One of my favorite yoga teachers has said, while cueing various poses, “Make sure you’re only going to 70% of your maximum depth here. Find your 70% point, and hold there.”
The first time I heard this, I immediately took pause: Say what?
Once, she elaborated a bit more, something along the lines of “You don’t want to max yourself out in any one pose, or in life. It will leave you depleted. Take care to preserve some energy, so you have that for yourself, so you don’t feel totally spent.”
The concept struck me hard, and I’ve had to think about it a lot, mainly because it’s so damned counterintuitive to my natural psyche. My most primal instinct, in both yoga and life, is to always give it my all. Always. I’m energetic, and the feeling of being “totally spent” is typically my holy grail, the actual endgame on any given day. Squeezing the juice out of my existence is the mark of time well spent. Put 100% in, get 1000% out. Am I right?
In yoga, likewise, I always push myself, always try the thing there is to try. No matter my mood at the outset of a guided practice, or a kind teacher’s reassurances that child’s pose is “always an option”. It generally seems like the best investment of my time to just, well, go to my depth.
Still, yoga wisdom is usually pretty wise, and I like to challenge my nature now and then. And, all told, I am sometimes depleted, and not always in the feel-good kind of way, or at least not always at the optimum time. If I use everything I’ve got in an 8:30am Sunday hot power yoga session, it’s tough to play tennis with the boys later in the afternoon. I’m sore. I’m yawning. I’m a little dehydrated. Likewise, if I exhaust every working brain cell on a project at work, even proofreading a 7th grade essay at 8pm can seem impossible. Prepping a nourishing, well-rounded meal at that point is probably out of the question. There are tradeoffs, certainly.
Yet, I’m not a fan of happy mediums. Their very neutrality makes them generally boring and unsatisfying. And in some ways, they’re also unrealistic: giving 70% to every workout wouldn’t reward me the same emotional release. Putting just 70% into every facet of my job would be plain career suicide. So where and how do you choose which limits?
Here’s where I’ve landed.
Not everything—or everyone—is worth your 100%.
The trick (or skill, rather) lies in knowing what is. And for the 100% Types, applying the 70% rule to any situation, effort, or relationship that just isn’t at the way top of your list of sound investments can be unexpectedly gratifying. After all, 70% is still more than deserved, and when you set limits knowingly, you’re being strategic….which is the right move 100% of the time.
People who juggle a lot, like working moms, are making these snap judgments and calculations of worth constantly, and on the fly. And some rightfully maintain that this very ability to zero in on what and whom ought to command how much attention is a critical business asset. (Read: nothing to feel half-assed about.)
The 70% rule creates the very conditions for you to give your max.
When it’s the right effort, The One, simple logic dictates that you still can’t give 100% if you’ve only got 90 left. Or worse yet, 40. Applying 70% most of the time is what you allows you to keep your full capacity on reserve for those times you know you need, or even just want, to dig deep and go to town.
Think 100% on the whole, but 70% on each of the parts.
This is terrible math, obviously. It also makes absolute sense. A creative pursuit, for example, has multiple and varied phases. When it’s a solid idea, you’ll probably want to give it everything you’ve got, and you should. But if you do so on each piece, at each stage, you’re vulnerable to premature burnout. At best, it leaves you tired and uninterested before the job is done. But the bigger risk is in becoming totally emotionally invested too soon in the game, like during early ideation, and ultimately led awry by your own over-attachments.
In yoga, the implication is that if you want to get 100% out of a full practice, you probably can’t afford give your all to any one asana. Focus on the whole by being conservative about the process, the parts.
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So that’s it: recognize when it’s time to go to your depth, but also when it’s not. Because that very strategic prioritization, demonstrated by the 70% give, is what will empower you to max out when it’s time. And when it’s time to max out, to temporarily deplete the reserve, consider the marathon, not the sprint.
Hold back, not because you have to, but because you know you can.
Namaste.