High standards.
This is a lot to talk about.
This is a term that a lot of people discuss and toss around.
But in truth, very few people actually understand what it means.
I’ve had to deal with this issue a lot in my life.
When I was younger, I didn’t understand how to demand high standards in my life (from myself, or from the people around me).
But the reason for why I had so much trouble with it also eluded me.
The truth was that I wasn’t getting high standards from the people around me because I wasn’t embracing them in my own life.
And that’s really the key.
See, when we live and act according to a certain set of high standards for ourselves, we also invariably and automatically invite other people with high standards into our life.
We attract them organically.
And at the same time, we also naturally filter out people who don’t share our high standards.
But a lot of people don’t understand exactly how this works.
So in this post, you’re going to learn how to create and demand high standards in your life in all kinds of different contexts and situations.
Most specifically, you’re going to learn how to create high standards:
- In your personal life
- In your work life
- In your dating/relationship life
- For yourself in-general
If you’re going to live according to the alpha mentality, then it’s crucial that you learn how to do this.
So let’s jump into it and break it down.
Why Are High Standards Important?
High standards are important because they dictate the overall level of quality that we will experience in our lives.
When we have high standards for excellence in life, not only for ourselves but also for the other people we allow into our social circles and tribes, we invite a high level of excellence into our existence and destiny.
By contrast, when we accept low standards of excellence, we invite those low standards into our life, future, and destiny.
This manifests itself not just in your work, but also in your relationships and your dating life.
Is It Good To Have High Standards?
Absolutely.
It’s extremely important to have high standards.
Why?
Because a low standard of excellence invites a low-quality life—and by contrast, a high standard of excellence embraces and attracts a high-quality life.
If you want to create a high-quality life that’s full of happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, and purpose—then living according to a set of high standards and principles is non-negotiable.
It’s a step that you must learn how to take and execute.
What Are Some Examples Of High Standards? – How To Create High Standards In Your Life
Creating high standards in your life isn’t always easy.
It starts with understanding where you are, where you’re falling short, and where you want to be in the future.
I created a standard of excellence for myself when I developed my own personal alpha code—The 18 Vows of the Oath of Kings and Queens.
Let’s talk about some specific examples of high standards that you can demand (from yourself and others) in some different life contexts.
Creating High Standards In Your Personal Life
This falls into an area that I call minding your business.
Minding your business basically means to take full responsibility for the vital infrastructures that are required to keep your life functioning and on target.
It also means to control what you can control, and to hold yourself accountable for the care and upkeep of your existence.
When you create high standards in your personal life, you’ll do things like:
- Pay your bills on time
- Meet your obligations
- Keep your word
- Show up on time for appointments
- Act with honesty and integrity
- Show up to school on time to pick up your kids
- Make sure that your clothes are laid out for work the next day
- Make sure that your alarm is set in the morning so that you get up for work on time
- Avoid drinking excessively in the evenings so that you can get up feeling fresh and ready to start the next day
These types of simple, responsible, proactive activities invite higher standards of excellence into your life.
By contrast, people who neglect these things always invariably end up living their lives according to a lower standard.
And thus, they tend to invite more pain, suffering, and misery into their lives as a result.
These are symptoms of a beta mentality.
Creating High Standards In Your Work
Whatever you choose to set your mind to, it’s vitally important that you commit to trying to do your best.
You should always be striving to achieve excellence in your work, in whatever you’re doing.
I often describe this as follows.
You should always strive to be the hardest worker in the room.
If you realize that you’re falling behind, it’s vitally important to try to increase your level of competency so that you can catch up and pull ahead of the pack.
This is a vital alpha mentality principle.
If you’re not striving to be the best worker in the room, then why bother?
This is called living a life of mediocrity.
And it’s definitely a beta mindset, not an alpha mindset.
You don’t have to be the best all the time, or hate yourself if you’re not the best.
But it’s always better to identify the people around you who get great results, and seek to either emulate them, learn from them, or to hold yourself up to their higher standard—thereby creating more excellence, increasing your own value, and basically raising your own standards for yourself.
