The Pursuit of Excellence

A gift, a curse & my antidote

I was talking to one of my chosen sisters earlier this week and she said something to me that made me feel so deeply seen and ….something. In the moment I couldn’t put my finger on it but I just knew there was another feeling occupying my body. The bothness of the experience was something I couldn’t shake.

She said “Everything you do, you do with Excellence.” I told her I felt seen. I mean the tag line for my mentees and cadets is “In the pursuit of excellence”. When I say it to them, I teach it to them from a liberatory and humanizing place. A place that I still struggle to stay rooted in myself. My pursuit of excellence has always been both my gift and my curse. BUT! With a whole lot of liberatory praxis (I’ll share some of my practices at the end) I’m working to heal the parts of me that operate from old colonial frameworks so that I can celebrate it as a gift.

I Can’t Unsee Potential!

One of my gifts is that I can see the gap between what is and what could be. I mean, how many times did I say that in my TEDx talk? Being able to “imagine, to reimagine, what is into what could be” is the very root of being “an architect of possibility” (to quote myself). This is a foundational practice for liberatory work, to be able to imagine and envision potential, in myself, in my body, in my business, in people, in the collective, in systems etc. That clarity is a gift, but it’s heavy because it means that I am almost never satisfied with what I have accomplished because I am always thinking of what I could accomplish! There’s always a sharper edge to chase, a cleaner system to build, another step in a more liberatory collective reality, a better version of myself or others, all just waiting to be realized.

If I’m extra honest and vulnerable with y’all, it also means staying in relationships (both romantic and platonic) much longer than is good for me/healthy. It means over extending grace and understanding because I can SEE someone’s potential, who they could be and what they are working towards. Yet, the lesson I have had to learn over and over is that we have to engage with people based on who they are now and what is real for them in their progress now, not who they could, maybe, eventually be if only they chose to work towards it. I have no one to hold accountable for the hurt that I have felt in those situations but myself because I knew good and well what was in front of me and when I should have changed the nature of the relationship, I just didn’t…because I was focused on what could be!

Why It’s Been A Curse

In all aspects of my life I have pushed and pushed and pushed myself. Has it served me well? In a lot of ways, yes, absolutely. From the outside, what people see is a nearly 40 year old who has “done so much already” in life. What people don’t see is the road to those accomplishments, to the legacy I will leave. The road is riddled with:

• Relentless drive: I push myself with endless discipline that many people have told me is unreasonable. Again, it has served me, but it also took from me because it was not truly sustainable, and yet, I made it so. It leaves me feeling depleted and sometimes I don’t even notice it until by body is literally hollering at me. Our body whispers at us to rest, to tend to it and if we don’t listen it HOLLERS until ignoring it is absolutely impossible. The relentlessness of this drive is rooted in the pursuit of excellence, like my progress is never quite enough. Like I could be doing more for the collective and myself!

• Double vision: If you’ve been with me a while you know that I live in nuance, it’s my favorite place to be! I hold multiple truths to be true at once as my default setting. That depth of perception makes for a more magnetic and richer life experience but it also makes life feel heavier, because I am always tracking the complexity of life and people. Couple that with my need to reimagine would could be, I spend an immense amount of time living in the complexity of what is as well as the complexity of sorting through how to get to what could be.

• Weight of responsibility: I believe so deeply in humanity, fairness, justice, kindness and efficiency. When people follow our current social norms and their identity socialization (rooted in systems of oppression) and act from those places, well, it’s infuriating. I end up carrying the emotional and mental labor of holding the line for values most people compromise. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, I have said many times that the weight of having a line in concrete (not sand) is exhausting. It would be profoundly simple and easy to just let things be what they are instead of refusing to sway from my liberatory ethos in a world that works so damn hard to extinguish the light of liberation.

• Never settling : I am constantly striving for….more? In everything I do I am convinced that if I decide to do something, I can be excellent. I have told athletes, cadets and mentees that my mindset is simple: if you ask me if I can run through a wall, the answer is yes. I am convinced I can run through a wall. Now, do I understand that physics tells me that this is not possible, yes, if I root into practicality and reality, sure (bbboooooooo boring!). That being said, this is the approach I take with everything in business, the gym etc. I am constantly torn between being tactical, powerful, practical, impractical, resilient, resting etc. The curse here is that I believe that I can want and achieve all of it and then some. Once I achieve a certain level of, well, anything, I go for more. I won’t settle, so I’m forever calibrating and recalibrating.

The Paradox

The very thing that people call my gift of excellence is also my curse. I am unwilling to settle for mediocrity, in myself, for myself, in others, and most importantly for the collective and the pursuit of liberation. Is it the reason I have been “successful”? Yes.But it also means peace and satisfaction don’t come easily.

I live in that liminal space between contentment and ambition, and honestly? IT IS EXHAUSTING!! I realized this when a friend of mine who regularly checks on me mirrored back to me that my usual response is “Oh, I’m okay, minding my business and trying to find balance”. He wasn’t wrong to bring my attention to that. I’m always trying to find balance because I have so many pieces of praxis rooted in fighting for liberation, in achieving excellence, in proving systems of oppression and people who buy into them wrong, in toppling hierarchy to achieve humanity for all…..I have a mastery of fighting, pushing, battling, challenging. What I have a theoretical understanding of without an intentional practice of is letting myself rest, being still, enjoying my “goal posts” (my clients are probably so tired of hearing me talk to them about theirs, so why can’t I do this for myself?), being better about being present and enjoying the riches of my labor so to speak.

