Framing The Four Agreements

Finish Strong Friday Mindset

What “Always Do Your Best” Is Not

Your Best Shifts With State

Effort Over Outcome Clarified

Shame, Self-Talk & The Brain

Practical Examples Across Roles

How The First Three Agreements Power The Fourth

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Wow, how did it get to be Friday? Already! Welcome back! Welcome back! Welcome back, beautiful souls. Welcome to the Sweet Spot. You are listening to Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your host here on the Sweet Spot. As you know, I'm a board certified psychiatrist. I work in elite performance circles. No circle is more elite than sitting with you today, having this conversation, discussing our teammate relationship as we move forward in the game of life. Looking forward to seeing what you think about this day and what we're going to discuss. This is the fifth of our seven episodes around an important theme we've been doing all week long about unpacking the four agreements, the book, the four agreements. We've learned so much, haven't we? What a week! What a week. On Monday, we named the agreements running silently in the background, the ones you inherited before you even had a vote. On Tuesday, we cleaned up the word. We we said, you know, the word is important to keep impeccable. What you say to yourself about yourself and into the rooms you walk into matters. On Wednesday, Win It All Wednesday, we separated feedback from identity so we could continue to be winners no matter what the outcome. We said that the person who can take the hit without becoming the hit is the one who wins over time. Go and check out Win It All Wednesday if you didn't hear that one. Yesterday we audited the assumptions we make, right? We said that curiosity outlasts certainty. Don't always be so certain you know. Don't just make these assumptions, right? And yeah, we talked about you have to ask the question you're afraid to ask, because that's where your self-trust lives. So today, today we close the sprint, and the fourth agreement in the four agreements that we've been really working through isn't a finish line, it's a foundation. And the fourth agreement is always do your best. Always do your best. Now, just to recap, remember the first agreement was to honor your word, be impeccable with your word. The second agreement was don't take things personally. The third agreement was luck, never assume, always ask, be curious. And we find ourselves today grappling with the fourth agreement, always do your best. Simple language. But don't let that simplicity fool you. And the name of today says it all. Strong means you brought everything to the table. That you didn't coast through the back half of the week. And you're not gonna coast because you're a finished strong Friday sweet spotter right now. Yeah, strong, strong means Friday doesn't get your leftovers. No way. Friday doesn't get just the second crumbs. No way, Friday gets your commitment. You're a sweet builder, of course you're gonna be strong on Friday. That's exactly what the fourth agreement is asking for. Not about your performance ceiling. More like your character, your the floor, the foundation of your character. And you don't look, you don't wait until the end of the season to finish strong. You don't wait till the fourth quarter comes. You finish strong in everything you do, every moment you finish strong. You finish strong in every conversation, in every practice, in every shift, in every interaction. Because how you finish anything is telling you something about the agreements that you're living by. And so, look, here's what this agreement is not saying, this fourth agreement. It's not saying always be perfect, it's not saying always perform at your peak. It's not even saying to grind until you break and call it excellence. Because that's not the agreement. That's a trap. Those are traps. Perfectionism, always being at the peak, constantly grinding to the point of just gritty breaking. No. Ruiz, the author of this four grievance book, is very clear. Your best is not a fixed standard, he said. He said your best can change depending on your state. Your best on eight hours of sleep, for example, is different than your best on three hours of sleep. Your best after a win is different from your best after a loss. Your best at the start of a season is different from your best in the fourth quarter of game seven. Hey, look, your best in the morning could be different than your best in the evening. Your best before eating the right kind of breakfast is different than your best after eating a bad breakfast. It's just that simple. Your best can change. And the agreement isn't with the outcome, it's with the integrity of your effort. Right? It's with the effort given what you're actually facing and dealing with. That's the that's the big distinction I want to make today. That it isn't about just the outcome, it's about what kind of state you're in, and that you're giving your best no matter what state you're in. So here's where high performers get this wrong most often. This is where they get it wrong. They set a performance standard on their best day, and then they hold every other day accountable to that ceiling, not understanding that their best can shift depending on circumstances. So when they don't hit it, and they won't because nobody hits the same thing every single day, they don't, these kind of folks don't just feel disappointed, they feel like they failed, and they walk around with a story, an agreement that they're a failure, and then shame enters the building. Shame is not a motivator, not at all. Shame is a performance killer. Feeling bad about yourself, that is that is all about killing your performance, right? Yeah, you don't want to do that. Yeah, the research on that is very clear. Like people who talk down to themselves and feel bad about themselves and have like a negative self-evaluation, you know what that does? It activates the threat systems in the body, in the brain. You know what's gonna come now. The amygdala, the amygdalafiers, your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and your and your anterior singular cortex, they start to freak out. So you don't want to walk around with guilt, with shame, with feeling bad. You don't want to walk around with an agreement in your mind on a finished strong Friday that says, hey man, I don't know if I can fix this. Hey man, this just feels like it's impossible. Something wrong with me, I'm not that good. You don't want that language, you don't want that to come into you at all. Because one kind of language builds you and another kind of language breaks you. And the fourth agreement, always do your best, is built on the idea that you will not collapse, and that if things are hard and things are horrible and things are terrible, there's still a part of you that can give the best you can given where you are. You can't run, walk. You can't walk, crawl. You can't crawl, sit there and visualize. That's what I'm talking about. You will have something that you can do. Think about what always do your best looks like across the rooms your life occupies. Look, you're an athlete, give your full effort of practice, even when nothing is clicking in your game. That's how you do the fourth agreement. You're a nurse on the 11th hour of a 12-hour shift, you still read the chart carefully, you still make eye contact with the patient, you still listen, you're still caring and diligent. That's