The 70% Principle

I woke up dizzy and my first instinct was to cancel everything and write off the day. Then I remembered a lesson that took me years to learn: you don’t have to be at 100% to show up. This conversation is about the belief that quietly wrecks progress for a lot of us all-or-nothing thinking and the alternative that actually works in real life: the 70% principle.

We get into why so many of us were trained to only value perfect performance, and how that conditioning turns normal limits into shame. I talk through what 70% looks like in practice, including how to tell the difference between a “100% task” that truly needs your full focus and a “70% task” that still moves the ball forward without draining your reserves. We also confront the guilt voice the one that calls you lazy for resting and reframe your body’s signals as data, not character flaws. Sustainable productivity, resilience, and mental health aren’t built by burning at full speed every day; they’re built by working with your capacity and letting rest do its job.

Then I zoom out to the civic side, because resilience isn’t just personal. Communities suffer when people sit out because they don’t feel ready, qualified, or fully informed. Your 70% participation matters: a meeting attended, a vote cast, a message sent, a conversation started. An empty seat at the table isn’t neutral.

If you’ve been waiting to feel fully ready, take this as your nudge. Listen, pick one thing you’ve avoided because you weren’t at 100%, do the 70% version, and tell me what happened. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs permission to keep going, and leave a review so more people can find Surviving Changes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Good morning. Man, I woke up dizzy this morning. Like the room moving, body not cooperating, not the uh Saturday I planned type dizzy, right? My first instinct was to cancel everything, shut the laptop, pull up the blanket, write off the entire day. And then I thought new, not because I'm some

Waking Up Dizzy And Showing Up

SPEAKER_00 0:39

sort of productivity warrior who never rests, but because I know something that took me a long time to learn. You don't have to be at 100% to show up. 70% is enough to move. And sometimes, sometimes, your 70% does more good than most people's hundred. Ah. So here I am, dizzy and showing up. And that's today's episode. No. Hey everybody, it's hiding. Welcome to Surviving Changes. This is a show about navigating chaos, building resist uh resilience, um, and figuring out how to keep moving when life is doing its absolute most. And today I want to talk to you about something that I think is one of the most quietly destructive beliefs in our culture. The idea that if you can't give something a hundred percent, you shouldn't bother showing up at all. All or nothing. Full effort or no effort. Fully healed or stay home.

Why All Or Nothing Hurts

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Fully prepared, don't start. 100% or don't bother. And I want to gently, lovingly, but firmly tell that idea to sit down. Because that belief has cost people, it cost me more time, more opportunities, more progress than almost anything else I can think of. And today I want to offer you something different. The 70% principle. Here's what I've learned from a life spent navigating change. And I mean real change, the kind that shows up uninvited and rearranges everything. Progress doesn't require perfection, it requires presence. That's it. That's the whole thing. When I woke up dizzy this morning, I had a choice. The all or nothing voice was loud. And it said, you can't do the website today. You can't do the big strategic work you need to do getting stuff on Ingram Spark. You're not a hundred percent, so you should do nothing at all. And that voice was right about one thing. I'm not at a hundred percent today. But here's uh what the all or nothing voice always conveniently leaves out. I am 70. And 70% of Heidi on a dizzy Saturday morning on the couch can still record a podcast, can still move something forward, can still show up for the people who listen to this show and maybe needed to hear exactly this today. 70%'s not failure. 70% is showing up. I want to talk to you

What 70% Looks Like In Practice

SPEAKER_00 3:00

though about why so many of us have this all or nothing relationship with our own effort. Because I don't think it's accidental. I think it was taught. Think about the systems most of us grew up inside of school work, civic structures, family expectations. How many of those systems rewarded showing up imperfectly? How many of them said, hey, you gave 70% today and that matters? Almost none of them. What those systems rewarded was a hundred percent performance, the perfect grade, the flawless presentation, the employee who never had a day off, the community member who showed up every single time, fully on, fully prepared, never needing anything themselves. And what that teaches us over years and decades of reinforcement is that our value is conditional on our output, that we're only worth showing up when we can perform at full capacity. And that's a lie. A well-meaning possibly, but deeply embedded and incredibly damaging lie. Because life, real life, does not operate in 100% days. Real life operates in dizzy Saturdays and grief Tuesdays and anxious 3 a.m. Wednesdays and exhausted but still here Mondays. And if you only show up on your 100% days, you're going to miss a lot of your life. So let me tell you what 70% actually looks like. Let me get practical here. Because I think sometimes this sounds good in theory and then people aren't sure what it actually means in practice. Showing up at 70% doesn't mean doing sloppy work. It does not mean lowering your standards or phoning it in or pretending effort didn't matter. It means accurately assessing what you have available today. Not what you wish you had, not what you had last Tuesday. But deploying what you have today honestly and fully. For me this morning, 70% looks like this. The website, which requires focus and decision making back and forth, that's a hundred percent task. And I didn't have a hundred percent today. So I let that go without guilt. But this sitting with the microphone talking too honestly about what it feels like to not be at full capacity, this I could do. This I had. So this I did. And here's the key thing that I want you to hear. The podcast I record on my dizzy 70% Saturday might reach someone who needed it more than anything I would have recorded on a crisp, clear, fully caffeinated 100% day. Because it's real, because they can hear that I'm human. Because surviving changes isn't a polished performance, it's a practice. So ask yourself: what is your 70% task today? Not your 100% task, not the thing that requires everything you've got. What can you do with what you actually have? Right? Now there is the guilt piece. And I have to address this because I know it's sitting in the room, it's sitting here staring at me. Some of you, and honestly, myself, some of you have a really hard time giving yourself permission to operate at less than full capacity without a story attached to it, without guilt, without

