The Way You Do Anything, Is The Way You Do Everything

I heard the phrase “The Way You Do Anything, Is The Way You Do Everything” for the first time long before it became a self-help cliché, printed on mugs and dentist-office posters. I heard it from my parents, on our living room floor, on a yoga mat.

This was back when a yoga studio wasn't on every corner. My parents practiced years before it became fashionable, and they practiced at home, in our living room, because there wasn't really anywhere else to go. I grew up watching them roll out their mats, and what stuck with me wasn't the poses. It was the unfolding.

They didn't just throw the mat down and get on with it. There was a way to unfold it: intentional, unhurried, the same way every time. They'd talk about how the placement of a hand mattered in yoga poses, how the angle of a foot mattered, how you could tell everything about someone's state of mind by watching how carelessly or carefully they set up. "The way you do anything is the way you do everything," my mom would say, usually right as I was about to fling my own mat down and skip straight to the part I wanted to get to.

I didn't get it then. I get it now.

The mat is never just the mat

The thing about that lesson is it doesn't stay in the room you learned it in. Once you've seen someone unfold a yoga mat like it matters, you start noticing every other place where people skip the unfolding. The email sent without a second read. The meeting that starts without an agenda because "we all know what it's about." The knife left dull in the drawer because sharpening it feels like one more thing.

None of these are really about mats, or emails, or knives. They're about whether you've decided that the small, unglamorous, nobody's-watching part of a thing is worth doing right. My parents weren't trying to teach me a productivity hack. They were showing me that care isn't something you switch on for the parts of life that feel important. Either you have it, or you don't, and it shows up everywhere, whether you intend it to or not.

Slowing down is not the same as being slow

There's a version of "slow down" that sounds like an excuse for inefficiency, and that's not what I mean. Someone who unfolds their mat with attention isn't wasting time, they're arriving. The unfolding is the transition from whatever came before into the thing they're about to do. Skip it, and you're just going through the motions of a practice you never actually entered. As our friend and fellow coach, Sasha Laundy, wrote in her testimonial for our book, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” That's true of a lot more than yoga. It's the five minutes of setup that make the next fifty minutes effortless. The prep work nobody sees. The sharpening before the cutting. It rarely shows up in the highlight reel, and it's usually the entire reason the highlight reel is possible.

Where the knives come in

Mathias and I have our own version of this, and it happens to be knives. We geek out about them, probably more than is reasonable, on the latest episode of our podcast. Good knives, kept well, are a small daily ritual that either gets your full attention or doesn't. Or, in my case, my knives that Mathias noticed weren’t sharp when he was cooking in my kitchen! Once you start paying attention to how you treat your knives, you start noticing the same pattern everywhere else, in how you run a meeting, how you give feedback, how you show up for the people counting on you. You also appreciate having the right tool for the job.

That's really what this post and our latest podcast episode is about. Not yoga mats specifically, and not knives specifically. It's about the small unfolding moments we all have, the ones easy to rush past, and what it might mean to actually be present for them.

We thought this episode would be a fun detour for this season. A light and fun topic that we enjoy talking about. It turns out that kitchen knives have everything to do with leadership, and we are now planning to have one “random” episode each season going forward!

Everything is the small thing

So here's the invitation, and it's a small one: pick one small thing in your life you've been doing carelessly or that is bringing unnecessary tension into your life. Not because it matters on its own, but because of what fixing it might reveal about everything else you're doing carelessly too. Unfold the mat properly. See what else gets sharper.

If you want to hear Mathias and I talk about kitchen knives far more seriously than is reasonable, check out the latest episode of The Intentional Organization Podcast.

The header photo for this post is Mathias and I at the Stay Sharp knife shop in Montreal. A great store! We were there earlier this summer to record the audiobook version of our book (which we’ll be releasing in September). And yes, knives were purchased.