The Agreements You Keep With Yourself

Spotting the habits that pull you away from your ideal day, the ones that don't line up with what you actually set out to do, is the easy part. You can catch yourself doing it again and again. The real work begins the moment you ask yourself: why? Getting there means you've found the belief driving the behavior, and that belief tends to show up in more than one part of your life.

Hi {{ first_name | friend }},

Last time, I mentioned there was a second distraction pulling me away from my ideal day, one I'd get to another time. Eleven years ago, in Toronto, it was a laptop instead of a phone. I was working at Deloitte. One afternoon, two colleagues came to my desk. “Come on. Let's go. It's 5 PM.” I looked at them, confused. “Where are we going? What do we have planned?” They looked back, even more confused. “Nothing.” It was 5 PM and the middle of summer: time to stop working.

As I packed up my things, my mind said one thing and my body another. Here we were in consulting, where we're made to believe long hours are what create impact, and here were two people showing me impact had nothing to do with how long I worked. I still had so much left to do; it made me nervous to close my laptop and walk away. At the same time, I knew they were right. My body was ready to move with the sun still shining over Toronto.

Three years later, still at Deloitte, it was 6 PM and I closed my laptop. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tarek, my junior consultant, walking toward my desk with his laptop open, ready to fire questions. I was ready to leave. I had just enough time to walk to my gym, change, and have a couple of minutes to spare before my 6:30 PM HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) class.

“Tarek, I can't answer your questions right now. I need to head out for my workout. You can email me everything and I'll take a look at it first thing tomorrow morning.”

While I walked toward the door, the thought “he is going to think of me as being difficult” was right there. I held my stance anyway.

I recognized myself in that moment, the new hire from three years earlier who believed everything was urgent, who needed people to see proof of my accountability by how fast I answered. I know now none of that was ever proven by a response at 6 PM. Whatever he needed could wait for the next morning.

Leaving at six was the easy part. However, telling people what happens to the unfinished work and accepting what they concluded about me was the weekly cost I needed to pay.

I do not want to hand blame to the system. Doing that gives it power over my life and takes away my agency to choose.

These days, the company is my own. Nobody has to catch me at my desk to test whether I'll leave. Whether the stop holds is entirely up to me now.

Right when summer started, I told my best friend, who's also my newsletter editor, I needed a vacation, an intentional break where I wasn't thinking about work. It didn't happen when I wanted it to, because of an unexpected loss in my family, then a full week of being sick.

What came right after was the joy of running Return to Yourself, a six-week program exclusively for a club out in Quogue, on Long Island, all summer long.

While my summer held plenty of breaks, I hadn't had the one I'd actually pictured with days completely free. So last Tuesday, as I sat down to write the first part of this letter, I opened my calendar and reserved six days. Friday before Labor Day weekend through the following Wednesday. The long weekend brought me luck. I didn't have to move any calls already on the books.

Most entrepreneurs will recognize this. Once you run your own business, weekends stop being the days off everyone else gets.

My last program held its sessions on Sundays. I reviewed and prepped work sessions on Saturdays. When I blocked six days for this break, the weekend inside it carried the same weight as any workday.

A couple of days later, my vacation block got tested three times. The first came fast: a new client enrolled in Take the Lead, claiming one of the 1:1 coaching spots I have available. She was eager to start and so was I, yet we scheduled the first call at the end of the following week, when I'd be back from my break.

Then a reader who'd signed up for a free 90-minute coaching session missed their initial appointment. I rescheduled them a week later too. A one week gap started to make me nervous. A week is not long. I just kept thinking about the calls being rescheduled again, and part of me wanted to move them up earlier in the week to avoid that gap.

The third test came on Friday itself. The owner of Studio 7 Pilates in Quogue asked if I'd lead one last HypnoBreathwork workshop on Labor Day. While in the past I would have jumped on the opportunity as a last hoorah, my inner voice reminded me, “That's work. What about your commitment?” I thanked him for the opportunity and politely declined.

It's normal to have doubts about how my rescheduling would be interpreted, or whether a decision like that could cost me something. The difference now is how quickly I catch it. I stayed faithful to the six days I'd already decided were mine, even with three good reasons to hand one of them back.

On Labor Day, I woke up early to meet a friend I hadn't seen in two years. We walked the beach for a long time, the water cold around our ankles, the sun warm on my face.

Victoria Grandury
CEO & Founder, Limitless Rebel
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