the fourth agreement. Okay, you're a student, okay? And yes, yes, you're in the middle of finals. There's so much going on. You have a lot to do, and you still sit, you take a breath, you recenter yourself, you take a five-minute walk, and you do what you can. That's the fourth agreement. That's how the fourth agreement works. You can be a leader who is giving honest and thoughtful feedback. Even when you're running on empty, you make room, your doors open, and you still talk to those that are depending on you with a degree of respect. It's not about the ceiling, it's about the floor that you refuse to go below. You have a standard. And even if you're not a hundred percent yourself, this fourth agreement is about giving your best with whatever you've got. So here's the part that ties the whole week together: this book on the four agreements. I hope you go by it. It's a great book, it's a classic, it's been around for years, over 25 years, I think. Look, the book basically is the four agreements, right? When you are impeccable with your word, you stop draining yourself with self-criticism that lures what your best can be. Because the fourth agreement is always do your best. But the first agreement was that you have to be impeccable with your word, you have to be clean with your word and say the right things. So, how is the fourth agreement and the first agreement connected? By what you say. When you are honoring your word, when you're clean with what you say about you, you stop draining yourself with all these negative thoughts, and you are able to always give your best. And hey, the second agreement comes in too, right? If you stop taking things personally, you stop spending your recovery energy on other people's projections. You're not gonna let other people run your show. That's how the second agreement can affect today's agreement, which is always do your best. Since you're not taking things personally, you're not drained, uh, you're not consumed by trying to figure out what other people think. There's another book that goes along with this. I'm gonna try to see if we can get it in. It's called, I think it's by Terry Cole Whitaker. And the book is called What You Think of Me is None of My Business. Love that title. Read that one in college, it was great. Maybe it was masculine, I can't remember, but what you think of me is none of my business. It applies to the second agreement. You're just what you think of me is really none of my business. I can't change it. I can't control that. That's that's not controllable. So, yeah, the second agreement, stop taking things personally and you stop spending your recovery energy with other people's drama. What about the third agreement? Remember that one? Stop making assumptions because when you when you stop making the assumption, here's what happens: you stop making decisions from fiction that cost you your real energy. You're not making things up anymore. You don't assume, you ask, you're curious, you figure it out, and that helps you today when we're talking about being your best. Because you're not caught up in the assumptions, you're doing you. How great is that? So that's how the other three agreements can protect the fourth agreement here today of you always doing your best. Does that make sense? Yeah, let it land, let it land. Because you see, when you practice the three agreements in concert with the fourth one here, they remove the leaks. So when the fourth agreement asks you to always do your best, the first three agreements that we discussed all week are what's making them possible. They're not separate rules, they're one system. Does that make sense? Oh, it makes sense to me. I hope it does for you too. Absolutely. Absolutely, because it doesn't matter what your circumstances are, right? It doesn't matter if you're up or you're down, you want to be a steady person, and that's what these uh four agreements are like the recipe for, right? It gives you a chance to be, to have joy, to have freedom, to do you, to be alright. That's the beauty of the four agreements. I hope you get it. And look, maybe the ancient wisdom can help us. You know, Paul in the book of Philippians for in the message Bible puts it this way I've learned now to be quite content. Mm-hmm. To be content in whatever circumstances I'm in. I'm just as happy with a little or with much. With much as with a little. I've found a recipe for being happy, whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Go look it up. Philippians 4 11. That's that's mastering the variables, right? That's being your best no matter what the circumstances give you. It's not lowering the bar at all. That's mastering the variable. Paul didn't um perform the same every day. That's what the ancient wisdom is trying to communicate. He didn't perform the same every day, he brought his full self to every day, and that was the agreement. Well, the prophet Kahil, uh Khalil Jabran, one of my favorite poets and philosophers, wrote this beautiful line: your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter it, take with you your all. Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter it, take with you your all. Not your best ever, your all. Right now, right here, today. Give it all you have in this moment, because this is the moment. This is the day that you've been given. This is the day for you to give your full self. That's what the fourth agreement is. This is the day that God has made if you into the ancient wisdom. This is the day you rejoice and be glad. That's a different standard, and it's a more honest one. You know, Kobe Bryant didn't have his best shooting night every single game. But I'll bet you something, I'll bet you every person who watched him closely said the same thing. His effort standard never changed, it never moved. His preparation, it was always there. The film study, it was always there. The intentionality, the focus, the execution, always there. Some nights if the shots fell and some nights they didn't. That's basketball reality. But the agreement, the internal commitment to bring everything available to the moment, that was non-negotiable. One of my absolute favorite quotes about Kobe was I think they were asking about practice and something about it being raining, and he looked as only Kobe could do, he looked at you in the eye with that mamba mentality, and he said, I don't negotiate with myself. So I'm not translation, it's raining outside, or that's not gonna stop me from doing what I have to do. So yeah, your best is your best, and that's what made him Kobe. Not the made shots, but the standard beneath the shots. Yeah. Job's not finished when he said that it's not about perfection, it was about refusing to give less than what was available. That's the agreement. That's finished strong Friday, right there. That's finished strong, and you have everything you need. No matter what state you're in. Are you a little tired? Are you fatigued? Are you are you frustrated? Are you happy? What no matter what your state, there is a best standard that you can give. And that's the fourth agreement. Your best can change your sleep, your stress load, your physical state, your emotional bandwidth, your season, your grief, your recovery, your fade. Where are you? Injury, illness, life throws so much at us. But here's the thing you don't have to be a hundred percent every day. Know what you have to do today. Give it your all. Ninety percent effort on a sixty percent day is still full agreement.