Do Your Best

All that you can ask of yourself while you are moving through life everyday, is that you do your best.  Your best will never be consistent, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aim for it.  The people we admire, are usually admired for their “super” human qualities.  Some of them we see as people who have special abilities that they are born with, but most just spend the time cultivating their skills through belief, practice, and consistency.  Your best is subjective, so it is up to you to set a standard, and to be curious enough to always see if you can reach for more.  At the end of the day you decide how you operate in your life.  Every decision is made out of this balance between two polar opposite scenarios.  Everything can go one way or another, and using the power of your mindset that you development, it will dictate how you feel and your reactions as you are going through lifes challenges and rewards.  Even the idea of challenges and rewards are interpreted differently by different people depending on their mindset.  Our personal struggles are subjective because a lot has to do with our environment and the situation we were brought up.  While that plays a role, there is a great power that is vested inside of you that can awaken a way of life that will allow you to see a shift if you let it.  This will fluctuate, but the more you can find this state of being on a consistent basis, the more you can understand how to use your mind to create a life you feel great living.  I’m not speaking about ignoring the realities of the hardships in life, I’m speaking about finding ways to mentally bullet proof your thoughts and belief in yourself to walk through life operating how you want to.  

Thats what you want right?  To be able to do something we want to do, when we want to, and to feel good about it?  Isn’t that why we idolize certain people, and look up to others for inspiration and guidance?  We want to be free.  Whatever that free means to you.  We want to make our own decisions whenever we want.  We don’t want to be restricted by this idea of money or the inability to participate.  It frustrates us and when we are frustrated, that is when we have a decision to make.  We can either use that emotion to push us closer to a self image we have created for ourself that will exist in the future, or we continue to exist on a downtrend towards giving up on doing our best.  

Everyone goes through hardship, and there are countless examples of people that have gone through “worse” situations than you that have come out the other side taking full advantage of life from that point on.  Doing your best is about not getting stuck in a past thought or disadvantage mentally, and figuring out how to use your mind to work in your favor, regardless of what is happening around you.  So when you find yourself struggling, or wanting to tap out, first ask yourself, “are you trying your best?”.  Then ask yourself again, “Are you really trying your best?”  Then look at what you are doing with your day.  Saying those words and making yourself feel better by saying you really are trying your best is not a solution that will make you feel better long term.  Getting into the honesty of asking yourself if you are really creating actionable behaviors to improve your situation takes guts, but it’s the only way to true change.  It doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you realize “difficultly” is a matter of perspective and practice.

It may start out difficult, but so doesn’t everything.  All of these amazing athletes, writers, doctors, or any high level skill that takes years of focused attention and commitment, started off just like everyone else.  Interest.  Interest and a drive to do something.  Skill is built through practice and time spent on a particular subject matter.  Struggle at relationships?  Seek out information and reading on relationships.  Want to be a great painter?  Pick up a paintbrush and start painting.  You cannot create a solution to a situation without the curiosity to find more information and the need to act on it.  This information is going to feel foreign and new, which it should be, and that is why you are seeking out information.  But if you dedicate time to this information, you will become better.  From there, the standards that you set for yourself can be set with your full imagination in play, because only you limit your ability to act.

The self image that you want to create will take time to develop.  But if you truly want something, no one can stop you from dedicating time and energy to it but you.  You have to truly want what you say.  It is easy to say you want to be fit.  But then never go for a run.  It is easy to say you want to be a professional athlete.  It is easy to say you want to be anything.  But when this self image that you want requires you to get up at 5am every morning for a couple months to train and you’d rather sleep in, well you don’t really belief what you are saying.  When you truly believe something, you don’t have to convince yourself to do the actions.  The energy and feeling you get from believing in your self image will be a great source of energy for action.  The work you do on spending time with cultivating the feeling inside of you, and the importance and value it can create for your life, will be some of the most important work you ever do.

I have a task for you.  Write down a version of yourself that you would be proud of.  Do not compare your life to anyone else, or live by anyone else’s standard or idea of you.  I want you to truly find an ideal vision of you for yourself, and write it all down.  Then when you think about it and jot it down, ask yourself this question.  Did you water it down?  Did you create a version of yourself and then whittle it down to fit a more comfortable idea of you?  Why?  Because that is the version you are going to get, even if you wanted something else.  These limits you have set within yourself might be deeply ingrained, and that is ok.  But in order to change them, you have to face them, and you have to create the strength and the resilience to tell yourself that you don’t have to water yourself down.  

It doesn’t matter what you have done in the past.  What matters is right now and if you can see how you can improve from this point on.  These ideas of yourself are not just about getting to the destination. It is not about the end result.  It is about the type of person you will become and the type of energy you create to help influence the world around you on the way.  Make sure it means something special to you.  It is how we live our life that matters, because that is the only way to those “destinations”.  It is to do.  It is to show up.  It is to live.  It is to be.

I urge you to spend the rest of your life doing the best you can.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t take time off from your hard work, because that is part of being the best human you can be when you can recognize how to balance how you want to live.  There is no perfect solution to what that means because every situation will require new solutions and dealings that a re unique to you.  But holding yourself accountable to always trying your best, will always be a day well spent.