Hey, Amy here.
I was at my martial arts class last night, which I love with all my heart.
It was a great class, as always. I always feel so pumped when I leave there. Like I can do anything. Such a great feeling.
And one of my favorite things is when our teacher has us circle up at the end and he pours his wisdom into us.
I grab onto every word that he says... it's really such a gift to be in the presence of a master like that.
He was talking about how, when he's teaching, he holds a high standard for himself.
He said he imagines that his teacher could walk through the door at any minute and watch him teach. He would want him to be proud of what he sees, and he said that's why he brings so much passion to his teaching.
And he was sharing about the high standard that he holds for himself in regard to his training time as well. This is a sport where we have to carve out time to practice a lot on our
own.
He said to us,
"Set a standard for yourself and then hold yourself accountable. If you do this, you will be light years ahead of most people."
And he looked at the kids, and said,
"If you can learn this when you're still a kid you will have a huge advantage in life. It's a great thing to be able to learn at
a young age."
I love this so much because it's advice that carries over into all areas of our lives.
We can set a standard for ourselves when it comes to our health:
- What are we willing to put into our bodies?
- What are we unwilling to put into our bodies?
- What is our standard when it comes to exercise? What type of exercise are
we going to commit to doing and how often, and for how long each time?
- Or whatever you want to set as your standard
We can set a standard when it comes to our businesses:
- How many hours per day are we going to commit to building our businesses?
- What are those hours?
- What income producing activities are we committed to doing each day during those hours?
- What's the minimum
number of leads we are going to commit to generating each week?
- Or whatever... what's your standard for your business?
We can set standards when it comes to our relationships, our spiritual practice, a new instrument that we want to learn, how we train our dog, or anything at all.
And we can then hold ourselves accountable.
And when we have standards in place like this, we are much more likely to achieve the things we set out to achieve than if we are wishy washy about our standards. Right?
So his advice to set a standard for yourself and then hold yourself accountable is really simple advice, but very powerful advice.
It provides each of us with a great opportunity to look at our standards in the different areas in our lives and to see where we can improve them, and then it provides us each with opportunity to hold ourselves accountable to them as well.
I also shared about how Michael Franti refers to his standard of staying shape as 'training for my game.' And he invites us to answer the question,
"How are you training
for your game, whatever that may be?"
