From The RULES, a six-week course I made in early 2017. Week five was about standards.
Your boss calls you in. "You're doing a brilliant job. From next month, I'm going to pay you twice as much."
Would that be acceptable? I suspect so. And it wouldn't take long before the new money felt normal. A few months in, going back to the old salary would feel impossible.
Now flip it. Same boss, same job. "From next month, you'll do it for half." Not acceptable, is it? Yet once upon a time you lived on a lot less, and it was fine.
What a standard is
The fifth of the five rules is standards. What you allow to be acceptable in your life. The things you'll put up with, and the things you'd never do or never accept.
Some are tiny. Take punctuality. Is your standard to be early for everything? Or is five minutes late fine? Neither is right or wrong. But it's a standard, and it's running part of your day whether you've noticed it or not.
Standards drift
Over time our standards move, and we hardly notice. The pay rise is the obvious one. It happens with the car, the holidays, the house, the size of our clothes.
It can go the other way too. There's something you swear you'd never do. Then circumstances push you into it. The first time, you can't believe you did it. The second time, it's maybe not so bad. Before long it's just what you do.
Whose standards are these?
Plenty of our standards aren't really ours. We picked them up from a parent, a teacher, an employer. If one serves you, brilliant, keep it. Copying the standards of someone who already has the results you want can be a great move. But if it's holding you back, it might be time to put it down. It's other people's baggage again.
Don't compare
For one person, an hour of exercise a day is a high standard. For someone else, that's the bare minimum and three hours is high. For someone else again, fifteen minutes is a big ask. It depends where you're starting from and where you want to get to.
Not everyone's high standard is the same height. If you're after progress rather than perfection, your new standard might be one small step ahead of where you are now. The person who already has the result you want might be thirty steps ahead. You don't need to be where they are. You need to be you.
The one you treat worst
"So many people have high standards for what they would accept from other people... yet they treat themselves even worse."
If you'd never let anyone talk to you the way you talk to yourself, call it out. That's bullsh*t, and I wouldn't let anyone else speak to me this way. So make yourself a promise. You won't treat yourself any worse than you'd let anyone else treat you.
"If you can lead yourself, then you can lead anybody."
Sometimes the bar is too high
And there's a twist. When I came back to standards in the last week of the course, I called it "shift your standards" on purpose. "Sometimes our standards are actually too high. That is the thing that holds us back in life."
Set the bar so high it's almost impossible and you'll feel rubbish every day you're not there yet. I've watched perfectionists who never really did anything, because their standard stopped them before they started. (More on that in Procrastination is protection.)
You don't have to drop the standard completely. Shift it down a little. Enough that you still move forward, and enough that you enjoy getting there. "Why wait until we achieve something to be happy, when you could be happy today?"
There's a line credited to Richard Branson that I used to close the course. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Try this
Write down five standards that run your life right now. For each one, ask whether it's really yours or something you picked up from someone else. Then ask whether it's set too low or too high. Then pick one and move it a notch, up or down.
Start with how you speak to yourself. That's the standard everything else sits on.
