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Set your Standards

What’s your bottom line? The line below which you just won’t go? Do you know what it is? Do you have one for different parts of your life? I have! For work my bottom line is cleaning and prostitution, they are the two professions I point-blank refuse to evenconsider doing. They are my bottom line.In fact it normally gets alaugh when I say it,

an awkward laugh, but a laugh none-the-less. But I am deadly serious about my bottom line. For me sex is part of a loving caring relationship so to sell it as a commodity just demeans it for me, so I won’t consider it as a career! I can’t abide cleaning, absolutely hate it with a passion, so the very idea of it being a profession of mine just doesn’t exist, it is most definitely below the standard for me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with cleaning – if you like it and I have many friends who enjoy it, they find it therapeutic, even relaxing, so to them it is way above their bottom line standard.

So do you know what your standards are? Do you stick to them or do you allow others to cross them constantly or even now and again and dismiss it, just like they dismissed you? Confrontational, I know, but if you don’t set and stick to your standards no one else will. The standards you set for you, are for you, not your family, not your work colleagues and not your friends. It is up to you to let them know what they are and to enforce them. I used to swear a lot, but there was one word Inever used, because I didn’t like it. I remember a linguist explaining that particular

word and all the meanings behind it and from then on I decided I didn’t even want to hear it repeated in my company. I’ll quite readily call anyone who uses it and tell them that I don’t like that word being used in my company and most of the time they stop. If they don’t, I leave. If they are in my home they are asked to leave! That is a small standard but it is an important to me and it is very much up to me to uphold it.

A cousin of mine has set a standard of being a little bit early for everything she has to attend. She has had this standard for years and when we’d agree to meet up and I’d turn up late she would be quite annoyed at me. To her it was plain rude to agree a time, go out of her way to meet up and then for them to turn up late, with no notice. Again, a standard she enforced and upheld. She even gets a bit frazzled if she ends up being late, even if it is out of her control. For someone else it could be doing a job to the very best of their ability and not stopping a day’s work until they have achieved that standard for themself. That could mean having to find out further information to be able to do that job, but that is part of the steps to maintaining that standard. Others might decide that not having the information to hand is enough of a reason to not do their job to the best standard they can That is how we start to

let our standards slip and fall away.

For some they don’t see that letting a standard slip is that big a deal. Then at some point they realise that nearly all of their standards and boundaries are being ignored and crossed and wonder how they got to that stage. At that point when they attempt to reinforce them, because they have ignored them for so long the people who have over-stepped their standards continue to do so. That is when conflict arises. We are teaching others how to treat us all the time, so by letting our standards slip we are teaching them to treat us with a little less respect. When we then attempt to re-introduce our standards we can often find that we are ignored or worse contradicted with scorn. While it may seem like nit-picking to maintain a certain standard it is the foundation that you base your life on, to strengthen it from the start makes for a better quality later on, just like building a house. You wouldn’t build a house on rickety foundations, so why do it to your life?. Set your standards, stick to them, adjust them when necessary and let others know that these are the standards you live your life by and ask them to respect them and enforce them yourself.