Practicing What I Preach: an Antidote

Radical Allowance

What I am great at: how to grind, sharpen, optimize, propel, be incredibly disciplined and focused etc (see hyper productive grind culture & perfectionism). What I for sure suck at without a whole hell of a lot of intentionality: rest, embodying the idea of “good enough” and allowing it to count, letting someone else carry the load even if I think they are gonna do it like 80% as good as I would, letting myself experience joy and fun even when the work isn’t “done”.

Radical allowance means a shift to believing that these things can coexist, that I can practice satisfaction and humanity without abandoning my pursuit of excellence in all things.

For me, it makes sense to first bring into awareness 3 distinct parts of me all working together:

• Mindset: I track not just “what’s next” but “what’s now.” I’m great at the to do list, mapping out every detail in a sequential flow. I am not great at “goal posting” (that’s what I call this practice for my clients). I usually suggest goal posting the big things but I have realized for myself that I have to start much smaller. I literally write down the things that I AM doing, that are already working out: my lift that felt really good that day, the run I finished strong, the client that had a breakthrough, the moment that I had with a loved one, the smile I brought to someone’s face etc. I do this to give equal energy to naming what’s complete as I do to naming what’s possible.

• Body (I am a gym girlie after all): Run through a wall? YUP DONE! Hit a new PR? I’m after it! Mamba Mentality (R.I.P. Kobe) all day long (I regularly ask my cadets “what kind of dog are you”? lol). Schedule in my runs, lifts, and pilates with as much importance as work meetings? Without question! Buuuuuuuuut treat recovery, mobility, and stillness as high-performance training blocks?? YIKES. I’m not so good at that! So I make that as important by having dedicated mobility days/blocks in my training now. I schedule “feet up” time, like actually putting my feet up on a wall and just laying there and vibing out to music. While I can’t measure these things in the same way I can my strength or lean muscle mass, I make that mean just as much because they ARE progress and they are necessary!

• Professional and Personal: I, by nature, carry the full weight of my values for everyone. I also hold myself to an impossible standard of relationship, and while I know that, it doesn’t allow me to let myself off of the hook. My practice here is to embody the “power of the pause” as I teach my clients. When I find myself ready to jump into over extending myself, power through even when I don’t have capacity, dishonoring my own professional and personal boundaries etc, I just pause. I ask myself “will it be alright if I just let it be?”. Most of the time the answer is yes. If it’s not an emergency, no one is harmed and me waiting until later or tomorrow won’t change anything, then I just let it be.

The Practice

So my gift and curse has me living at the horizon line. My antidote is letting my feet touch the ground while still being able to face forward and look into the ocean. Potential isn’t going anywhere, I can’t change the way my brain is wired but I can train my nervous system to recognize enoughness in the present. This is a practice I’ve honed in on for myself through years of healing and self exploration. There are tons of similar or adjacent practices and I hope this inspires you to create your own.

My Ritual: a 5 min daily practice

Step 1: A moment of coming home to myself (1 min)

I do my best to start my day with this or at the very least do it during my morning coffee. I spend a minute thinking about what is working, needs to be celebrated, taken note of in the now. It can be something as simple as “I slept a full 8 hours last night”, “My runs are getting faster”, “My mentee is excited about school for the first time in years”.

This practice is aimed at training my brain to see “enough”, to spot sufficiency before starting to look for deficiencies or things that are “not done”.

Step 2: Give it away (1 min)

Remember how I said I was terrible at letting people take things off of my plate? Every day I take a look at everything I have going on and I decide on at least ONE thing that I can “give away” and then I do that. It might be literally asking someone for help, so giving it away to a person, or giving it away to recklessness or “it is what it’s going to be” so I can let go of control or perfection. This can be a decision to make a super simple dinner or even order in/let someone else feed me, lift with whatever I have in the tank, or ask someone to complete a task if they can do it “well enough”.

This allows me to release my need to be responsible to everything and surrender to imperfection! It breaks my patterns!

Step 3: Ruthless gratitude (2 min)

My god mother once asked me “If you woke up today with only the things you said you were grateful for yesterday, what would you wake up with?”. That has always stuck with me! So out loud (or in writing if that’s your thing) I name at least three very specific gratitudes. I give myself permission not to be generic with it cuz my health/family/work are (1) too easy (2) I am always grateful for those and (3) it doesn’t challenge me to be grounded in the moment. Instead I name things like: I am grateful that I get to mentor and coach young adults that trust me. I am grateful that I have a body that allows me to move in all of the ways that bring me so much life and joy. I am grateful that I have the space to sit in stillness, silence and peace.

By being this specific it keeps me from cheating myself for the sake of just performing the practice, no one likes performative bs, am I right?

Step 4: Close with permission (1 min)

This one is pretty simple in theory but oh so hard for me in practice. I give myself an explicit permission slip (also something I teach my clients, so shouldn’t be hard for me, right? Wrrrroooonngg!!). My permission slip can be anything I might need that day. Some days that permission slip is that I can end my workout at 3 sets even if I programmed everything for 4. Other times it’s to ask a client to reschedule. Other days I need to give myself permission to not have to prove anything to anyone, not even myself.

These permissions slips are little pieces of self-allowance that start to rewire my relentless pursuit for excellence and have created a foundation for me to continue to give myself permission slips in real time as I need them.

What Now?

We are all on our own journey and we all have our own path to walk. Mine, in this moment, looks like practicing radical allowance, ruthless levels of gratitude and a packet of permission slips. My theoretical knowledge of what needs to happen in order to combat so much of my own socialization needs to become a full embodied and integrated praxis that becomes such habit that I don’t even need to think about.

I hope that this has helped some of y’all think through ways in which you can embody and integrate different practices in order to challenge the ways in which some or any of this shows up in your own lives.

Remember living into liberation fully is a marathon, not a sprint. Be kind and gracious with yourself, and I’ll start practicing what I actually teach and do the same!

Tata for now,

Weeze