Lower Your Standards

Every time. A lot more chill. He leaves you with the responsibility to reach out and schedule all your dates. No weekend getaways, no meeting close friends or family. No problem. Set one measurable, easily achievable Conditions of Enoughness and then notice: did you get it done? Did you enjoy the process more? And most important: do you have energy and motivation to continue shaping more of the life you want?

Love, Jen P. These lexicon posts are just a taste of what we dive into in the Life Navigation course. Whether you join me for the course or not.

Sign up here. But over time, holding that frantic pace as your body naturally changes can become difficult. You also might encounter other physical situations where you have to scale back, such as when you're sick, have a baby or get hurt.

Don't forget that chronic stress and depression, common with heavy workloads and responsibility, can cause very real fatigue and focus problems, too. In these cases, the new standard becomes whatever your body safely can tolerate or needs to recover. Disabilities absolutely count, too.

I can tell you from experience, for instance, that as a 4'8" little person, there just ain't any way I'm getting the cereal on the tippy-top shelf without a sales clerk or my trusty-dusty grabby tool. I'm not giving up with those accommodations. I'm just finding a different way to ensure I get what I want.

Others have set the standards for you. We're not talking about a boss setting a basic quota or timeline here. We're talking cases where instrumental people in your life try to manipulate you into achieving life-altering goals they wanted for themselves. There are also cases where many people say what someone should do simply because that individual has a particular talent. For example, maybe your love-to-build parents pushed you into engineering even though you hate it, or perhaps everyone in your community keeps saying you should be a doctor given your aptitude for science.

If you're working to please everybody but yourself, you'll likely never be happy in what you do.