Happy New years! in this special episode, Maria Ceballos speaks with DE LA MORA Institute President Agustin De La Mora about the 4 agreements.
We wish you a very happy and productive 2021
Happy New years! in this special episode, Maria Ceballos speaks with DE LA MORA Institute President Agustin De La Mora about the 4 agreements.
We wish you a very happy and productive 2021
Welcome to subject to interpretation, a podcast, which takes us deep into the topics that matter to professional interpreters. I'm your host, Maria Sava Wallace. Welcome this program is recorded via zoom in both video and audio format. An article published in forms, Matt magazine in December of 2019, put the rates of failure for new year's resolutions at 80%, the top three reasons you may ask most people who make resolutions, aren't starting with the right foundation. That includes a willingness to change their consciousness, to be accountable to themselves and to face their fears of failure or even success. So as we bid farewell to 2020 and get ready to welcome a much anticipated new year, I've asked that Stein, that aorta to join me to talk about the knowledge interpreters can apply from the ancient Totex in order to be able to reach their fullest potentials. Welcome Aine.
Speaker 2:Hi Maria. How you doing? Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm thrilled to have you here. Aine. Let's set the stage today. We're going to talk about a book called the four agreements it's written by Don Miguel Reese. He's a renowned me, Mexican spiritual teacher who shares the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient tox. Tell us a little more about this book.
Speaker 2:Well, actually it it's a book that it was given to me a long time ago and, uh, I was surprised to find out actually that it was written originally in English, even though the author is Mexican. Uh, and the reason I found that out, uh, interestingly enough is because I said, well, I should read it in Spanish. And when I read in Spanish, it was clear to me that it was a translation, because I think that all of us become a little bit too picky about things that have to do with interpretation and translation. They said, oh, that's, that's a translation right there. So anyhow, uh, when I got it, I, I really liked it. It, uh, I connected with it in several levels and I personally enjoyed it. I remember, uh, buying several copies and giving them to my kids, especially my oldest. Uh, cause I thought it would be fruitful for them to read the, the book. So I found it, uh, very interesting practical, short, which is a very good, um, thing about a book for me anyhow, and it was not preachy, which is what I like the best. It did talk about personal commitment. It talked about a way to improve your performance personally. And then I found out that a lot of people liked it, you know, famous people, uh, talked about how well it had, uh, sat with them. So that was it. That's how I got introduced to the four agreements and I started applying them and it was much later than I realized maybe it has to do more with interpretation that I thought it did.
Speaker 1:So let's so before we go into what it can do for interpreters, let's talk a little bit about some of the main themes in the book. Uh, the book begins with the idea that we are socialized to have self-limiting beliefs that Rob us of the opportunity to experience things fully from our own perspective. And it also gives us an opportunity to review a code of conduct that we can use to transform our lives.
Speaker 2:Correct. And I actually liked that part very much so because he talked about, uh, how do you create your thoughts when you are a little kid and it tells about how you get socialized by hearing opinions. And when you hear an opinion, if you believe the opinion and accept the opinion, you create an agreement with that opinion, you agree with it. And once you agree with it, it becomes a norm for your behavior and conduct. And it's really interesting because I mean, there's authors all over the place. It has been said a million times about the fact that you are, what you think about, right. You know, Ford was, uh, very famous of saying, you know, if you think you are, whether you, where you think you are, where you think you can or whether you can, you'll be right, because your thoughts, this agreements that you make with yourself in your mind become the directives of your life. So it, that impacted me quite a bit. And then of course it gives you very simple steps. Like I said, one of the things I liked about the book is that it gave you super simple steps to follow, to have specific results pretty quickly immediately, if you wanted to about, uh, modifying behaviors that you thought were not, uh, changeable.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the principle premises in, in this book, especially about our framework, how we view the world and the prism by which we each conduct ourselves has to do with language, the symbol biology that makes the world goes a go around. And it also conditions us. You mentioned that a little bit earlier, but symbols and therefore words are culturally and socially bound and perhaps even biased, they're attached to norms, shoulds shouldn't and absolute truth that are relatives since languages don't use this, even though we might have an equivalent word for a tree in several languages, right. A tree doesn't necessarily have to symbolize the same thing to each culture. How, how does that affect our understanding of each other in communication?
