If you want to improve your life it all starts with raising your standards. You get what you tolerate in life. The current state of your body, money, relationships, work/biz are all based on what you are tolerating in those areas of your life.
I know it might sound hard to believe but you are making exactly the amount of money that you are expecting to have based on your internal blueprint. Same goes with your current state of physical fitness and your intimate relationship. It’s all based on your comfort zone.
A simple metaphor is of a thermostat in your home. There is a slight variance above and below of what the thermostat will move between. But once the temperature gets too low or too high the thermostat will immediately kick in and do its job. Once your finances / health / relationship get too low / bad or too high / good based on where your internal target is set you will adjust accordingly as well.
If you want to make them better you must raise your standards. What does that mean? Start by writing down a list of all the things you will no longer tolerate in your life. What will you no longer accept? From yourself? From others?
Next decide on what your new standard is going to be. How much money do you commit to making every year? What do you commit your net worth to being? What percentage of body fat will you have? How much love and passion are you committed to having in your intimate relationship? Get as clear and specific as possible. Clarity is power. This is an ongoing process so don’t try to get it all done in one sitting and never look at it again. Keep it close by so you can refine and improve it whenever you get a new insight or distinction you want to capture.
This all sounds great but what do you actually do to raise your standards?
Our lives are a reflection of our rituals. What daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly rituals do you need to set in place to make your new standard a reality and bring it to creation in the physical world?
Michael Jordan would take 1000 shots a day which made him the greatest basketball player ever. What are your 1000 shots a day?
What’s the one thing you need that’s going to move the needle. Not five things. ONE THING. There might be many things within that one thing that need to be done but there’s one primary ritual and focus. Now this isn’t always going to be the same thing forever. You are going to learn from what’s working and not by tracking and measuring and fine tuning based on whether it’s producing the results you are after.
If it’s losing 20 pounds and you’ve never exercised before maybe it’s going for a 10 minute walk each day.
If it’s getting your finances in order maybe it’s tracking your expenses and making sure you spend less than you earn.
If it’s improving your sales maybe it’s making 50 sales calls each day.
There’s no right or wrong approach. Just like a scientist would conduct an experiment with a hypothesis, you need to do the same thing. Choose something you think will work and start measuring and observing the results it is producing. Stick to it for 30 days and then reassess if you need to refine it, keep doing the same thing (because it’s working or needs more time), or scrap it and try something else.
Keep changing your approach until you get the result you are after.
The key is to keep it simple in the beginning because you are creating a new habit and the main reason people don’t follow through on a new habit is because they make them too hard to execute on and then beat themselves up when they don’t. The key to forming a new habit is consistency in the beginning and then as you get better at it you can start working on refining it. Make the game winnable.
If it seems too easy and simple to be true, don’t let your intellect trick you out of trying and actually executing on this. As you keep doing it day after day compounding will start working in your favor and you will start getting a lot of momentum which is hard for a lot of people to manage with all of the other moving parts in their life. Stay focused. You got this.
Pura vida,
Naeem
