BEYOND CLICHÉS

Try something that is beyond most people. See if you can get away from the clichéd stigma that “Doing your best”, “Giving it your best shot” and “Being the best you can be” inevitably carry. Too often these expressions have been used for all the wrong reasons. In making them emotive, throwaway generalisations, they’ve become corny, powerless and useful only for:

• Making excuses
• Justifying poor performance
• Trying to make a hopeless situation somehow less hopeless
• Hoping to make someone else feel better when they’ve just been utterly embarrassed
• Giving someone with little talent an objective in which it is theoretically impossible to prove failure and thereby avoiding having to deal with their upset when they inevitably lose.

Take a look behind or inside the words themselves until you can see beyond the cliché and grasp the actual essence of what “Being the best you can be” truly represents. What is that essence? What does it really mean?

It means this: that 100% of the time, you commit ALL your available resources (physical, mental and emotional) to the task at hand. It means no matter what happens, you apply ALL your experience, knowledge, ability, and skills whilst remaining completely open to learn, change and evolve towards that frustratingly elusive thing called your potential. It means your intention, commitment and effort are total and unchallengeable, irrespective of the outcomes you produce.

It also means not just saying or thinking or planning to do those things, but doing them relentlessly, always, every moment of your life. THAT…is living the phrase “Being the best you can be”.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.