Speaker 2:Well, it's, it's important. I mean, if you, if you read Fred Hernandez<inaudible> and I apologize, I don't speak French. So I might have murdered the last name, but when you study a little bit of Semitics you talk about, he talks about specific about the signs, right? A sign, the word, and the word has two parts, the signifier and the signified and the signify is the word itself. But the meaning changes so rapidly and it's affected by not only language, culture, age, et cetera. Right. We were in one of the conferences, uh, for interpret some years ago. And one of our colleagues was given a really interesting, um, presentation about this subject. And he said, you know, write down what you, uh, think about the word tip. And immediately everybody started writing down what tip is, you know, and of course we all spoke English and we all had, but the idea what tip meant and how it's interpreted was completely different in a group of a lot of linguists. And that tells you how important it is that it's not only the word itself, but it's meaning within the culture, within the, uh, parameters within, uh, the environment or where it's used. And that interested me a lot because in language, as we know, which is our tools, words, and language, how does that affect us? And I started thinking a lot about that, about this agreements that we've made about certain words that potentially don't have the same signified or meaning for different people, even though we believe they do.
Speaker 1:So that brings us straight into the first agreement, be impeccable in your use of words. Right? Let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Well, I, as I told you, before, I, it took me years, actually I read the book many times and it took me years to all of a sudden connect this idea of the four agreements. How does that, you know, kind of mesh with interpretation and the first agreement is be impeccable with your word and what does being impeccable means? You know, one of them is, do not sin, right? Impeccable, you don't sin. But the other one, the meaning of impeccable simply is that you are as exact with the meaning as it was before, when it was created. And I started thinking, Hmm, that's exactly what we have to do. Right? We have to be impeccable in the sense, not about, about sinning, but about being flawless. For me, being impeccable with your words as an interpreter means that when you're interpreting from one language to another, you have to be flawless, transferring the meaning and the word. And that's what it means for me to be impeccable with your word, when you're an interpreter that you are flawlessly transferring meaning.
Speaker 1:And when we talk about flawlessly transferring a meaning, um, things like register, for example, come into play very strongly because we may have a word that has, um, or a series of words, which have the same meaning, but they appear in all different kinds of registers, whether it's legalese, of course, or medical, um, jargon, or whether it's just, um, you know, street talk. And that's really, really important for us interpreters, isn't it for us to really be present and identify what is actually being said. So we choose the most appropriate word, not just any word,
Speaker 2:Correct. I mean, if you compare the code of ethics for interpreters in, in whether it's legal medical, one of the cans of the code interpreters, oftentimes the first one is accuracy and completeness, which is the first agreement be impeccable with your words. So you see when, when I realize that I go, Hmm, this me perfectly, I wonder what happened with the others. And it turns out that all of the agreements are very applicable to us as interpreters and mesh very well with our code of ethics.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about the second agreement. Don't take anything personally that can be looked at in several different ways. Mm-hmm
Speaker 2:<affirmative> of course. And, uh, I, you know, I you're right, but there's two things that I have, uh, heard from interpreters. And one of them is what if I'm hearing this horrible narration of somebody who's a victim of a crime, or is a relative of a victim of a crime? Well, if you take it personally, you, all of a sudden are outside your, your job as an interpreter, you might not be as effective as you could, especially because as you know, when we teach interpretation at the Institute, we talk about visualization as a very important tool to improve performance in consecutive. And it Dawn on me. Oh, how important it is to remember that you are visualizing, but more like a movie. And not as, even if you are the protagonist, you have to learn to separate that movie, that visual interpretation of what you're hearing into something that is not personally affecting you. So even if you, at the end, cause after all, as an interpret, you're gonna say, and then he stabbed me four times.
