Be Your Best When You’re at Your Worst – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

What’s your strategy for bringing your best to any challenge?

Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash

At hard moments in my life, sides of my character have surfaced that I’d rather keep buried. My instinct to react on the spot to a tough situation has brought me all kinds of results, mostly bad ones. To avoid them, I rely on one strategy, and it’s my answer to this post’s title: "Think about the legacy I want to leave my children and, if they’re watching, how I want them to see me". Read on and find your own.

Problems don’t define us. What defines us is calling something a problem when it’s really a challenge. When you think you’ve hit bottom and nothing worse can happen, that’s when the mind finds new ways to move forward, keep going and learn. The key is knowing this pattern repeats itself throughout life, and that learning is the richest resource we can take from it.

A tough situation is an opportunity. A challenge seen from every angle offers valuable information, and seeing it takes maturity, awareness, calm and memory. I single out memory because it lets us draw on strategies we’ve used in similar situations. It’s what lets us pause, act with maturity and find within us the awareness and calm we need to think and use our time well.

Reacting on the spot without a strategy is common, and it’s a natural survival instinct. That reaction isn’t necessarily the best or the most fitting, though. Giving your best pays off both ways. It shows respect for the world and for others, and it builds our ability to meet challenges with better, more rewarding results.

Being our best in hard times means being a lighthouse or a compass. Hard as it may be to picture, a genuine act of kindness, like showing gratitude in a deeply troubled moment, takes a high level of awareness and gives others direction and inspiration. It can spark new paths and new ways to solve problems, and open room for trust and the calm to think.

Being your best when you’re at your worst is a habit, one that takes a strategy to cultivate every day of your life. We all have the potential to build a wonderfully full life in good times and in hard ones. In good times we all know what to do and how. For the hard times, I’ll leave it to you to find your own strategy, put it into practice for good and let the results surprise you.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: Being creative isn’t being original. What stuck with me was the author’s answer to "How do you get your creative work back?". Also: "Creative people need time to wrestle with their ideas". That happens to me, for instance, with the pile of ideas I have whenever I sit down to write.
• What I’ve been Listening to: Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney. From the podcast of Tim Ferriss, one of my favorite authors. What stuck with me was Bob Iger’s perseverance: 30 years in business before becoming CEO of The Walt Disney Company.
• What I’ve been Reading: A Brief History of Time. I read this book years ago and, after the Netflix movie, decided to read it again. As with every second read, I’m amazed by details I missed the first time for one reason or another (maturity, knowledge and so on). Today I feel I understand a little more of answers that are so simple and so complex at once: "Will time someday run backward, with effects preceding causes?"
• What I’ve been Learning: Hints for Case Teaching. I keep going deeper into teaching, a field I love. Academia is how I keep connecting my ideas with what I know and how I see the world. I fell for the case method the day I discovered it, and every time I put it into practice I dig deeper and try to get better.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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