Raise Your Standards

Raise Your Standards

What are personal standards?

It’s the way we have set to do anything based on our expectations. For example, my standard is to make time for myself every day, or to run at least 20 minutes in the treadmill every time I go to the gym, or to work at least 4 hours a day on my craft, or to make “X” amount of content for my site every day.

What does it mean to raise your standards?

It means to raise the bar for yourself, your life, your business. Turn your “should” into a “must”. As Tony Robbins said: “What changes people, is when their should becomes must”. Raising your standards means changing your mindset. Many people when they are trying to change their life, they are thinking like: “I should start doing more social activities”, or “I should start reading more often”, or “I should stop spending so much money on things I don’t really need.” NO! Your “should” isn’t enough for you to change and grow. For you to change, you MUST replace that word and start saying: I must do that XYZ thing…

I remember talking to one of my clients and he told me: “Jim I want to improve my communication with my team, to become more productive and more focused on our goal.” He wanted to raise his team’s standards. I asked him to rate his current situation from 1 to 10 and he replied with a 6. He spent some time visualizing his ideal situation, his ideal day with his team, how many hours they work, how it’s the environment, and how he’s feeling about it. After he finished describing me his ideal day, he had already found the goals he wanted to set. Now it’s the time for you to create your “must”. If you really want to improve your teamwork, your productivity or whatever it is that you want to improve, you must say to yourself: I don’t have any other option. I must do it.

There is something really important to keep in mind. You have to believe in your “must” and you have to transform your limiting beliefs around your “must”. Otherwise, it will remain just a “should”.  Say to yourself: “That’s enough! My limiting beliefs have offered me nothing, and I will start believing in myself.”

How to keep your standards high?

1. Control your environment

Your relationship with your coworkers, your family, your spouse, your friends, affect strongly your standards. If you are among people that they have high standards like you:

• they can help you reach and sustain those standards
• they will encourage you to “keep chasing” high standards

But be careful! Stay away from toxic people, people that they discourage you, and want you to fail because they will keep you down. As author Mandy Hale has said: “Refuse to lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.”

2. Keep track of your goals

Keep track of your goals with every detail. How do you feel about that change? What will you get from that? What changes you have to make in your lifestyle, in your routines to keep your standards high? Who are you when you have high standards? It’s very important to have something tangible, for example a journal, where you can check and remind yourself about the standards you have set.

“If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.”

― Anthony Robbins