Speaker 1:<laugh> yeah, you're internalizing that. That's
Speaker 2:Right. So you have to keep it away. You can't take it personally because if you do, you're probably gonna get emotionally attached and you're no longer being objective and you might no longer be impeccable with your words, which would be a violation of the first agreement. And one of the cans of the code of ethics.
Speaker 1:It's interesting to me, as I said earlier, that you can interpret the idea of not taking things personally, a couple of different ways. Mm-hmm<affirmative> another way is that since interpretation is so subjective, it's entirely possible that your version of an interpretation and my version of an interpretation are completely different and still, um, render the same meaning from the original language. Of course,
Speaker 2:Of course,
Speaker 1:I always find it interesting that interpreters don't cut themselves enough slack in their work. And they try to judge themselves by what they have heard from other people, or they listen to other people's comments and those comments may or may not be ill informed. And that affects their self knowledge, their self confidence, their ability to problem solve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually it's a good point. And first of all, this idea of subject to interpretation came because of, because of this feeling about the subjectivity of interpretation. Now it depends. I mean, there's two theories about it. I think that it's not so much subjective as it's varied. And what I mean by that. And I often tell my students bottom line is you still have to be impeccable with your words. So you have to transmit the meaning correctly, but you can use several ways to convey the same meaning. And I say often interpreting is not like ATIC right where you have to go. One plus one is to another way, because an interpretation there's several correct ways to solve any linguistic problem, which is what we do as interpreters. Right? So yes. Uh, we have to incorporate the idea that because another interpreter says it differently. That doesn't mean that you're wrong. That means that you're taking a different path to get to the same place. Um, and yes, we are exposed to some people that are not even interpreters that have, uh, limited knowledge of one of the languages or the others or what we do for a living and intervene and sometimes very forcefully, right. And I've had interpreters say, well, the attorney interrupted me and said, blah, blah, blah. And yes, we have to learn to not take that personally, either to stay in your role as a professional interpreter and you know, and they have their opinion and they, and by the way, don't take it personally because there is a possibility you could be wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is, that is true. That is true. I, I like to remind people that, that since everyone is interpreting through their own prism, which is how we started talking about the symbol biology and the culture and the social aspects, everyone will see things differently. It's, it's even people, two people in the same family will see things differently and they have grown up together. They're in the same culture, et cetera. It's interesting, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Sure. Yes. And when we are interpreting, uh, we are exposed to different uses of the same words. And again, that doesn't mean that we are better or the other ones are better. It' just, it happens to be a different approach to the same. And what I think is important to keep in mind is that you always, if you are a professional interpreter, you're gonna interpret, you're doing your job correctly. You'll arrive to the same, um, place, which is a correct interpretation of, of that linguistic problem. Whether you got here through this way or through this other way. And also we have, especially because you and I are mainly legal interpreters, uh, we tend to forget sometimes that we are in an adversarial situation where even if it's not necessarily true, that you made a mistake, some of the participants of that adversarial situation might use this perceived subjectivity to advance their cause. Whether, whether it affects you personally or not, because they're there to do their job, which happens to be different from what you do as an interpreter. So yes, stay, uh, focused on not taking things personally is very, very important. Cause sometimes we get combative, you know, and I've had at least a couple situations where one of our colleagues gets so offended about something that was told to them that they react inappropriately, even though they were actually wrong. And it would have been a lot easier to say the interpreter stands corrected rather than fighting and taking it personally.
