One of the most important concepts I have adopted from Ido Portal is developing quality standards for everything I do. He calls it a “pregnancy principle”: you cannot be half pregnant, or quarter pregnant, or almost pregnant, you either are or you are not, and there are no in-betweens. When you study with him, high standards are demanded on every level – the execution of movements, the approach to practice, the interaction within the community, the capacity to stay focused on a task, etc. In the beginning, it felt like a burden, but what I have come to understand with time is that these standards are in place not for the teacher, but for myself. Demanding from yourself an execution of every little thing with the highest quality is an act of self-respect. It has nothing to do with perfectionism, very often looking for perfection can be destructive to the learning process. It is rather understanding your real capacity, and setting the bar for that. It is a habit of doing whatever you need to do, however small it is, to the best of your current ability and according to a certain standard you hold for no one else but yourself. It is a predetermined parameter that you abide to follow, and anything but it doesn’t count. It forces you to be honest with yourself and as a result, honest with others.
As you start applying this mindset to your movement practice, slowly it spills into everything else you do: the food you eat, the information you consume, the people you associate with, etc. This is a powerful phenomenon about human behavior that is important to understand – you do everything like you do every single thing. This phrase can be confusing, so to unpack it I will give you an example from everyday life: unless you are living in a mansion with servants, a certain time of your day will be devoted to cleaning your dishes. It is an inevitable and mundane task that needs to be done if you are to keep your house clean and keep the cockroaches at bay. What was the last time you paid attention to HOW you do it? Very likely, never. And if you have 3 meals a day at home, you spend, let’s say, 2 min on average per meal on dishwashing. It is 6 minutes a day, 42 minutes a week, and about 36 hours a year. It is 36 total hours spent doing something without giving it any attention, with apathy towards the task, “with your sleeves down’, as we say in Russia, you might even hate it so much that every time you are about to do the dishes your mood changes. This is not an inconsiderable amount of time to spend in such state (if any amount of time is). My bet is, if something that you have to do on a daily basis is being done poorly, there is no reason other things you are involved with are done differently. This approach to doing things creates internal resistance, which drains the energy out of you, so it is not sustainable. Paying attention to things that are considered trivial is actually quite a high level, this is why it is important to start somewhere big which requires a lot of your resources as it is, like movement practice. Eventually one will follow the other.
Suddenly, as you start to apply this mindset of quality control to all the things you do, the world starts to transform. You become more honest with yourself, and the day-to-day activities stop being a burden and move into the category of rewarding, important deeds that need to be done with consideration. This is a transition of the focal point: the WHAT is not important anymore, and the HOW is taking the central seat. Understanding this principle, in my eyes, is the key to living a fulfilling life. Now daily activities that might have felt like a drain take a spin and become a practice in themselves. Whenever I engage with something from this perspective – it is a possibility for me to improve myself. Any job that seemed meaningless and burdensome can be transformed by applying this mindset. For example, I often see the people who clean the streets in Barcelona being very dissatisfied, weighed down with their job, lifeless, and only concentrated on the moment when the shift ends so they can smoke a cigarette. They do not live their lives for at least 8 hours a day (and probably never because this mode of living makes you ten times as tired as you would be otherwise). It is objectively hard work, but someone needs to do it and it is incredibly valuable for society. Shifting the perspective from “I fucking hate this job but I have to do it to make money cause I don’t have other qualifications” to “this is an incredibly important task that keeps my city clean and livable, by doing it I create an environment where people can flourish because they don’t have to walk through the piles of garbage every day” will make a huge psychological change in the person reframing it. If the WHAT of the question will be substituted by the HOW, any kind of work stops being a burden and becomes a practice and a valuable contribution to society at the same time. This kills two rabbits with the same bullet: the city will become cleaner because the work would be done with more care, and the person doing it will be much happier and fulfilled, which will have an inevitable positive effect on the immediate environment around this person.
Unfortunately, this is not something that is taught in schools, nor by a lot of parents. Besides, to my regret I observe that there is a constant attack on a merit-based assessment of skill and condemnation of striving for excellence in general. We praise mediocrity instead, and this is a slippery slope that can lead to a very dark places. The matter of fact is: whatever role you fulfill in life, having high standards for yourself and those around you will serve a huge favor to your development on an individual level and also on a level of a community. Adopting this mindset in relation to the most mundane tasks will fill your days with meaning. It will pull the best out of you and also will help you to elevate others. Family, work contacts, and friendships of the individual who applies this approach to life: everything will be transformed. Going from micro to macro like that, we have a good chance of making some serious improvements on a bigger scale. Because the engine that moves all of us forward is human ingenuity and it can only flourish when there are conditions for it to be appreciated, and this appreciation should come first and foremost from the inside. Having standards for yourself is creating conditions for this to happen. This is the ultimate act of self-respect.