The Standards You Keep
Do you have standards for yourself? For how you show up? For how you contribute?
As a co-worker? As a teammate? As a spouse? As a parent? As a friend? Your work?
I like to think that I do, but I don’t!
In reality what I really have is loosely defined aspirations.
I aspire to do good work, to be a great friend, a great parent, a great spouse, etc..
But I don’t consistently adhere to a set of standards to help me consistently meet that mark.
The more I reflect on this, the more it has bothered me!
Mainly, because there is no real reason for why I’m not setting and keeping standards that align with the vision I have for myself.
However, there are a couple forces contributing to this challenge that warrant a mention.
The standards of society have become incredibly low. It does take much effort to meet expectations these days. In many instances doing the minimum is actually celebrated.
Productivity culture has us over indexing on quantity, making us too willing to sacrifice a little quality for the sake of a little more throughput.
I’ve come to appreciate that over time these two forces combined create quite a headwind of resistance that can make a simple act of setting and keeping some standards feel more like an extreme act of resistance.
Great outputs require equally great inputs.
And, those inputs typically require exponentially more of a time commitment than the outputs.
10 hours of prep for a 10 minute presentation
3 months of training for a 3 hour race
20 years of experience for a 200 page book
Can you begin to appreciate how a hyper focus on the outputs will have us constantly struggling with maintaining the standards we once set for ourselves.
Through this process, we allow ourselves to compromise once, then twice, now we suddenly find our bar much lower than it once was.
This could all be prevented by simply honoring ourselves with the standards we keep.
This week I’m going to leave you with a poem I wrote as a reminder to myself the importance of this topic.
The Standards You Keep
Our standards set the tone
Do you find yours harder to keep when navigating the group or when you’re alone?
Our answers to these questions can be quite revealing
Exposing us to the incongruency that we’ve long been concealing
We say we want “this” and we commit to do “that”
But over and over we find that those inspiring words we whisper to ourselves fall flat
The promises we make to ourselves are meant to be kept, not just something to be swept aside at the first inconvenience.
Accumulating anxiously to one day reveal just how far our integrity has crept from that ambition aim that we once so honorably set.
Do the standards you keep fill you with joy
or leave you with feelings of regret?
