Your success in life will perfectly align with the standards you set for yourself.

So, if you’re the kind of person that will turn in a report that’s filled with typos and grammatical errors, and as a result of it, your supervisor has to spend the night or the weekend working to correct your work, what does that say about you? What does it say about your character? What does it say about your commitment to excellence? It shows, doesn’t it? Yet, many people get very comfortable having low standards for themselves…low customer service standards, low standards on the outcomes that they create, and low standards on the product that they produce.

What if instead, you set the intention of, “I’m just going to raise my standards. I’m going to hold myself to higher standards. I’m going to double-check my work every time before I send it in. I’m going to go study a little bit every night and get better at the things I’m weak at. I’m going to choose to, in every customer encounter, blow that customer away by creating my own customer service standards that far exceed the customer service standards of my organization.”

If you’re to hold yourself to higher standards, you can only imagine what the accumulation of a lot of good choices will create for you. Today, choose consciously to have higher standards and set a note for yourself every single day this week to plan to have, and demonstrate, great standards of excellence in everything you do at work and at home.

Do you set the intention every day to exceed expectations? Let me ask you this: What’s more fun? You go home at the end of the day and you say, “Hmm, I met all my conditions of satisfaction, so I did my job”, or do you go home and say, “Ooh, I rocked people’s worlds and my customers were thrilled and my supervisor, I took half the load off of his or her desk and took on part of their job and blew them away in terms of making their life easier?” When do you feel best about yourself? Exactly. Whenever you exceed expectations. And many people come to work every day looking to barely meet expectations. And when we barely meet expectations, we don’t get that lift of self-confidence and self-esteem that we get when we know that we rocked people’s world. It starts with intention.

If you don’t start the morning by going, “Hmm, how am I going to blow away at least 10 different people today?”, the reality of it happening is pretty slim. What if today you set the intention right now that before you go home today you’re going to rock the world of 10 people? You will far exceed expectations. You will plus one everything, everything that’s asked for, you’ll do at least one thing beyond that which will blow them away. Do it for a day as an experiment, see how you feel about yourself, and then do it for another day. Then keep doing it as a habit. And I promise you, self-esteem is a battle for every human on planet Earth and the more you help and are contributing to others, the better your self-esteem rises. And the more self-esteem you have, the more you can conquer the unconquerable and your self-esteem grows even more. Start the journey perhaps today. Why not?

Do you give yourself permission to grow? Think about it. There are many people who have had the same job for over a decade, but their productivity really hasn’t improved much, their knowledge hasn’t improved much, and their outcomes haven’t improved much. And, as a result, they’re probably not growing in opportunities either.

Oftentimes it stems from someone who has not given themselves permission to grow. Permission to grow means you believe that you’re worth investing in yourself to learn more and to do better. Sometimes it comes from childhood beliefs that you’ve created about yourself, that you’re not worthy, or not good at math, or not good at grammar. You’re not good at spelling, or living your word, and hitting deadlines. When we have a story that we believe about ourselves, we live into the story until we decide to break the pattern. So I’m curious, are you the kind of person who’s going to stand up, invest in yourself, and decide to be the most valuable human being that you can possibly be? I think you’re worth it. Do you?

Micromanagers are oftentimes made as opposed to just their way of being. The reason that we make a manager a micromanager is because we don’t inform them where we are on our projects. We don’t get the conditions of satisfaction that we need before we take on a project.

We don’t let them know where we’re at with each client that we’re talking to – what the result is, what kind of outcomes we’re having, the stalls that we’re having, and the challenges that we’re having.

Without information, managers, who are responsible to their managers, of course, need to have questions answered. So sometimes micromanagers are made.

Start today by informing your manager to create great visibility of where you are with every project that you’re working on so they never have to ask another question. You’ll be happier, they’ll be happier, and all the right work will be done.