The problem with giving 100 per cent

'If you aim to give your whole self to everything, and to everyone, then what's left for you?' asks Natalie Lue, in this month's intergenerational conversation.

Welcome to the second instalment of Intergenerational Conversations, a new interview series on The Shoulds, where I interview someone at least a decade older or younger than me about the ‘Shoulds’ they have faced (and continue to face) in their lives, and how they navigate them.

If you’d like to catch the first incarnation of this series, you can check out my conversation with former magazine editor turned The Shift podcaster Sam Baker, where Sam spoke candidly about her decision to be childfree. This week, I speak to Natalie Lue, the 46-year-old author of The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People Pleasing, Reclaim Boundaries & Say Yes To The Life You Want.

An intergenerational conversation with Natalie Lue

If you aim to give 100 per cent of yourself to everything, and to everyone, then what's left for you?

That was a question Natalie asked of herself – and, well, all of us – in this interview. She took an everyday phrase and lifted it up to examine, in the process causing all the insidious little Shoulds beneath it to scuttle out and reveal themselves.

‘Give it 100 per cent!’ It’s a phrase we tell kids, in a lazy attempt at motivation. But what does it really mean, in practice? How do we really hear, and interpret it? Is it, giving away our whole selves in service to something, or someone?

Or maybe it means nothing at all (because how do you quantify a 100 per cent effort, really?). It’s pseudo-mathematical. It’s an impossible, abstract standard we subject ourselves to. It means whatever we want it to mean – and that seldom means, say, finish your task at a sensible time, and then take a break. We often think we have to have something to show for our ‘giving it 100 per cent’: hours of extra effort, physical or mental exhaustion, a promotion, a bonus, maybe even an actual medal.

I realised, after talking to Natalie, that giving it 100 per cent – for me – meant never feeling like anything I did, professionally or personally, was quite enough… because how could it be? Was that really what you call 100 per cent?, my inner critic would enquire, wide-eyed and innocent.

Anyway, that’s the spirit of this newsletter: taking apart these rules and mantras that guide our lives, and examining them to see whether or not they actually serve us. How many of these Shoulds do we beat ourselves with on a near-daily basis? And this one – epitomised by an innocuous phrase – went unnoticed, at least by me, until this conversation with Natalie.

In our full interview, she also speaks about breaking up with her mother aged 45 – a taboo subject, and yet one which I suspect many are grateful for her honesty about – she writes extensively on her Substack,

On Knowing Yourself

. We discuss the pressure she felt to be ‘more ambitious’ in the early years of her own motherhood, and her present struggle to figure out ‘her next big thing’, career-wise.

Here’s a list of Shoulds we unpack in this interview…

What’s a Should that you’ve let go of?

‘You should always give 100 per cent’

Putting effort into things has served me well, in a lot of ways. But there’s a flip side to this: I have often done too much, missing signals from my body that I need to stop.