The Guilt Voice And Old Scripts

SPEAKER_00 6:10

internal voice that says you're being lazy, you're falling behind, other people are doing more. I can still hear my dad yell at me that if I slept past 9 a.m., I was gonna be a bum forever. Now I had a law office, I fired a senator's daughter, I declined Obama's uh inauguration, I my office had Washington have to change laws twice, and I slept in past nine, and I still heard my fucking dad tell me that I was gonna be a bum the rest of my life. So can we talk about that voice for a second? That voice is not your conscience, it is not your wisdom. That voice is a survival mechanism that got confused along the way and started treating rest and limitations as threats instead of information. Bunch of crap, man. Your body telling you it's dizzy is not a character flaw. It's data. Your energy being lower than usual is not laziness, it's a signal. And here's something I really believe. The people who are most substainally productive, the ones who actually finish things, actually build things, actually contribute over the long haul, are not the ones who burn 100% every single day. They're the ones who have learned to read their own capacity honestly and work with it instead of against it. You cannot pour from an empty cup. I know that's almost cliche at this point, but it becomes cliche because it is profoundly and repeatedly true. 70% today means 100% is available sooner. Burning through reserves to perform today means you might be at 30% tomorrow, 20% the day after. Rest is not the opposite of productivity. Rest is what makes productivity sustainable. Now, I do want to talk about the civic angle. You know me, I can't um talk about resilience without connecting it to the bigger picture. So let me bring this to the community level for a moment. One of the things I write and talk about a lot in the context of civic engagement is this idea that people remove themselves from participation in their own communities

70% Civic Engagement Still Matters

SPEAKER_00 8:17

because they don't feel ready. They don't feel qualified, they don't feel like they have enough, not enough knowledge, not enough energy, not enough time, not enough credibility. And what happens? The seats stay empty, the meetings go unattended, the decisions get made without the voices that most needed to be in the room. This all or nothing thinking applied to civic life, and it's it's costing communities enormously. You don't have to be a policy expert to show up to city council meeting. You don't have to have a law degree to contact your representative. You don't have to be a professional organizer to talk to your neighbors about what's happening in your community. Your 70% civic participation, the comment you left, the meeting you attended, even though you were tired, the vote you cast, even though you didn't fully feel informed on every single issue, that participation matters. It moves the needle, it keeps the seat filled. Because an empty seat at the table is not neutrality, people. An empty seat is a vote for whoever shows up. Most of the time, their only qualification is they're the people that showed up. No, it gets us to the adapt. Don't crap. Let me bring this home. Adapt, don't crap. Today's version of that is this. Adapt to what you actually have. Not what you plan to have, not what you had last week, but what you have today. Today I have a dizzy head, a couch, and a microphone. And I'm adapting to that reality instead of crapping all over it by pretending today doesn't count.

Adapt Don’t Crap And Takeaway

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Because it doesn't look the way I wanted. Today counts. Your today counts. Whatever percentage you're running at right now, it counts. So show up with it. Do the 70% task. Move the thing forward even an inch. Because an inch forward is still forward. And forward, even dizzy, even tired, even uncertain, is still forward. And that's how you survive the changes. Now, before I go take a rest, which I'm absolutely doing after this, without guilt, without any guilt, daddy. Oh Pa. Here's your takeaway. Tonight or this weekend, I want you to ask yourself honestly, what is the one thing I have been um not doing because I wasn't at 100%. And then I want you to ask, what is the 70% version of that thing? And then I want you to do that. Just that. The 70% version. See what happens. Just see what happens. Come find me at survivingchanges.com. The books, the courses, all of it's there. If this episode hit home at all for you today, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Please. I'm Heidi. This is Surviving Changes. Make sure you adapt, don't crap.