Thank God It's Monday®! Blog

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, if you really look at it, 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. Because without that permission, and sometimes it comes from childhood beliefs that you’ve created about yourself, that you’re not worthy, or I’m not good at math, or I’m not good at grammar. I’m not good at spelling, or I’m not good at living my 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?

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.