I wish I knew this sooner. The one thing I learned about high performers and how they keep their standards
Why some people seem to always play at a higher level while others slack.
When we go after anything in life, a part of us is always going to come up against some resistance. Resistance to start becomes resistance to proceed.
So with any goal, we have to learn to manage our perfectionism. We have to live in a space between two standards. Those that you cannot miss (floors) and those you cannot hit (ceilings).
The floors in our lives act like our smallest standards.
The thing that is predictable and safe for us. We’ve done it several times and we can do it again. We know how to hit them 100%. It is our lowest rung on the ladder. The least we ask of ourselves. To get anywhere significant, we must reach this level to begin with.
This will all course vary for everyone.
We’re all different at different stages in life. On different journeys and missions. But the principle still applies. We can all ground ourselves with a dose of self-compassion by working on the floors we accept.
We can keep hitting the targets we know we can hit which gives us that sense of progress. But also, raise our standards with time, without sacrificing their completion.
Then on the opposite end, we can all go after those out-of-reach goals too.
The ceilings in our lives we can’t quite touch but can see ahead.
These keep us striving, keep us hungry, and demanding more of ourselves by forcing us to grow and level up. But again, we need a level of strategic self-compassion to not go too far the other way. We need to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt when we try to reach for these ceilings but do not succeed.
We see the distance between the floors and ceilings in our lives in the metaphor of an elastic rubber band.
We need to keep our rubber band of life with a healthy level of tension to help us grow by creating a stretching effect.
With any given goal, we can boil its success down to following one key process. To then use the metaphor, let’s imagine our smallest standards for that process as our floor. The one thing that we keep inching forward with.
And then on the other end, we have our just-out-of-reach goals. Our ceiling. The standards that we can’t quite hit as often.
For the elastic band to have a healthy tension and to be of any use, we need a gap between both ends. Both ends of our lives need to stretch out enough.
But if we move the ceiling too far, it’ll snap, and we’ll have gone too far in the search for growth.
No tension. No growth.
In fact, the snap, in some cases can be a no-point-of-return moment. Injury, hospitalization, or worse. This is the extreme end of positive growth we don’t want to cross.
But also, we shouldn’t be too light on ourselves either.
This is where we are not creating enough tension by keeping our stretch goals well within reach.
Time will pass by and we’ll have not made anywhere near the progress we could have made. All because we didn’t challenge ourselves to raise our ceiling a little.
The distance between the two ends is too short and doesn’t create any tension. The band is loose, limp, and pretty useless. This will create the effect of no stretching.
No tension. No growth.
This isn’t what we want either.
So the ideal balance lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. And it’s a personal journey for you to figure out what exactly you’re going to be comfortable with. But remember one thing…
The game is not about how far you can stretch your metaphorical band without it breaking. It’s about how long you can keep it stretched, without it breaking.
Life’s best things come to those who keep progressing over time. Consistency beats intensity.