Personally, I love how Vince Lombardi said it:
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
Creating High Standards In Your Dating Life
To create high standards in your dating life, it’s vitally important that you learn to respect yourself and that you also learn to command respect from others.
It’s also highly important that you vet partners properly, and that you rule out partners who don’t share your high standards.
Some examples of high standards you should maintain in your dating life include:
- Refusing to tolerate disrespect
- Refusing to tolerate unkindness
- Refusing to tolerate people who waste your time or don’t prioritize you to the same level you are willing to prioritize them
- Refusing to tolerate behavior that you consider trashy, low value, or unacceptable
- Trying your best to be a good dating partner, and to only entertain other people on your same level
- Ceaselessly challenging yourself to make yourself the highest value, best potential mate possible, in all of the vital value metric areas that matter
When you put your best foot forward in your dating life, and you manage to engage in the dating marketplace with a certain level of excellence—then you should demand the same for yourself.
If you’re struggling to bring your full level of excellence to the dating marketplace, then you may need to readjust, reevaluate, and work on yourself so that you can increase your own standards of living.
This will invite higher quality people into your life, and is also how you get high-value people to love you.
If you’re struggling to attract high-value partners, there’s an important question that you need to ask yourself.
“Am I not attracting high-value partners because I’m not acting in a high-value manner?”
There’s generally a lot of truth to be found in this statement.
Remember—attraction is a survival instinct. And the marketplace doesn’t lie.
If you’re not getting the results you want—you must look at yourself first to identify where you’re going wrong.
Once you fix your behavior, great results are sure to follow.
This speaks to the importance of radical self-responsibility.
Creating High Standards For Yourself In Life In-General
Always remember that high standards start with you.
If you want excellence to come your way in life, then you must create excellence for the world first.
This means taking your life seriously, pursuing your passions, being responsible, being determined, and being a hard worker.
This means taking radical responsibility for yourself and pledging not to act like a beta mentality victim.
It’s crucially important to take your power back from the chaos, and to act like a true alpha.
Always work diligently to level up and become the best version of yourself.
When you act with this kind of mindset, you’ll be much more likely to attract high standards to yourself in return.
5 Steps For How To Start Raising Your Standards Today
Alright, now it’s time to talk about some specific steps that you can take in your life to start raising your standards today.
This is crucially important.
Remember, the higher your standards become, the more you can expect to receive from the universe.
This is a proactive mindset.
You must create value to receive value.
If all you create is low-value energy, that’s all you’re going to get in return.
Why?
Because nobody of high value will see you as being worth the time or effort to engage with.
As humans, it’s natural for us to want the best deal that we can get.
Therefore, it’s incredibly important to engage in these five steps, to help you increase your standards for yourself so that you can also demand higher standards from the people in your social circles and dating life.
So let’s talk about each step.
1. Take Stock Of Your Situation
Are you struggling to get the kinds of results you want in life?
Do you constantly feel like you desire more than you’re getting?
Do you constantly feel like people don’t take you as seriously as you wish they did, or like people don’t treat you with the kind of respect you wish they treated you with?
If so, it’s crucially important to take stock of how you are choosing to live, and to evaluate the possibility that you’re not living up to your full capabilities as a human.
Once again, this principle is so important.
We must become radically self-responsible and vow to always be striving to level up our mind, body, and spirit to make sure that we are only accepting the highest standards in our own behaviors.
When you get used to living like this, you’ll automatically start to filter out low-value behavior and attract high-value behavior to you.
This is the first step.
2. Make A Plan To Improve Your Life
So how exactly do you raise your standards for yourself?
Well, it all starts with making a self-improvement plan.
Write down some goals that you’d like to meet.
For example, this could include working on:
- Your physical fitness to achieve a healthier body
- Your monetary and business goals so that you can grow your income
- Leveling up your living space so that you (and your family) have a nicer place to live
- Leveling up your habits so that you live a more responsible, productive life, etc.
These are all great ways to help you increase your own standard of living.
But the only way to achieve these things is to make a plan.
Write down your goals, and then start working to achieve those goals.
