“If you want to change your life you have to raise your standards.”
tony robbins
There was a gentle breeze blowing and the air had the crisp playfulness of a Friday afternoon that was bringing in the weekend. We were gathered around the water cooler during a break from a leadership session that I was running, with a leading global bank, and as always, conversations were aplenty.
There were two men engaged in a very interesting conversation about their respective wives, and I couldn’t help myself from politely eavesdropping.
Man 1 talked about how his wife was easy going, so chill, and so relaxed that even when he was travelling he could go days without calling her and she wouldn’t say a thing. “Mine’s pretty low maintenance, Thank goodness! like a good Maruti 800” said Man 1 with a self satisfactory chuckle.
Man 2, who I will forever remember as someone who made me smile, said this in response “That’s great buddy! My wife is pretty high on maintenance. But then again – she’s like a Ferrari, so I’ll take it”. Man 1, was done.
They took their glasses of water and made their way back to the training session leaving me with food for thought.
I’ve personally always taken pride in being easy going, chilled out, and low on maintenance.
This habit started to reflect not only how I was so easy for other people to accommodate in their lives, but also how easily I let my standards for myself drop to ground zero. And this was often, to accommodate everyone else’s.
I pondered over how it was important to be a little bit of both. Easy going and easy for people around me to enjoy and maintain like a Maruti – dependable, low on costs and trust worthy. But it was also important to have Ferrari standards for myself – in terms of performance, and the time and attention I would give to myself.
And in this ease of being low maintenance, I’ve realised and re-realised many times over, that I can’t be driving a Ferrari and maintaining it like a Maruti 800. The inverse is also true. If I take care of myself, the way I would a Maruti 800 – then I’ll never believe that I’m actually a Ferrari. And neither will the people around me.
And therefore:
The standards you have for yourself is directly proportional to how you see yourself.
This seeps into every aspect of one’s life. The way you eat, the way you dress, the way you check out of the party early to go home and get a good night’s rest, or the way you party till dawn because you’ve joyfully and intentionally taken the night off.
How you speak to yourself, how you nurture yourself, how you treat yourself, and how you bring your whole self to your work and life, is simply a reflection of the standard you have for yourself based on how much you think you are worth.
“We only get what we believe that we deserve. Raise the bar, raise your standards and you will receive a better outcome.”
JOEL BROWN
When you’re so used to treating yourself and your life a certain way, it takes consistent practise and re-correction to course correct. We’re often faced with feelings of guilt, or even conflict from those around us who are so used to us being ‘low maintenance’ that this shift in behavior can be hard to accept.
I’d put money on the fact that you probably have very high standards for everything else – your business, the services you pay for, or the clients you service and the work you produce. But when it comes to how you live your life, you probably haven’t even assessed what your current standards are.
So start there.
It means understanding what your current standards or expectations of quality of your life are and deciding what you want them to be instead.
What are your standards when it comes to your health, your career, your appearance, your relationship with others, and your relationship with yourself?
Someone once said to me that if we don’t have expectations, then we will never be disappointed. And this is true. When you walk into a 2 star hotel, your expectations are much lower than when you walk into a 5 star hotel. Some people lower their standards because they don’t want to disappoint others, and some lower their standards because they don’t want to disappoint themselves. But running away from disappointment also means running away from progress and growth.
The biggest problem is when we provide 5 star service to everyone around us, but we believe we are nothing more than a run down 2 star hotel, and we live by those standards. Eventually, your shoddy perception of who you are is going to catch up.
And therefore, how you see yourself is crucial to how you live and love your life. And so the first step is to identify the gap between what you believe to be true about yourself and what is actually true. You’ll see you deserve to be better to you.
So raise the bar for yourself first – and when you do, your taste in people, in food, in habits and the conversations you engage in will start to change.
The road to raising your standards will be a long bumpy ride, met with friction along the way. But the view as you go along will be worth it. After all, you’re in a Ferrari so put down the windows, let your hair fly in the wind, crank up the music, and enjoy the ride!
For starters, I’m going to stop taking pride in my 2 second showers and give myself a full glorious 2 minutes to enjoy taking care of myself to look sparklier!
Keep stepping into better! And you’ll thank yourself for it!
Kanika
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