Coaching practices for Where Do Standards Come From

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Where Do Standards Come From, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I keep measuring my whole life against this yardstick
• I keep getting frustrated that people aren’t hitting the bar
• I’ve worked so hard to make my team comfortable that I’ve gone soft on the bar, and now they’re relaxed and underperforming
• I’ve basically written my team off as weak
• The shame keeps ambushing me in the same handful of areas

Practices that may help

1. Relativising the standards you use to judge yourself
   Notice the standard you are using to evaluate your life and ask where it came from and whether you chose it.
   Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift
2. Agree in advance on what good performance looks like
   Performance conversations go badly because the standard was never made explicit — the reprimand is the first time it is stated.
   The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
3. Hold high standards inside high safety
   Safety without standards is comfort; standards without safety is fear. You need both axes high.
   Psychological Safety, Made Practical
4. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
   The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
5. Identify your shame triggers and their cultural context
   Shame is always triggered in a specific domain and shaped by cultural expectations — knowing your triggers reduces their power to ambush you.
   Shame Resilience, Made Practical
6. Locate where you’re authored from
   Notice whether your current decision is driven by others’ expectations or by your own internal standard.
   Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
7. Write your own internal standard
   Articulate the values and criteria you’ll use to judge your own choices, independent of approval.
   Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
8. Insist on objective criteria to evaluate options
   Agree on an independent standard — market rate, precedent, expert opinion — before applying it to the specific deal.
   Principled Negotiation, Made Practical
9. Recalibrate ideal-self standards when they are unreachably high
   Distinguish between aspirational standards that stretch you and perfectionist standards that only punish you.
   Self-Discrepancy Theory, Made Practical
10. Anchor the conversation on criteria first
    Set the standard the number should follow before any figure is named.
    Anchoring Bias in Negotiation and Judgment

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