Speaker 1:Now, as far as subjectivity is, is concerned, one way to make sure that you are not acting, um, subjectively whether it's consciously or unconsciously is not to make assumptions. That is the third. Um, that is the third agreement, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, it is. It don't make any assumptions. I think that the, the biggest issue here is that as interpreters, we tend to assume all the time that we understood what was said to us. And we also assume that people understood us. And that's a challenge for interpreters because any assumption to that effect might be a, create a difficult situation. That again, might cause you to not be backable with your words because you assumed something that was not true. And I think ambiguity is a perfect example to talk about, right? Uh, these assumptions, because there's many, uh, situations as an interpreter and you know that you assume that somebody that you assume you're correct. And, uh, when I talk to monolingual people, I, uh, who often assume that, Hey, you know, to be an interpret, you have to do is say one word from one language to that's it. So I, I ask them, uh, well, what if, uh, the doctor says to you, for instance, that is very, very important that you get this treatment that could save your life, but it's important that you do it biweekly and ask people, what does biweekly mean? You're you don't even need to don't tell me in another language, tell me your own language. English. What does bilingual, I mean, biweekly mean,
Speaker 1:Does it mean every other week? Does it mean twice a week? Does it mean twice a month? What does it mean?
Speaker 2:Exactly. And all of a sudden you get three answers and I go, so which one is the correct one? Right. But as interpreters, you have to, we have to be aware of that, those ambiguities, because they happen all the time. Mm-hmm<affirmative> what does a couple mean? And I don't mean a couple of like two people that are, uh, as a couple, which is another meaning, but we were with a couple of friends. If you're an interpreter, do you interpret that as too,
Speaker 1:Or a
Speaker 2:Few, a few? And if you make assumptions, you might interpret incorrectly.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Make assumptions.
Speaker 1:I wanted, I wanted to, um, share this with you, cuz it's really, it it's interesting. This was actually in the book and we, it alluded to the fact that as we go through life and we communicate in, in, or in, in interactions, we try to anticipate the behaviors and the language and the interactions we're going to have with other people. And that's kind of a, a, a, some kind of social contract that we have. We, you know, hello, Aine, how are you? And then you're going to reply presumably, um, with a greeting as well. But when we are uncertain, we fill in the gaps because we are expecting things to perhaps go a certain way. And that's something that interpreters can ill afford to do. Right?
Speaker 2:A absolutely. I, and again, this is why, when we talk more about interpretation, it's clear for people that is not as easy as it sounds because on, on one hand, you're absolutely right when you anticipate and you assume, you know, you know, the famous saying in English about assuming so, but on the other hand, we teach a technique called prediction,
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Right. So as interpreters, especially this simultaneous mode, one of the techniques you use is to predict what comes next. But if you predict that you're violating your third agreement or not, and, and that very, uh, important balance between not assuming incorrectly, but being able to, uh, project or, or predict what's coming is, is an important thing. And it's important technique to learn. So we don't assume. And I think the biggest issue for interpreters is that by not assuming you have to take the responsibility, that if you're not sure, or if there's a possibility that you're not correcting your assumption that you must ask.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And then that opens the door to many new interpreters of, well, I don't want to interrupt the judge or I don't want to interrupt the attorneys. Right. Well, but if you really stick to the fourth agreement, I mean the third agreement, I apologize, the third agreement says, don't assume anything. So you don't take an, a, you don't make a choice or you don't guess based on your assumptions, because then you're not complying with the third agreement and the code of ethics, which I keep on coming back to. Uh, and I invite all of the people who are listening to us. If you have a chance, just go and read the four agreements, at least the actual agreements, if not the whole book, and then find them in your code of ethics. And you're gonna see that they almost go hand in hand,
Speaker 1:Well, that takes us straight into the fourth agreement, which mm-hmm,<affirmative> actually the first three agreements do not work without the fourth agreement. Right. Right. And that is to always do your best,
Speaker 2:Always do your best. And as an interpreter, I often say, we're always climbing a stairway, right. We're looking to go. Uh, and I talk about the most important things. I think it interpret has to understand. And the first commitment is the precision of transferring. And, but you're always shooting for the most elegant solution. You talked about, uh, register, uh, you talk about the tone of voice and all these things that, but we have to understand that are first, at least the way I see it is the first thing that we have to do is to precisely convey the meaning. But because you always have to do your best, you keep on climbing that stairway to become precise, economic and elegant. And what I mean by elegant is not necessarily that it sounds, you know, like, oh, you speak like the King's, uh, uh, English, but because in my opinion, elegant could be even because it's the same register, the same impact of the original. And that's a very elegant interpretation. So we always do our best. And I say, for us, that's a stairway to heaven. We're never gonna stop learning or acquiring information about, uh, uh, being better at our job.
