brings her whole self with her.
I believe our spiritual selves when defined this way represent us at our most alive. In Czech, the word is “žive.” It sounds just like it should that way.
A mentor of mine recently told me one of the most important things I’ve heard to date. He said that the time we spend in “doing” mode—not just literally completing tasks, but living in that headspace of the next thing followed by the next thing—must be balanced by times of non-doing. Sure, we’ve heard this line before, but the key word here is MUST. This isn’t optional. The inner perfectionist in me sighs in absolute revelry at that knowledge, that permission to just STOP.
So today, as I attack my to-do list, I’m going to ask myself some questions:
· What part of me is suffering if I hold myself to this standard?
· What happens if I lower my standard? What do I gain?
· What’s the worst thing that could happen if I let myself perform to a lower standard?
· Does my body have the energy for this task right now? If no, what do I need?
· Would I hold others to the standard I’m holding myself to?
· What can I delegate?
· How do I want to feel at the end of the day? What do I need to do/not do to make that happen?
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