100 per cent
Some people find their best selves at work, others at home, some out with their friends and others in situations like telephone calls, washing dishes or whatever.
Living 100% is a rather mutilated concept.
People have hacked it to bits over the years saying all kinds of contradictory things: ‘live life to the full’ but also ‘you can’t do 100% all of the time’; ‘carpe diem’ but ‘learn acceptance’. That kind of stuff. I hope that when they work with me my clients find out how to be as much themselves as possible. I take the view that the person in front of me is special, whether they like it or not, and this always proves to be the case once they have got their self-doubt, other people’s envy, the effects of trauma and stupidly limiting expectations out of the way. Special is not the same as superior, better, or more privileged. In my book special means different from normal. Life is about recognising differences and seeing that normal is nothing to be scared of: there’s a normal bit of everyone – one that has a lot in common with a lot of others, and understanding what this is has to happen in order to reveal someone’s specialness. The bit of them that is especially them.
Remember context. A lawyer may need to do a lot of things at 100% but if they approach mowing their lawn with that attitude they’ll explode, need an addiction, or some other sorry state of affairs will develop. This is all about doing 100% in a 100% way: realising when you can’t make any difference, or when your 100% input might actually mess things up, and instead you have to do some 10% or something, that’s important. A Dad playing cricket at 100% with a six-year-old child is not going to work. That Dad needs to be stopped. But if that Dad applies 100% of his attention to that child in order to work out what that child likes, needs and wants to do, then we are rolling.