Speaker 1:Now, when you do your best, this is interesting. Very, very interesting to me. Um, reading it, you don't give the judge now that judge can be your internal judge, that judge can be other people that, I mean, that judge can be anyone, a little voice behind in the back of your head to find you the opportunity to find you guilty when you perform your best, then you have, there's no question that you have done the best with what you have. And if perhaps you fail in that case, then you will have to learn from it and figure out what to do about it. But you certainly haven't, haven't given it, you know, half a half effort.
Speaker 2:Right? Right. You still did your best. And that's important as an interpreter to recognize that doing your best might still not be enough. And we have to recognize interpretation is a human endeavor and therefore imperfect. As far as I know, nobody can interpret a hundred percent, right. A hundred percent of the time. So what we strive for as interpreters is consistently perform at a high level. And that's why you're always striving to do your best, being your best, doing your best every day doesn't mean that you're the best, but that you're striving to be the best.
Speaker 1:It's also, um, been noted that a person is at their best when they're enjoying what they're doing. And when they, they are, they feel like they're in their element. They're one with whatever, um, endeavor they're working at, as opposed to it being a performance based task. If you are just one, if you're just worried about, or just doing it because you have to, because there's a paycheck at the end of the road, et cetera, you can probably come up with a competent interpretation, but overall it's not really going to, um, reflect your best efforts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I, I don't think I had ever worded it that way, but that's a very good, uh, way of putting it. And I'm happy to say that most people that I know in the field really enjoy interpreting, and I believe that the really good interpreters must enjoy it first. Um, I remember telling somebody a long time ago, man, I got hooked as soon as I started interpreting. And it was really enjoyable and a little bit in on the cynical part. I said, you know, I get paid to be a VOE, you know, to hear people's lives and successes and tragedies and everything because, uh, you're there, you're part of the conversation and you're there and you actually got paid to do it. So I think it's a very good thing to remind interpreters. This is one of those things that you really have to enjoy, uh, to really do your best. It's, it's not a bureaucratic job. It really isn't. And I think the more, uh, people started getting tested as interpreters. We could see that divide between the people who just took it. Hey, you know, I do this, I come in, I interpret, I go home and that's it. And I'll do as little as possible because it's a bureaucratic job when their performance was evaluated. Many of them were not up to par. So yes, you definitely have to do your best by enjoying what you do.
Speaker 1:And, and, and one of the, the key, I guess, the, the core tenets of your teaching strategy and your teaching philosophy is that practice isn't doing. And so in order to be your best, you can't just go and repeat the same thing over and over again, with hoping to have a different result. As we know, you need to practice as much as you can. And that requires patience and it requires sometimes failure.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When you, uh, we talk a lot about it in the Institute about the difference between being in your performance zone, which is when you're concentrating what you already know how to do, and you have mastered versus when you're in a learning zone. And when you're in your learning zone, you actually expect to make mistakes. So you can understand and improve that mistake by knowing about it. So, yes, it's, uh, it's crucial actually to have the separation and understand, yes, we're gonna have some mistakes and some failures, no question about it. The difference is what you do with them. That's why practice by itself is not what creates perfect deliberate practice does.
