This week, our Operations Director Jeff started the week by sharing something he attributed to Dr. Pete Friesen - a Coach & Trainer for the Carolina Hurricanes plus numerous Canadian World Championship & Olympic teams (I say attributed because I tried and failed to find any similar quotes online...so if anyone else can please share).
He told us about the Rule of Thirds:
"If you're really working hard toward your goal, you should feel great about 1/3 of the time.
1/3 of the time you should be just coasting along.
The other 1/3 of the time you will feel terrible and beaten down."
"With this rule in mind, if you never feel like you've got nothing left to give, and just feel great all the time, you aren't pushing yourself enough. You're capable of more, and you're holding yourself back.
Conversely, if you feel terrible more than 1/3 of the time, you aren't taking time to recharge or to recuperate. You're not taking the appropriate self-care steps. You're at risk of injury and burnout."
Now, I have never been an athlete of any sort at any level. I dropped out of most of my high school teams within a couple months. I have my excuses, but that's besides the point. Until 2020, I'm not sure I had ever seen this rule played out to its full extent; at least, not in myself.
Only during the boredom of COVID restrictions did I find the drive to push myself to feel physically terrible 1/3 of the time long enough to be able to say, "yeah, I jog sometimes. I'm a jogger." And you know what? It felt pretty great the other 2/3rds of the time.
Also (mostly) thanks to COVID I've found myself in a tightrope marathon; a seemingly endless balancing act between "things are ok right now, let's make the most of it," and "oh crap, here we go again." There have been times it was go time all the time, and the yellow slice of my pie chart took over. There was no time to recharge, no time for self-care. Other times the slices stayed the right shape, but the time-spans stretched WAAAY out: 1 week of insanity, 1 week of coasting, 1 week of feeling pretty good. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Jeff's words came as a very healthy reminder of my limitations. That it's ok, even good, to feel like crap sometimes; that it can mean I'm working hard to accomplish something positive. It's pretty easy however, in an environment where your coworkers are your dinner buddies and your patients are your downstairs neighbours, to stray into one-half to two-thirds territory.
So I must say thank you. To every coworker/dinner buddy/neighbour/friend who has told me it's time to leave the office/take a sleep-in day/book a couple more days of vacation. I think my pie consumption is slowly starting to come back into balance.
And as I approach the end of the race - or at least this leg of the race - it has definitely been worth the whole pie.
À la prochaine,
-D
