When I talk to people about big goals, I always start with three things:
1. Purpose: Are you staying connected to the purpose that will cause you to take significant action in your life?
2. Process: Are you staying connected to the process that will drive success in your life?
3. Reframing: Are you staying focused on solutions rather than problems?
What Makes The Greatest Great?
Framing a discussion with these things makes it easier for me to answer the questions I'm asked all the time: What makes the greatest great? What makes the best performers the best?
Here are the answers: The great ones focus on standards. They live by standards. They don’t allow their feelings to dictate whether or how they show up.
Too often, we make decisions based on our feelings instead of basing them on standards we've established for ourselves. We allow the difficult things in our lives to drive our decisions.
Let’s say you’ve decided to start a new workout regime. The very first day, your alarm goes off, and you realize just how good those sheets and that warm bed feel, so you hit that snooze button repeatedly until you go past the time when you can actually start your workout. You’ve allowed feelings to dictate your actions instead of applying a standard that makes it easier to roll out of bed and get started.
When we rely on feelings to guide our efforts, we allow ourselves to be subjected to the highs and the lows we experience every day. Feelings manifest themselves in our actions, our conversations with others and the conversations we have with ourselves, which creates conflicts or doubts and denies us the consistency we must have to be successful.
But when we set a standard, we remove the mental noise that can impede our progress. The framework for success is already there. How we are to move forward has already been decided. If we're strong-willed, there's no room for debate, either with others or with ourselves. The hard work of making the decision and the commitment to follow a certain path no longer needs to be a battle because that battle has already been fought and won.
Belief, Potential, Actions And Results
Many people think that the most successful people have found a way to skip ahead and go around the process that's usually required to be successful. They’re wrong. Success is simply the direct result of hard work and setting standards.
One of the key elements of hard work and setting standards is consistency. There's a big difference between hitting the snooze button because you don't feel like working out and getting up in the morning and not even having to think about reaching a goal because of a standard you've set. That hard work becomes part of your DNA because there's no conflict with what you're trying to achieve. In the former scenario, you also eventually get up to start the day, but because you don’t feel like working toward your goal and you have no standard to hold you accountable, you're much less likely to be consistent in your efforts.
To put people in the right frame of mind about what it takes to set a standard that incorporates hard work, I ask people to think about four elements:
1. Belief: Having a belief in yourself is the first step to achieving success. Underperformers are almost always guilty of not believing enough in themselves or their purpose in life. This first step is a mental commitment that's the foundation you must have before going any further.
2. Potential: If you don’t have a full belief in yourself, it's almost impossible to access your full potential. When you create a barrier that walls off the belief that you can achieve your goal, by extension you automatically also wall off your full potential.
3. Actions: If you limit your ability to tap into your full potential, what do you think your actions are going to look like? You guessed it — something less than what you're fully capable of executing.
4. Results: When we underperform, our results are less than we'd hoped for. Our feelings come into play, and we ask:
• Why is the world doing this to me?
• Why are things set up this way?
• Why is a client treating me this way?
If we aren’t getting the results we want, it's because of the choices we’ve made. We didn’t believe enough in ourselves, tap into our full potential or take the actions that drive the results we wanted to get.
How You Can Set Standards For Yourself
Setting goals and standards share some of the same steps. The main difference is that goals are created for a much more narrowly defined activity and standards can be applied across a broad spectrum of circumstances in your life. Let’s take a look at how you can create standards for yourself:
• Develop mental discipline. Be honest with yourself, and take the process of setting standards seriously. If you put forth a half-hearted effort, you’ll wind up with a half-hearted outcome.
• Make them challenging, but achievable. Set standards that have some level of difficulty attached to them. Aim too low, and you won’t care about the outcome. Aim too high, and you’ll only be setting yourself up for frustration. Make your standards achievable.
• Make them meaningful. Your standards must be in areas that are important to you. Why bother setting a standard for something you don’t care about? You will just take energy away from what really matters to you.
• Make them measurable. You can’t hit a target if you don’t know how close or far away you are to it. Find a way to track your progress. Make sure you identify an activity or process that is 100% in your control that will give you the ability to drive results by repeating that action consistently.
• Commit to them. Don’t wait for the perfect time to start. The time is now. Procrastination may be a sign that you need to revisit the four elements of hard work that go into setting your standards.
