A standard is a level of quality or attainment used as a measurement. It is something that a person, or an organization is continuously striving to meet and uphold. Whether it's an individual or team trying to meet a set of expectations that leads them to reaching the goals that they set for themselves with the whole purpose of maintaining high quality and consistency that leads to results. Striving for high standards helps you soar.
It provides a clear understanding of what is required by those to choose to uphold that standard. It's one thing to know where you're going and knowing how to get there is the other part. Can you imagine trying to get to a destination you have in mind with no clue on how to get there. That standard is a roadmap of how to get to that destination that you're trying to reach. It’s processed based so you know what actions need to be taken.
Falling short of the standard that is set jeopardizes the results that you are trying to produce. If you look at many highly successful people or organizations, they set a high standard for themselves that clearly defines the actions that they need to take. Things such as the amount of effort that they give each day and the consistency with which they operate allows them to get better and build upon the things that they've worked for. It tells them what is acceptable and what is not, so they know what exactly to focus on.
The daily process of upholding that standard gives an indication of the trajectory you're on whether you get to the goals that you set for yourself. If you look at a company like Domino's Pizza where they set the standard of guaranteeing 30-minute delivery for all orders placed within 30 minutes, this signals to the customers that they can count on the company to come through and further gains their trust that leads to increased returning customers. For this to be done everything in preparing, making, and delivering the food needs to be done in a consistently efficient manner. That standard that they set for themselves means they know exactly what they're striving for each and every day.
But when you have low standards or no standards at all it's going to be reflected in the results that are produced. It can make it feel like you don't know where you stand, or uncertainty really starts to cloud your focus. This can make it feel like you're just stuck in the situation you're in, becoming frustrated and confused about why things are not progressing as the way you might have hoped. But hope without a vision just leads to longing for something more but not understanding how to make it happen.
To be excellent at whatever you choose to do, set high standards because that is what you will eventually get. Low standards will produce below average results because that is what will be accepted, but with high standards it drives you to be better and do better in everything you. The quality of our lives reflects the standards that we set for ourselves and while we may fall short of those standards at times, it at least gives us something that we're constantly striving for. The more consistently you can do that, the better the quality of life you'll have.
Benefits of standards
Setting standards for yourself, especially high ones, are that it removes the things weighing you down from your life. This is particularly true when it comes to people as those that really want to be in your life will rise to the standards that you have. Those standards that you set serve as a filter of the things that pass through will be that of high quality. This does not mean that you are snobby or feel like you a better than, but your standards help you recognize that your time is limited and is phasing out the things that are not serving you well.
Why should you lower your standards to fit in? In the end it's going to save you so much time because you won't be messing around with mediocrity. In a case like this it's almost like addition by subtraction, because you're removing those things that are holding you back kind of like limitations, you're breaking free from it.
It also improves your confidence because you know the things that you're continuously striving for. When you know this, it gives you a clear understanding of what you're ultimately working towards. This gives you a sense of purpose that drives you to operate with a higher sense of conviction and direction of where your life is going. It makes you pick up the pace that gives you greater urgency to do more.
The more you do, the more confidence you gain because you’ll reflect and see the consistent effort that you have put in. Eventually this leads to major breakthroughs throughs that build on so many accomplishments. It's not all about achieving what's at the end of the journey but it's everything that comes along with it because with each step you take the more confidence you gain that strengthens who you are and what you can do. Your satisfaction will come from growth that continues to push you for the next thing that stretches you beyond your limits.
Eventually your goals will become a lot clearer because you have a set way of how you do things. This set way accustoms you to focusing on the details that are going to make the difference. So as opposed to having general goals, you'll be more dialed into specifics of what you're aiming for. A very general goal is to want to lose weight and live healthy, but having a standard for yourself will take it a step further by saying I want to lose 24 pounds in 12 weeks losing approximately 2lbs a week by eating well balanced meals that includes lots of fruits and vegetables consuming about 1,600 calories per day and exercising 40 minutes five days a week.
This elevates your drive to do things with excellence because you set milestones along the way that are clearly defined. It's almost like a step by step method on how to get the results your striving for. You map out your plan and execute on it, making you enjoy seeing how things play out.
Another thing is it holds yourself more accountable. The defined metrics that you put in place for yourself helps you to operate within a framework so you remain on track. If you fall outside of that framework, it becomes a lot more obvious that you're not doing what you set out to do and you'll be more willing to self-police. One thing's for sure, having a standard for yourself and upholding it right away starts to make you more accountable.
Accountability can lead you to take initiative that will ascend you to new heights. You break free from someone needing to hold your hand to being your own person and setting things that you need to get done. When you're able to operate with this sort of autonomy everything around you seems like it's at your disposal because too many people are sitting on the sideline waiting for things to come to them. It can make you feel like you're flying when you were once walking to get to your destination.