Need help with this? Join my Mastermind Tribe to get some help with things like alpha mentality coaching, accountability, writing down your goals, and just in general chasing excellence on a day-to-day basis.
3. Be Disciplined And Excel At The Things That Matter
Far too often, people spend too much time on things that don’t contribute to raising their standard of living.
For example, many people engage in far too much escapism.
They may play a lot of video games, watch a lot of TV shows, or just in-general do a lot of things that waste time or effort.
Now, it’s not a bad thing in life to want to have some fun and just relax.
Watching a show or playing a game from time to time (especially with friends or loved ones) is a great thing.
But it’s also crucially important that we don’t waste too much time too frivolously.
We must be disciplined, and strive to excel at the things that matter.
You’ll never raise your standards if you never put in the work.
4. Stop Tolerating Low Standards In Yourself And In Other People
This can be difficult at first, especially if you’re approaching life with a scarcity mentality.
But when you start to walk away from people who don’t live up to the standards that you desire for yourself, then you make room for people who actually do have high standards to enter your life and take you seriously.
It’s also true that you tend to be the sum of the five people you spend the most time with (this is a Jim Rohn principle, and it’s so powerful).
So if you spend time around people who embrace a higher standard of living, this will tend to rub off on you—and you’ll tend to do the same.
5. Hold Yourself To A Higher Standard Than Anyone Else In Your Life
This is probably the most challenging aspect of this entire process.
And yet, it’s also definitely the most important in the long term.
Always strive to be the best man or woman in the room, no matter which room you’re in.
This is a powerful alpha mentality principle, and it cannot be overstated.
Personally, I always consider it a challenge when I run into someone who’s able to perform better and at a higher standard than me.
This includes people who:
- Make more money than me
- Are more productive than me
- Are in better shape than me
- Get better dating results than me
- Are better at relationships than me
- Are better at certain skills than me (skills that I work on and care about)
- Are more disciplined than me
I see this as a challenge to try to make myself better.
I look up to that person for inspiration. And then I think to myself:
“What do I have to do to get on their level? What will it take to surpass their level and to become even better in my life than they are in theirs?”
See, it’s not about competing, necessarily. And it’s not about outdoing anyone, or trying to show off.
It’s actually got a lot more to do with respect than anything else. It’s about respect for the other person’s work ethic, knowledge, and hustle, and respect for yourself in the sense that you want to continue to expect more of yourself in life.
It’s about always striving to become the best version of ourselves that we can be.
This is so crucially important.
FAQs
What are high standards for a woman?
For women, it’s important to maintain high standards of femininity—especially if they want to succeed on the dating marketplace.
We live in a world where more and more women are feeling ‘offended’ at the idea that they need to be feminine to maximize their potential.
But to deny this standard is to deny our evolution.
Women are amazing! And femininity is the seat of their truest, most formidable power.
What are high standards for a man?
For men, it’s important to maintain high standards of masculinity.
This is true in life, in work, in friendships, and especially if they want to succeed at dating and as protectors/providers.
This isn’t to say that men cannot embrace a bit of femininity.
That’s totally natural.
But once again, we seem to be living in an age where more and more men are rebelling against the idea of being masculine.
And this is simply inherently self-destructive—especially when you consider that strong, healthy masculinity is so powerful and effective.
Men are amazing! Don’t be ashamed of your masculinity. Embrace it.
What are high standards in a relationship?
The baseline for high standards in any relationship includes doing your part, taking responsibility for yourself within the relationship and as an individual, and respecting the other person.
If a couple can maintain these baseline standards, they’re going to head off a lot of potential issues before they even get started.
These things are so important! And they truly matter.
Final Thoughts
I hope that this post has helped you to understand how to develop and maintain high standards in your life, and why it’s so vitally important to take this matter so seriously.
It’s truly a really important issue–and it’s in every human’s best interest to do their best to cultivate a high standard of excellence in life.
Need some help with this?
Consider listening to my podcast, subscribing to my YouTube channel, and checking back here on the blog to read more posts.
I’m always striving to help people become the best version of themselves possible.
Go with grace, my friends… and never give up your power.
Until next time…
Joshua K. Sigafus