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My Best Me (Guest post)


Guest post by Erin McMahon, MS, BCBA, LBA and Mom

I was not my best me today. Yesterday was a rough day and I hadn’t fully recovered. I stayed up too late watching Tiny House Hunters and getting annoyed with the hunters every time they said one of the tiny houses was “way too small.” This morning wasn’t a smooth one. My own kids were slothlike and I was frustrated. So, like I do, I got mad at myself for being impatient and frustrated because obviously that helps (sarcasm font needed).


I had back-to-back meetings scheduled at school this morning and usually that’s not a problem. Meetings are good, we learn from them and get ideas and solve problems. We make plans and help kids. Meetings result in more work but that doesn’t scare me because I really, really love my work. But I wasn’t a good version of me this morning and I’m still thinking about two times in these meetings when I screwed up- not huge screwups, but I struggle to let stuff go when I’m the one who made mistakes. (When I was in high school, I took a Regents exam a second time because I wasn’t happy with my first score. It was a 98, and my second one was better.)


But when I work with students and with colleagues, I’m always stressing the fact that we have to choose our battles. We can’t fight them all and many do not matter in the long run. I absolutely believe this to be true, and apply it to my own parenting every day. For some reason, I have not been able to give myself the same break. I have a feeling I am not the only one who does this.
Even with me not being a great me today, something really cool happened. I watched more than one colleague be really awesome, strong, creative, and compassionate in ways that I’m not sure I would have noticed had I been “on.” I realized something so cool. We don’t all have to be the best version of us all the time. When you work with a group of great people, one person’s imperfect day does not negate the sum of the team’s performance. I will have to work really hard to generalize this realization, it is not natural to my way of thinking toward my own performance.

Maybe we only scored a 98% today, but that’s still an A.

http://www.quotesnpictures.com/qnp/working_together/a-group-becomes-a-team.jpg


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Check out this previous guest post by Erin too! 

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