I went on an entire European vacation last December and shared not a zip of it on social media. I was immersed in the power of NOW that my immediate attention was simply in the experience of it. We took my parents (first timers) to have an exquiste first class experience the entire way. We went to Paris, London, Venice and Rome and my dad and I had a morning ritual where we would say, “no lines, no lines, no lines” and good attitudes only lol and guess what... we never had a line the entire trip. We didn't wait long at all anywhere that we went and I know it was our good luck and our powerful intention... Anyway, I will share some of my collection of photos each week so I hope you enjoy them.
Ok now for the good stuff, one of the best things I could ever share with you is that standards you hold in your life are a direct reflection of who you believe yourself to be, and most people have never once stopped to examine them.
I am not talking about your goals or your vision board or the things you say you want. I am talking about what you are actually accepting right now, in your relationships, in your work, in the quiet of your own mind when nobody else is around, because that is where your real standard lives and it is telling you everything about the identity you are currently operating from.
Here is a small example: I get fresh coffee beans delivered to my house every few weeks now because I can taste the difference in the beans between wood roasted and normal ground. When I was growing up, my family had instant Folgers, the cheapest thing available and nobody questioned it because that was what they bought. So when I grew up, I also bought Folgers. I never questioned it once.
The version of me now has completely different standards, and not just for coffee. For what I tolerate in my relationships, for how I spend my time, for the thoughts I am willing to keep thinking about myself. Those standards did not suddenly start because my circumstances changed. They changed because I started making decisions from a different identity, a version of me who genuinely believed I was allowed to have more and that belief began to reorganize everything around it.
This is the thing about standards that most people miss. They are not about what you own or where you live or what you have done. They are about what feels normal to you, and what feels normal to you is always a mirror of who you believe yourself to be right now.
Your personality was largely shaped before you were old enough to choose it. In your childhood you were absorbing everything around you as just the way things were. The standards you took from your childhood became the invisible ceiling on what felt acceptable and possible for you, and they have been running in the background ever since.
But here is what is also true, at any point you can look around at your life and ask yourself, “what am I still tolerating that the next version of me would never accept, and what would I need to believe about myself right now to raise that standard?”
That is not a small question. I have watched it change everything for people, and I know what it has changed for me.
So look around today, not at what you have but at what you are accepting, in your closest relationships, in the work you are doing, in the standards you hold for how people treat you and how you treat yourself. Ask yourself honestly whether those standards belong to the identity you are stepping into or the one you are finally ready to leave behind.
You get to decide. You always have.
It's all possible.
If you believe it is.
I do.
ps. That hotel in the picture above was incredible! The Hotel Plaza Athenne is one of the swankiest (wow first time I ever used that word) hotels and the bathroom was an experience in itself! The attendant cleans the toilet immediately after you use it… I didn't know that so when a woman walked out I walked in and the attendant had to ask me to please come out lol… well first time for everything!
FOR THE LEADERS IN THE ROOM
The standards conversation belongs inside every leadership team and most organizations are having it without realizing it.
When accountability conversations happen over and over without real resolution and when the same issues resurface in different forms, what is often underneath all of it is a standards problem and not a skills problem. The team is operating from a collective standard that nobody has explicitly examined or chosen, and that standard is quietly setting the ceiling on what feels normal and acceptable inside the organization.
The most powerful thing a leader can do is make that standard explicit, name it out loud, and ask the team honestly whether it reflects where they are going or where they have been.
That single conversation changes the operating climate of a room.