Raise The Stakes, Raise Your Standards

In our efforts to become the person who we know we’re capable of being, we know that we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

We unlock our fullest potential when we’re more disciplined and consistent with our commitments, more courageous in the way we show up to opportunities, and more intentional to make better choices on a day to day basis.

The problem is, there’s a reason we’re not already as disciplined, courageous, and intentional as we want to be. It’s because our lives are perfectly calibrated to maintain the level of performance we’re currently at. Our life conditions are designed in such a way that we are pulled toward a specific equilibrium or set point, which is our current level of output.

So if you want to break out of that pattern and raise your standard, you need to disrupt your environment so that your life naturally settles at a new and more elevated level.

When you raise the stakes, you raise your standards. When you put something on the line - your reputation, your pride, your stated level of commitment - you create necessity in your life. You create conditions that require more disciplined, courageous, and intentional action or else there will be consequences.

For example, having a daily podcast requires that I share something new every single day. If I started missing days, people would call me out. There’s accountability embedded in my environment. If the stakes weren’t so high and I didn’t have an expectation to meet, there’s no way I would have kept up with this over 7 years later. But my commitment raised the stakes, and that’s why I’ve achieved a higher standard.

You can’t try to hold yourself to a higher standard just because you want to. But when you redesign your environment and create conditions that make you need to, you’re much more likely to follow through. All it takes is one decisive moment of bold action and things can permanently change. You just need to know what to do, and actually do it, because raising the stakes and cultivating necessity is one of the most impactful things we can do to bring out a higher-performing version of ourselves.

That’s why my first step in supporting you is to invite you to take on a 21 Day Challenge. When you sign up for it, you’ve raised the stakes, and plug into a system that helps you deliver on that higher standard. If that's what you want, give it a look!

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