The Mirror and The Work

You’re out to dinner with a group of people.

You excuse yourself from the table and go to use the restroom.

While washing your hands, you look in the mirror and see a small chunk of food stuck between your top front teeth.

Do you leave the food stuck in your teeth?

More than likely, no. You pick it out, or maybe rinse your mouth out with water.

Food chunk now gone, you return to the group and continue the evening.

***

You were out in the world doing life, you retreated to a private space, and upon reflection you saw something “unclean” and did something to clean it up before going back out into the world to do life some more.

******

That is the work.

That is the never ending work.

You go out in the world, do life, reflect on HOW you did life, the energy, the posture, the character…everything— and reflect on it by asking

“Does this align with how I aspire to show up in life?”

And if it is not aligned, you cut it out or clean it up.

That’s the work, it’s that simple.

It’s easy work when the work is picking food out of your teeth.

The work is substantially more difficult when the work means standing face-to-face with personal deficiencies that you chose to ignore, or you didn’t know existed because you never took the time to look.

*********

The more you DO the work, the better you get at DOING the work.

The better you get at DOING the work, the tighter the feedback loop between reflection and correction.

The tighter the feedback loop between reflection and correction, the faster you become the truest form of yourself.

I’ll see you on the next one,

- David