You Don't Want Better Habits, You Want Higher Standards

When someone talks about getting into better habits, it often means that they want to get more consistent in making better choices. They want to prioritize their health and wellness by exercising consistently, preparing nutritious meals while resisting unhealthy foods, be more productive by having routines to plan their time and organize their tasks…

But what they really mean is they want to hold themselves to a higher standard. They know what’s best for them and they want to be more accountable to doing it more often. 

There’s a long list of things we know we should (or shouldn't) be doing, yet we often don’t do them. We make an excuse or exception, or somehow rationalize that it’s not what we want to do or what we need to do. Only for us to look back and regret the choice we made, making a decision that we don’t agree with.

That’s where the idea of having standards comes in. A standard is a personal expectation. It’s the level of performance or intention you want to hold yourself to regardless of outside conditions. The problem is many people have a hard time enforcing a higher standard for themselves because they haven’t clearly defined the expectation.

They want to eat healthier, but what does that mean? They want to get a workout in every day, non-negotiable, but does that include a long day spent walking around a theme park with their kids?

When there’s gray area, there’s room left for interpretation and the unconscious mind will shape it into whatever it wants. And by nature the unconscious mind wants us to be lazy, experience short-term pleasure, and do the ‘safe’ thing… Even though we know it comes with long-term consequences.

But when you clearly define your standards, and you make them more objective and easy to measure against, you remove the gray area. You set the expectation and clearly know if your choices are in integrity with it or not. Susan Peirce Thompson calls this ‘having bright lines’ because if you begin to cross the standard you set for yourself, you know without a doubt it’s happening.

My system for reviewing my day and knowing how I did against my standards is: I fill out my Self Improvement Scorecard. If you want to see how it works, I’ve created a video where I show off my self improvement system and explain how it works in detail.