Surviving Work: Raising Your Standards

Personal standards comprise how you treat yourself, how you treat others, how you speak, your vocabulary, your behavior and how you do your work.

Standards are not those you've learned over the years from family, school, and religion. Those are shoulds. Standards are set by yourself once you're old enough to review the imposed thoughts and behavior of your youth. Your standards reflect just who you are. They are not set in cement. They need to be reviewed and sometimes changed to reflect who you are as you mature.

Here are some things you can do to raise your standards at work and home:
1. List several people you admire and their behaviors you appreciate. Watch them and emulate how they handle tough situations.
2. Be "unconditionally constructive" every time you speak while still saying all you need to say.
3. Respond to everything that happens in your space as though you were responsible for the occurrences, Don't take the "blame" take the "responsibility". Handle the incident and raise your standards so it doesn't happen again.
4. Put people and relationships ahead of results.
5. List 5 things around your office that you tolerate but which continue to catch your attention and drain your energy. Do them, delegate them, or let them go knowing they will never change.
6. Pick your battles carefully. You could fight all the battles and lose the war by raising your standards of what is worthwhile defending and what is not.
7. Join an "ain't it awful" group by the water cooler and inject "ain't it great" observations.
8. Take a stand by letting others know that you do not engage in gossip about fellow employees.
9. Work on your emotional intelligence to understand what triggers you to "lose it" in a tense situation.

Do these few things and you will immediately begin to raise your standards.