Because that standard removes the things weighing you down from your life it will attract people who align with your standard because they’ll see what you hold yourself and others to. This is going to make you stronger as it's going to build momentum in the direction you're ultimately working towards. It's going to help you all come together and hold each other accountable for the better. Through being united for a common cause you form strong bonds that gives you a greater sense of community.
Knowing that you have people in your corner creates an atmosphere of excellence that can rub off onto others. This can have a ripple effect that furthers the vision and the goals that you all share. What is gained is collaboration and comradery that can yield truly spectacular results. If you think of yourself and others as individual fingers on your hand, coming together can make a fist and knock things out. Together you get more accomplished that spring you forward by leaps and bounds as opposed to just individually moving in the same direction.
Understand yourself
Before you start to set your standards first come to understand yourself by knowing your behaviors. Understanding the things that motivate you and the things that are off putting are going to help you figure out the things you're ultimately striving for. What's great about all these high performing individuals and organizations is that they have different standards that work for them. They are very specific to the things that they're trying to accomplish.
While it's extremely difficult to try to be the best at every single category, we all can specifically do certain things with extreme precision and accuracy when we know our target. We all have different strengths and weaknesses and when we can come to understand what they are we can better leverage the skills we have and manage some of our deficiencies to work for us. By understanding yourself more you can find what standard specifically is going to work well for you.
Another thing to understand is how much respect you have for yourself. This is going to be key when it comes to upholding that standard, especially during those tough times. We all will experience disagreements and different viewpoints amongst each other and it's going to be important to stand by your values through your words and actions. The more you're able to stand by them the more respect you have for yourself.
When it comes to those times of disagreements with others you can respectfully be yourself in opposition that clearly defines where you stand and know that it's OK to walk away as there's no need to try to prove how much strength you have to others. The more self-control you have, the better you can navigate through some unsettling situations. Conforming to others is going to make it difficult to know and create your own standards. Hopefully the goal is to create the life that you want and that comes from defining what is most important to you.
Knowing what you want
Identifying what you like, interests, beliefs, ideals, goals, and dreams are great starting points to think about to find what you want to work towards. If you get excited about the things you are focused on, the process will be more enjoyable. There are so many avenues you can take; you just must give it some thought. Something to have in mind is, what are the things that you need to experience in your life that would make it that much more memorable. What would you like to happen in your life can give you an idea of the things that you envision.
A great exercise to just let your thoughts flow is to do a voice recording of the things that you're pondering or write it out so you can later review them for insight. Maybe even ask somebody who knows you very well what they hear you talk about a lot because sometimes we are unaware of what that is. Their perspective can give you an outside look of where your attention might be going to. Giving yourself the time to do this allows you to take a step back to see the vast opportunities all around you.
If you have so many different thoughts going through your mind and are not sure what really to pursue just go ahead and pick one and start doing it. If you come to find out you don't like it you can always try something else, but at least the more you try the more you come to really figure out if that's something you want to go ahead with and you can take certain aspects of it to figure out how you're going to incorporate that into the standard you set for yourself.
Whatever it is try, there's no rush in needing to figure out exactly right now what your standard should be. Take different pieces from the experiences you gain and see what you will apply going forward. Say yes to new things as it can open a new world of opportunity that will expand your horizons. What you want to avoid is overthinking to the point of not doing anything. This only creates more uncertainty that's going to make it difficult for you to know the things that you're trying to strive for.
Defining your standards
After knowing what you want, you can begin to define your standard. One of the first things to set is attitude. This might seem like it's unnecessary but if you don't, emotions can take over that will dictate your actions. By being able to set the specific attitude that you're striving for, it's going to help hone in your thinking. An example could be focusing on what can be done instead of what can’t, or focusing on the things within your control and not worrying about what you can't affect.
This helps you to reframe your thinking to empower you as opposed to all the things that can go wrong. Knowing the type of attitude you want makes you more aware of the attitude you currently have so you can work to close the gap between them. Being unaware of the two will make it difficult to get a handle on things to work for you and instead be more prone to reacting to situations not being able anticipate problems that arise that could have been handled well or avoided.
Once you set the attitude you’re striving for, set the behaviors you want to incorporate because eventually they will become habits. When things go wrong have a preset way of how you're going to behave when that comes about. A common thing that happens when things don't go according to plan is getting angry, you're looking to blame for why things happened.
You can condition yourself to behave a certain way by delaying reacting taking a walk to clear your head or taking deep breaths to help you get in a more level state of thinking. This is going to help override that default mode of going into negativity. It’s almost like you’re funneling your excess energy to work with the current of the stream, being nimble and adaptable instead of fighting the resistance of it.
We all are going to have different degree of standards that very quite a bit and others not so much, but some helpful things to incorporate into defining your standards is being early to appointments and meetings, being prepared, being properly dressed, taking care of your health. These types of things set the tone for how you go about your everyday life. It's going to attract the right type of people that you ultimately want to be around. The more you take these types of things seriously, the more you will take yourself seriously as well. This will have a ripple effect to the things that you say so when you tell yourself you're going to do something it means you're going to do it because you take yourself seriously enough to get it done.