Speaker 1:And, and the one final point I wanted to make about when you are doing your best is that it is really, really critical that you practice self care, because you have to be honest with yourself about where you are, what you need to do. Um, you also need to practice self care in terms of fatigue level and workload. Perhaps if you do not do that, then you, you actually can't do your best. Can you,
Speaker 2:You cannot. And also you go back to the third agreement, you know, and, and, and all of the agreements and self care is part of not taking things personally, in the sense of, oh, no, I have to do this no matter if I die. Right. Um, so you have to, uh, practice self care. It's a very important area of our profession that I think is just now starting to be even talked about, uh, cuz I remember it when I started this business 30 years ago, it, it was actually the opposite self care was, Hey, I'm macho, I'm an interpreter. I can do this for 17 hours straight. And I, I I'll brag about it. Right. And the reality is we know now and studies show that if you do that, yeah, you might be very natural, but you're not doing your best. And certainly you probably are not being impeccable with your words because now you're making mistakes. You don't even realize due to fatigue.
Speaker 1:That's right. And, and it turns out that, um, Don Ru um, didn't stop at four agreements. Although that particular book ends with four agreements, he actually came up with a fifth agreement. Do you remember what that one is?
Speaker 2:<laugh> well, how about you? Tell us what the fifth agreement is.
Speaker 1:Well, it's the one that I like to call trust, but verify, but it's a little more, um, sophisticated than that. It's be skeptical, but learn to listen. In other words, what you see in your mind, what your mind perceives is not the absolute reality. And it may also not be what others see
Speaker 2:Of course, and you know, those famous filters that, that, uh, the Miguel Reese talks about that says, you know, you hear opinion, accept opinion. You make an agreement and your agreement filters information. And if you are convinced that this is true, or this is not true, or this is one way or the other, that definitely is, is gonna give you a different perspective or a different view. And, and so trust would verify something that I say a lot, I think is attributed to Ronald Reagan as far as, uh, making it popular. I don't know if he came up with it or not. I don't even know if he really said that a lot, but sounds good to me. And trust would verify, really applies a hundred percent to interpreters because I think if you don't follow that fifth agreement, if you don't realize that. Yeah. Uh, I think that that's true, but just let me check. You make a lot of mistakes and we hear this, uh, constantly when interpreters have made the same mistake over and over again, because they're a hundred percent convinced that they're doing it right. And they have never verified it. And you know, we, we hear that, uh, with words and we are certain approaches that became even part of the vernacular for interpreters that, uh, years later we found out, Hmm. Maybe that was not the exact way of saying that, but it just became popular. I said, nobody bothered to check.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the reasons why I love this book and the these agreements that we're talking about is because you can actually look at the agreements in so many different ways. And the fifth agreement for me is also, um, I can also, I also look at it in the sense that you must not, um, jump on any bandwagon just because you heard it. In other words, if you are interpreting in a medical encounter or any type of encounter, just because you're hearing one story doesn't necessarily mean that that is the only side of the truth. And really you should not get bound and caught up and you should learn to listen so that you can remain objective.
Speaker 2:Yep. That's it. That's it. I like it.
Speaker 1:<laugh> so how do we, okay, so, so how do we break these agreements? Um, how do we make the new agreements sticks? They say that we need to use the same power to break an agreement that we use to make it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the first agreement for me in that sense is the most important. And, um, Stuart wild always said the, the objective of the discipline is don't make an agreement unless, you know, you want to do it. And I, you started at, at the beginning by saying, you know, how many of the new year resolutions are broken? And I ha I I'm convinced that it has to do with people saying, I'm gonna do this or not do that, or stop doing this, et cetera, because they haven't been able to. And because they think they have to, but they really are not convinced they're not being impeccable with their words to themselves. So I tell people, uh, myself included, don't make an agreement. If you are not have the dis, you're not gonna have the discipline to stick to it. And an agreement should be something that you agree to, not that you force yourself to do. And my guess is, that's why most of these new year's resolutions are broken because, and, and many of them start with nos, which for me, that's already a problem, right? I'm not gonna eat donuts anymore. Well, good luck if you have been eating them for 60 years. Right. Right. Uh, so being impeccable with your word means, are you gonna keep your word to yourself as a discipline? And if not, then you shouldn't commit to it.
