A few years ago, I ran two miles faster than I ever had. I crossed my own finish line feeling victorious for roughly seven seconds before I fell on my hands and knees and vomited on the grass behind some lovely South Jordan homes. I rolled onto my side and lay there for almost as long as it took me to run that sub-14-minute pair of miles.
In some ways, it felt like defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. I couldn’t do what I’d just done without becoming physically ill. But even as I lay there on the slightly damp grass that late spring morning (not in my own “output”), I found myself thinking about those superweight lifting competitions where someone lifts a seemingly impossible amount of weight, completes the lift, drops the bar, and immediately crumples to the floor. They exert so much force that their brains go into “Danger Will Robinson!” mode and shut down everything not required for survival. Their bodies decide, in a pretty dramatic way, that staying alive is more important than trying that again. At some point, pushing harder stops being strength and becomes risk.
In the Western world, we’ve been conditioned for decades to pursue competitive edge over just about everything else. We spend so much of our lives being trained to believe that more effort solves more problems. All you need to get ahead is more discipline, more grit, more self-control, more pushing, and more holding on. I’ve wrestled with this idea for more than two decades and, if I’m honest with myself, I still haven’t figured it out. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve written dozens of articles orbiting this same idea. Apparently I am still trying to learn the same lesson from dozens of different angles.
The basic idea is reasonable enough. Strengthen what’s weak and fix what’s broken or disappoints you. Improve the areas where you’re falling behind. Those principles work well in business, athletics, school, and lots of other areas of life. Where they become dangerous, however, is when we start applying them to ourselves in a “show no mercy” kind of way. Somewhere along the way, self-improvement, donning a referee shirt, picks up its clipboard and whistle, and starts keeping score from the sidelines.
Ann Landers said this:
Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.
I came across that quote more than a year ago and it’s stayed lodged in my brain, surfacing occasionally when my personal referee comes into clear view again. I applied that quote pretty easily to jobs, relationships, and even difficult circumstances, but somehow it stayed in a blind spot related to myself until just recently.
Where self is concerned, this quote applies to situations over which we have almost no control, situations where we have almost complete control, and everything in between. We’re all faced with situations that drive us to keep score, hold on to impossible standards, and cling to the belief that becoming better always requires carrying more weight.
For most of my adult life, I’ve viewed self-improvement and self-acceptance as enemies. Accepting myself felt basically like surrender. If I accepted where I was, what motivation would I have to become something better? Improvement felt productive and like movement while acceptance felt almost dangerous and like standing still.
It was during those years that I encountered ideas like the ones in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He famously wrote something like habits are the compound interest of self-improvement and that if you get one percent better every day for a year, you’ll end up dramatically better by the end. Conceptually, I don’t disagree with him though he’s clearly not thinking about the reality of long-term compound math.
The inherent problem is that some of us will unintentionally (or intentionally) turn that “one percent better” into a daily punitive performance review. It doesn’t take a massive leap to move from small actions matter because tiny changes compound to if I didn’t improve today, I failed. Every day starts carrying pressure. Did I improve enough? Did I optimize enough? Did I do enough? Did I earn my rest?
Looking back, I’ve literally spent years treating self-improvement like a courtroom instead of a compass. Every missed run became evidence of failure. So did every pound gained. Every bad day became proof that I wasn’t trying hard enough somewhere, somehow. Improvement, in a weird way, became judgment.
Lately, I’ve reevaluated the relationship between self-improvement and self-acceptance. I’ve stopped seeing them as enemies and started wondering if they’re actually dance partners. Self-improvement provides direction while self-acceptance provides footing. One tells us where we hope to go and the other reminds us we’re allowed to stand where we are. Paradoxically, sometimes standing still is exactly what keeps us moving forward.
When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan without ropes, he didn’t attack the mountain with reckless abandon. He practiced the route dozens upon dozens of times and memorized every handhold and foothold. Inside of his remarkable, terrifying achievement, the thing that caught my attention was how often he stopped to rest and prepare. He slowed down a lot. Rest was an integral part of the climb.
The same might actually be true for the rest of us who aren’t Alex Honnold. We don’t have to let go of effort. We don’t have to stop trying to become healthier, wiser, stronger, kinder, or more disciplined. What we do need to let go of, though, is the belief that our worth is waiting at some imaginary finish line.
I still want to improve. I still want to run faster, become healthier, and continue becoming more of the person I hope to be. I’m just beginning to suspect that self-improvement works best when self-acceptance is willing to dance.
