The fourth agreement is Always Do Your Best. The first three ask a lot of us. This one asks how much of ourselves we actually have to give them today.
Always doing our best doesn’t mean we need to get trapped in the rigidness of perfectionism, because the reality is that our best will change from day to day. If I am grieving or depressed, my best might be just getting up and taking a shower.
Doing our best allows us to feel both satisfaction and self-respect. When we don’t do our best we often suffer from regret and self-judgment. Understanding that our best changes from day to day allows us to not waste our time or energy in self-judgment. The perfectionist in us is a part, and a loyal one. Somewhere along the way she learned that being faultless was the safest way to stay loved, so she holds the yardstick and keeps a very good memory for every time you came up short. She means well. She cannot tell a day when your best fills the calendar from a day when your best is a shower.
When I was in grad school for counseling we learned that the best parent is the good-enough parent, an idea that traces back to the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who wrote about the “good enough mother”. Good enough parents are not perfect. They get frustrated, resentful, and overwhelmed. They are fully human. When parents are perfect parents, their kids never learn to self-regulate. They never learn how to handle disappointment, or that relationships can have ruptures and that those ruptures can be repaired.
As a recovered perfectionist, I took the idea and ran with it. I learned how to be the ‘good-enough’ student, the ‘good-enough’ yogini, and the ‘good-enough’ partner. When we accept that on a difficult day, our best may be limited, we surrender to the idea that we can be good-enough. We can accept our limitations and do our best within those limitations. Even with those limitations, we are good. We are good-enough to receive self-love. We are good-enough to not self-critique. And if we’re good-enough, then we are worthy.
Your best has a body, and the body gives its report before the yardstick comes out. On a full day it may be a back that lengthens and eyes that reach for the next good thing. On a day of grief it may be limbs full of wet sand and a long minute on the edge of the bed before the floor is possible. Some days it is both, one after the other. Ask the body what is possible before the part holding the yardstick answers for it.
Doing your best does not buy the outcome. Good-enough partners get left. Good-enough students fail exams. And when a limited best lands on someone else, the apology and the repair remain yours to make. Good-enough gives you the room to make them.
After all my years of practicing this, my best has come in more than one size. In the weeks of grief it was a shower and a clean shirt. In the good weeks it was a full day’s work and then some. Both were everything I had, and both were enough.
May you do your best each day.
May you have compassion on yourself when your
best is less than you would like.
May you have compassion upon others when their best is limited.
May you know peace.
The Toltecs were a people who lived in central Mexico, and people who carry that ancestry are alive today. Nearly everything said about the Toltecs of the past comes down to us through the Aztecs, who looked back on them as a vanished golden age. No Toltec text survives that anyone can hold these agreements up against. What travels under that name in modern spiritual writing runs through a twentieth-century line of teachers, Carlos Castaneda among them, whose account of his own apprenticeship did not hold up when it was examined. None of this makes the four agreements less useful to you. Their authority comes from what they do when you try them. If they work, they work because they work, whoever said them first in Tula, the old Toltec capital.
Where the agreements come from: The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.
More in the Four Agreements series