A while ago, I was at a swim meet with my two kids. I happened to be standing near a group of coaches while some swimmers waited to debrief after their races. One of the coaches — who wasn’t from our club — turned to a swimmer and asked how she’d swum in the previous race. She immediately focused on the negative.

He listened for a moment and then asked her a simple question. “What’s your measure of success?”

“Times,” she replied shortly.

He nodded, paused, and then asked: “Did you really expect to swim your personal best on the final afternoon of a three-day meet?” This time, she hesitated. “No.” And then he asked her to think about what a better measure of success might be.

That conversation stayed with me. Because it made me think about the way we move through our own lives. All those days where we wake up feeling slightly off. Flat. Tired. Sore. Mentally overloaded. Not unwell — just not operating at our absolute best. And yet so many of us still expect peak performance from ourselves anyway. We keep the same expectations. The same workload. The same standards. We judge ourselves against our “best” days, even when the circumstances are completely different.

But maybe there are times when adjusting the measure of success isn’t failure at all. Maybe sometimes success is simply showing up. Getting through the day. Doing what we can with the energy and capacity we have available to us in that moment.

And maybe we’d all feel a little lighter if we allowed ourselves to measure success more honestly sometimes.