As part of one of my professional mastermind groups, we recently read “At Your Best” by Carey Nieuwhof (available in Minnesota through Inter Library Loan) and discussed the book as a group.

Big topics from the book included:

• building a life you don’t want to escape from
• using social media vs it using you
• measuring your status in a variety of categories
• understanding your best big-lift times of day
• controlling your calendar

But the biggest take-aways from the book from my perspective were:

A reminder of how bad stress and burnout are for us. Bad, bad, and more bad. Don’t live your life there.

That if you’ve been saying the same version of “I’m overwhelmed” for more than 6 months, it’s not just a season, this is the real state of your life and something needs to change. If we keep doing the same things over and over again, we can’t expect different results. Work isn’t going to reduce your workload or hours just because it would be better for you.

That this survival, just barely scraping by, situation current society has forced on us is ridiculous. As the author puts it,

how did the most prosperous people who ever lived (which is everyone in the developed world in the twenty-first century) make their lives about survival? Seriously.

At Your Best, by Carey Nieuwhof

There are hard tasks we should be lifting, those are the big rocks who get priority place in our schedule, timed to when we have the most energy for those specific tasks.

I also disagreed with the author on a number of points.

Unlike what the author presented, about us each having only 168 hours in a week in which to get things done, some of us effectively have a lot less control – through intermittently flaring medical conditions. The president does indeed only have as many hours as you do, but our presidents have been without such conditions going into their presidency, and they come out of those 4-8 long hard years looking more aged than 4-8 years of regular living would make them look. And, you aren’t outsourcing most of your daily tasks (shopping, food prep, dishes, parenting, driving, house cleaning, home maintenance) through having others paid to do it for you.

As an employee, controlling your calendar is hard. Again the president only has as many hours as you do, but nobody adjusts their schedule for you; you’re the one having to do the accommodating, rather than being accommodated.

The author claims that opportunities available to a capable person exceed the time available. I do see a lot of this; that you will be asked or told to do more than what you can possibly handle. I’ve also seen the opposite, that the world doesn’t always recognize that capability, especially when it looks different (age, sex, skin color, professional background, personal experience) than what it

Are you “at your best”?

There are some things that may frustrate you if you are an employee reading this book. But if you are a high level employee, a business owner, a homemaker, or anyone else who could have a lot of say over their life, this book is very valuable. If you are a rank-and-file employee, one whose niche of being low on the totem pole is very well specified, it can still give you insights into why you’re so frustrated and what kind of life changes you might need to make, so that you too can be “At Your Best”. Because your life shouldn’t be about burnout and survival.