Thank God It's Monday®! Blog

When I was three or four years old, my mother used to constantly say: “Roxanne, say please and thank you.” Boy, I didn’t understand how profound those words were until I became an adult and I realized the power of the words please and thank you.

They shape relationships, they make people feel good about who they are. It’s easy to forget that we get busy, and when we get busy, we start bypassing people and just instructing and forgetting to say the words please and thank you.

My commitment is to get a little bit better at it every day and someday, maybe I’ll be as good at it as my mother hoped I would be. So, every day, I set the intention of getting a little bit better about saying please and thank you. You may want to try that as well.

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, 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 sent it on. 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 where 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”? And if we don’t come from that place, 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?