The unspoken tension at the heart of every personal and business relationship, collaboration, and partnership:
How can I give to the relationship without sacrificing my own needs, desires, and goals?
Underlying this tension is a belief that to give to others, to show up well for our partners, to contribute to the partnership, means that we must put our own needs aside.
It’s a zero-sum mindset that believes we must sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the whole; that the other person’s needs become more important; that feeding the partnership comes at our expense.
What if this isn’t true?
This is the polarity at the heart of yesterday’s full moon in Aries.
Not coincidentally, today I had an experience during CrossFit partner workout that proved to me that our own needs don’t have to be put aside for relationship. In fact, contributing to a relationship can help us meet our needs more effectively.
The workout:
For Time:
- 1500M row – split with a partner
Into
10 Rounds of “You Go, I Go:”
- 6 clean and jerks
- 8 knees to chest
- 8 burpees over bar
Into
- 1500M row – split with a partner
How It Went Down
My partner and I split the row in to 250M segments, which we alternated.
Typically my “strong” row pace is around 2:15/500M. When I get tired, it falls to about 2:30/500M.
Today, I was on another level. I was consistently pulling at a 2:05 pace, and even saw the pace dip below 2:00 for portions of each row, hovering around 1:57–1:59. In my final row segment of the second row — the point at which I was most fatigued — I hit 1:55/500M for a few seconds.
I’ve never rowed a sub–2:00 pace before, not even for a split second.
This performance translated to the other part of the workout.
I’m not great at clean and jerks, and thought I might have to scale back to doing just cleans. But somehow I managed to find the strength to get through all of my 5 rounds. Even my burpees moved better than usual.
We finished in a respectable 28:07.
The Lesson
Everything in life is patterns, and my performance in this workout reaffirmed a pattern I’ve seen in myself in other places:
I show up better when I’m playing for a team, and not just for myself.
Even though I was showing up for my partner, it wasn’t at a sacrifice to myself, my needs, my goals, or my progress.
I was actually serving myself better by how I showed up for my partner.
The proof is in my row times, in which I hit a personal best. I was also able to push myself harder in the other portion of the workout. If I had been doing it for myself, I would have ditched the clean and jerks and been slow as molasses on the burpees. Having someone else’s needs at stake caused me to push myself harder — not at the expense of my well-being, but to meet more of my own potential.
The lesson here is that showing up for others doesn’t have to come at the expense of our own needs.
In fact, if we play it right, the way we show up for others can help us meet our needs and our personal goals. And in a way that is more fun and energizing than if we are just doing it alone.
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