Speaker 1:And it would probably be helpful to take stock and inventory of what you believe your current agreements are and what the agreements you would like to replace those with are so that you actually have a roadmap,
Speaker 2:Correct? Correct. You have to see what are your filters now and what do you really want, want to, and I think that's the first one, what do you want to do? And you have to be impeccable with it.
Speaker 1:And just in the same vein, as we talked about earlier, um, that practice is really key to learning new behaviors and to learning new skills. You also have to practice forgiveness if you don't get it right the first time. Right.
Speaker 2:Right. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Aine. Tell us how this book has helped you in your career as an interpreter.
Speaker 2:Well, um, in many ways, first of all, to organize my thoughts as to how to interpret in court, but also how to teach people. I, I like being an interpreter. I, I said it many times I might be a competent interpreter, but my real calling is to train others and to share with them. And so when I go back to the four agreements, I go, well, first of all, if I'm gonna be Impec with my worst, then I walk the talk. Um, there's, uh, many people out there doing training for interpreters that I know of. And some of them don't interpret anymore. And some of them don't attend conferences anymore because, Hey, I'm already here. I don't need to, I don't need to. Right. And so for me, being impeccable with my word as an interpreter has to be, I walk the talk. So it has helped me to constantly remember, I am, I'm committed to that, this job that I have to continue to do it also has helped me a lot to not take it personally, because especially teaching people, wow, you get a lot of kudos and you get a lot of criticism too, right? Mm-hmm<affirmative> and people, your competitors or your non competitors, uh, will attack you personally, even though you didn't have anything to do them personally with them personally. Um, so not taking things personally, obviously has, uh, impacted me and always doing my best. And I'm always climbing that stairway
Speaker 1:As far as doing your best. I once wrote a quote, which was really apropo. It says that success is like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit. When the gorilla is tired,
Speaker 2:That's a very good quote. Yeah. I, I like saying your best is always gonna change because, you know, we equate our training with weight lifting. And if you've ever done any weightlifting, of course, you don't start every time you're looking for a new best. You might start with five pounds and you work it until it becomes too easy. And then you go to 10 and 15 and 20. So your best is always gonna be defined by where are you on that stairway? So you're never gonna stop getting your doing your best. That's why I like that. Being the best ever as a goal, just like Steven Hawkin once said was as what is your goal in life? And he told the interviewer, my goal is the complete understanding of the universe.
Speaker 1:Wow. Which is
Speaker 2:A fantastic goal. He might never get there. And he said it, I might never get there, but I'm always striving to get there. So this doing your best is always climbing this stairway. And it's gonna change because what was impossible for you some weeks or months ago before your training is no longer impossible.
Speaker 1:And in the imortal words of Charles Schultz, the creator of peanuts life is like a 10 speed bike. Most of us have gears. We never use.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely true.<laugh>, that's absolutely or not even know how to use.
Speaker 1:And we didn't even know they were there. Right. And that's, and I think this is, this is in, in the end, this is what we wanna leave our viewers and our listeners with mm-hmm<affirmative> with, um, the inspiration that you do have the tools that you need. And if you don't have them, you can get them. There's a
Speaker 2:New agreement,
Speaker 1:Make a new agreement and you can get them, I will say, thank you so very much for joining us today. Um, I wish you a happy new year.
Speaker 2:Thank you. And, and to all the, the listeners and anybody who has followed us in the past, thank you very much for your support. I know you mentioned it at the beginning 2020 was not the best year, but then again, it was. And, uh, we hope everybody is safe and healthy and we're all shooting for a much better 20, 21. So happy new year to everybody.
Speaker 1:Thank you everybody for joining us on this last episode of subject to interpretation for 2020, we know it's been a difficult year for all. And we look forward to moving past difficult and painful experiences and learning from them in 2021. I'm Maria Wallace. And on behalf of the team here at Del LAMODA Institute for interpretation, I wish you renewed and continued health and peace for the coming year.