Whatever you define your standard as write it down and place it somewhere where you can see it on a consistent basis because eventually you embed it into your mind and that will become your default mode. It’ll become so second nature you don’t even think about it, it's just something you do. Having specifics of what you are upholding is vital to setting an effective standard, if not it will be hard to determine where you draw the line and if you are meeting your expectations. So if you say you want to be the hardest working person around it will be subjective based on your view point, but if you set a standard of being a hard working person by working 70 hours a week then you clearly define what makes you that or not.
Upholding your standards
Once you know what your standards are, it becomes about upholding them continuously striving for what they represent. An example of this might be to give your best effort each day because if you do anything you might as well do it wholeheartedly, that produces excellence. If you think about a restaurant where they get a health inspection report to signal to customers the quality and cleanliness of their establishment, this is vital to their business. Obviously the higher the grade the greater confidence customers have in eating there. The lower the grade the less confidence customers will have in one in that establishment and if it's low enough it can mean seizing to operate the restaurant because of health code violations that can cause harm to the public.
In cases like this it's going to be very crucial to operate at a very high standard by keeping everything clean such as the silverware, the kitchen, the food, and staff members being hygienic in their daily operations. These restaurants want to make sure that they do all the right things to retain the customer's trust because once it's lost it's very difficult to regain it back because there's always going to be the stigma of well, they had that health code violation once if that happened it could also occur again.
View the standards that you set for yourself in the same type of manner, where you're consistently striving to earn your own trust. The more that you can uphold that standard, the more you can continue to trust yourself even further. And yes, they'll be slip ups at times but you got to make sure to correct it before it gets out of hand. It can be far too easy to become complacent and just let things go. The higher the standard the more work required to keep it up but it's going to be well worth it. You’re ensuring that the process is being done in an excellent manner to produce those same types of results.
Have a routine that you can get into to make sure you're continuously doing all the small things right. Yes, at times it can be a pain or annoying to get it done but what's the cost of a few minutes here and a few minutes there to make sure things are done properly. Is eating that little bit of kale really that bad for you if it means maintaining your health. It might not be the tastiest of foods but it's helping you ensure you have a good quality of life.
Over time you're going to see the results that are going to make you proud of the effort that you put forward. Reflecting on what you've done can help you draw strength going forward to continue to do things in an excellent manner. Almost like compound interest where in the short term it might not seem like a lot has been built up but over the long term what you gain has been so substantial that you might wonder what all the fuss in the beginning was when it yielded such big results.
Struggling with standards
Sometimes what causes the standard not being upheld is the loss of focus, forgetting the details that matter and thinking it will all just be automatic. That muscle memory of what you once did can lose some of that prime, that spring that it was so effective and to get back on track sometimes what you need to do is just refocus. Almost starting from Ground Zero and working your way back up, going through a checklist to make sure all the steps are being taken care of properly.
If you look at a profession like an airplane pilot, they have many intricacies that go along with getting ready to take off which includes a lot of their prep work and then the actual taken off, flying and landing. But to help ensure all the steps are properly being done each time they have a checklist that they go through to make sure they're at their best. If not, it can prove costly.
While the standard you hold may or may not have the same type of effects of an airline pilot, operating in their type of manner helps ensure things are running smooth. Some signs to watch out for that might indicate struggling to meet the standard is if think you have it down packed no questions asked, or if you're taking shortcuts, or if you think it's always worked well for me in the past and resting on it.
Maybe you've already experienced struggling upholding that standard and it's difficult to get back on track with it. This can cause confidence to be lost in what you worked up to. To help overcome this evaluate if that standard still suits what you're doing because over time you'll notice your interest and drive might change so you got to you know how to tailor what you're doing to fit your current needs.
Just know that we all go through periods of slumps where we’re trying to get that momentum back on our side. If that happens, take the time to see the things that are blocking that attention needed to sustain what you once did. The easy thing would be to just give up and throw it out, but work through it to find the solution to get back on track because if you don’t, complacency will overtake you and eventually leave you unsatisfied.
Final thoughts
Having a standard and consistently following through on it is going to help you live further empowered because it gives you a sense of direction and drive to channel your energy for a cause of excellence. When you can see the progress that you made, you gain overall satisfaction on how well you're living, that helps you enjoy the process of what you're doing and it's not just about the end result. You get what you are striving for, which is set by your expectations and the higher they are the more room for possibilities you have.
Be aware as you're starting off be realistic with what you set for yourself and gradually work your way up into a higher standard. Too high too quickly can discourage you from wanting to continuously strive for more. When you feel that you're meeting your expectations too easily increase it to challenge yourself and you will eventually rise up to meet it. Make your standards specific that measures process-based actions and it will lead to substantial results consistently. Most of all, enjoy what you do.
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