Is it okay to lower your Standard of Excellence?

Let’s say you are single, and you are renting a house. Your dream is to purchase your own house one day, however, you are saving for your dreams. Your standard of excellence is to have a lovely yard. You work, you plan your weekends so that you can keep up the lawn, your rose garden, and maybe even have a workshop that you are keeping organized.

 Your boss offers you some overtime. You want to purchase your own house, so you start working overtime. Then you come home and park in front of the television set, letting your mind say it is okay, because you have worked overtime. One day, you take a look at your yard. You quickly get up, mow the lawn, take out a few weeds, but not all. A few things at your shop don’t get put back where they are belong because time is now less than what it was before.

Eventually, you have allowed your yard to not look so good, your workshop a bit messy, but your bank account is growing. However, to have that money, you have compromised your own standards of what you feel is important.

 Now, you have choices here. Get up away from the television, do your yard, and get that shop picked up, then vow to yourself that you won’t let it grow to weeds and that every time you use something it will be put back into place. 

Alternatively, you can lower your standard of excellence and decide that is okay, for now, for things to be a bit messy and learn to relax with your new game plan, or, you can hire someone to do your yard for you, and take a little longer to get your dream house. 

You need to take responsibility for your own actions. It certainly is okay to not have the most beautiful yard in the world. It certainly is okay to lower your standard of excellence, as long as you don’t do it more and more, until you look around and you wonder where that “real you” went. 

Here is another example. You have just lost weight. You worked hard at it, you watched what you ate, you started an exercise program, and things are going great. You are proud of yourself to take control of that area of your life. You meet someone, fall in love, and nine out of ten times, you will lose a little more weight because you are in the euphoria of “being in love.” 

Time wears on, your new partner takes up more of your time, you start dropping 20 minutes of your exercise plan, soon, you drop it completely out of your life, and before you know it that darn weight is back on you again, only this time, it’s worse than it was before. 

  What happened? Did you lower your standard of excellence? Did you learn to accept that the extra weight was okay, or did you lose your focus or change your priorities? 

Can you lose it again? If so, can you keep it off? There is now a niggling doubt, and of course, self disgust, because you allowed yourself to gain it all back again. Then you start looking at yourself, and think, "Hey, this extra twenty pounds is not so bad, look at that fat neighbor down the street"… and soon you are allowing yourself to accept something that used to be very important to you. 

Do you see how lowering your standard of excellence can affect how you feel about yourself, how you make excuses, how you allow little things to continue on until they become so overwhelming that they hard to face? 

WHAT if you never did have a great standard of excellence in the first place, because the perceptions that you grew up with did not teach you what is accepted as “normal” in the society that you live in? 

This can be from chewing with your mouth open to passing gas in public, to it is okay to have urine on the toilet rim, and not making the bed is no big deal. Your dishes are piled up and so you use a paper plate. Your yard has two junk cars in it, so why not a rusty old mower? 

If you lived with slobs all your life, two things would happen - you would be a slob, or you would decide that it was unacceptable to live like a slob. 

Now, if you are a slob, and your mate is a slob and your close friends are slobs, and this just does not bother you and your self-esteem is high and you are getting what you want out of life, you are making the money you want to make, you are happy at your job, and you are living in complete harmony in your environment, then that is your Standard of Excellence, but I am glad you are reading a selfhelp book ☺

I remember as a child, coming from a very poor background, thinking that if I saw a house that was clean and had some furniture, and had a television that those people were rich indeed. If they had a real dining room table with matching dishes, and food in their refrigerator, in my young mind they were as rich as rich can be. It was my perception. 

When I went to live with my grandmother and I got mud on a doll and I put in the toy box, grandma came in and said. “What are you thinking? How can you put that doll back in that toy box with mud on it?” 

“But, grandma,” I answered, bewildered. “I am going to take it out later to the fort I built.”

Grandma then said, “if you put it in with the other toys, then you are getting other toys dirty causing more work for yourself.” 

“Oh, I didn’t think about that.” 

Then she added, kindly, “Teresa, I know you are not used to having things in their place and everything in its place, and I know you don’t come from a home where everything is kept clean and tidy as this house is. In this world, there is no excuse for not keeping things clean. No matter how poor you are, soap is cheap and elbow grease takes your own desire and determination to improve your own living conditions. You can then have pride in all that you do, whether you have money or don’t have money, because you have given it your very best. There is no shame in being poor; there is shame when you allow poverty to keep you from being able to hold your head just high enough to keep your nose out of the air.”

I sure miss my grandmother.

Take pride in what you do, and do the best that you can. Do not fear failure, we all fail, then we get up and brush ourselves off, and try again. Each time we fail, we learn yet another way to not do something. It is all in learning. 

Each time we learn something new we take the risk of failing and stepping out of our comfort zone. Imagine, not learning how to walk for fear of looking silly when we repeatedly fall down, or not learning how to talk because we were afraid we could not say the words properly. Keep learning something new in perspective, and failure should not scare you at all. 

Did you fear failure when you got on your first bicycle, or were you so excited about getting your bicycle that you took your falls until you mastered the bike?