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.