How to Raise Your Standards With the Power of One More

You want to raise your standards, and every method you have tried asks you to overhaul your whole life at once. New routine, new diet, new calendar, all starting Monday. Two weeks later you are back where you began. There is a simpler way to raise your standards, and it fits inside the day you already live. Do one more.

Last week I ran a session with a leadership team I coach on The Power of One More, Ed Mylett's book, which has shaped how I operate for years. I asked the room a question. When you go to the gym, how many of you do sets of 10? More than half the hands went up. That one number turned into an hour-long conversation about where each person was quietly capping their own life.

What does it mean to raise your standards?

There is a line in the book I love: you can find your best life by doing one more than the world expects out of you. I would edit it. Do one more than you expect out of you.

The world's expectations are a low bar. Yours are the ones that matter, because you will not exceed the standards you create for yourself. One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself is seeing yourself as your own coach. Your coach would never let you stop at 10. Your coach would ask for 11.

The framework I use with every team is intention, awareness, and consistency. Once you have the intention to do one more, you start seeing opportunities everywhere. One more phone call. One more rep. One more person you introduce yourself to. The more you see, the more you can see. That is why this one small skill can shift your entire frequency. If you want the deeper identity work underneath it, start with how to be your best self.

Why does everyone stop at 10?

Because 10 is the number the world agreed on.

I told the team I am offended by the number 10. Everybody else likes the number 10, and I have no interest in being like everybody else. So I do 11. Then something sneaky happens. The moment I say 11, that is now the limit I created. It is one more than everyone else, and it is a brand new ceiling.

One woman on the team said she usually does 12, and sometimes she pushes to 15 and feels the difference. I asked her a question. When you say 15, have you noticed you just set a new artificial floor for yourself? You will do exactly 15. Make it 16.

This is the Jedi mind trick we play on ourselves. We set our own thermostat. The move I have learned is to switch the decision mid-set. At rep three, four, five, I already know I am going to 15, and a little voice says why only 15 when you know you can do 16. Tim Grover tells the story of telling Michael Jordan to do 12 reps and watching him do 22. The best in the world, with the hardest trainer in the world, adding a zero.

How do you raise your standards without changing your whole life?

You shrink the unit of improvement until it is impossible to skip.

My very first coaching engagement was with a sales team of about 15 people. When I asked how many struggled with fitness, the answer was the same across the room: if I cannot do an hour, I do nothing. So we started with four pushups, six jumping jacks, and seven air squats. Small enough to do in a hallway. Small enough to do on the worst day of the week. Momentum started at the smallest unit, and it built from there.

I call the same idea no zero days, and it is the principle that carried me through 75 Hard. On a day the workout falls apart, what does no zero days mean? Twelve pushups. Twelve pushups times 365 days is a few thousand pushups a year that would have been zero.

One of the leaders on the call did the math live. He already reads 10 pages a day. If he reads 11, on a 180-page book, that is two more books a year. He committed on the spot. Someone in sales making 20 calls a day makes 21, and that is a few hundred extra conversations a year. We overestimate how hard it is to make progress.

The same math works at home. Jesse Itzler once asked another dad why his eight-year-old was so much better at soccer than every other kid. The answer was five extra minutes a day. Over a week, that is 30 minutes. Over a month, two hours. Most kids get zero. Do you think your son or daughter might notice five extra minutes every day?

How do you make one more a habit instead of a one-time push?

You attach it to something you already do, and you give it a deadline.

Saying you will give more compliments is easy. Becoming a person who blesses 50 people a day is a different thing, and it comes from collecting evidence. The CEO on the call gave his team the cleanest version of this I have heard. Find the places in your life that are already consistent, and stack the new thing there. If you are in your car every day, you will see another car, so bless that driver. If you walk every morning, bless the person you pass. Then set the deadline. Do it by 10 a.m., once, twice, three times. The question "how would I do this by 10 o'clock" changes how you think about the whole morning, which is why I am so protective of a morning routine you actually love.

My own anchors are simple. Every time I walk into a grocery store, I know there is a cashier I am going to compliment, because nobody else will. Every time I pay with a tip, I add one more. Every time my wife walks past me on the way to bed, I say I love you one more time, because love is created by giving it to somebody else.

Then there is my run. My maintenance run is 3.7 miles because there is a sign on the road that marks the turnaround. One morning a little voice said, here is an opportunity to be an epic overachiever. There was a white stake 50 yards past the sign. Then an orange sign. Then a third marker. Three miles became 3.73, and now I am trained to look for the next marker at the exact moment I want to stop. That is the habit. You stop asking whether to do one more and start asking where the next marker is.

Your declarations do the same work. When you say who you are out loud, you start looking for the evidence, which is the whole reason I teach people to speak things into existence.

What do you do when the negative voice shows up?

You get to neutral, and then you do one more.

The best opportunity to raise your standards is rarely a puppy-dogs-and-rainbows day. It is the morning you slept four hours and woke up with a headache and a loud inner critic. My coach Steve Hardison says it in five words: doubt your doubts, not your declarations.

Trevor Moawad, who coached Russell Wilson, taught a concept called getting to neutral. In a playoff game Wilson threw four interceptions, the worst game of his career, and got the ball back with under two minutes left. He never tried to go from that low to feeling great. He got back to zero. Plus one, zero, minus one. Most people live at minus four. Wilson got to zero and led the game-winning drive.

I use this on the golf course. A friend of mine is a far better golfer than I am, and I beat him about 30 percent of the time because of how we each talk to ourselves. He misses one shot and tells himself he is an idiot for the next three holes. I dump a shot, smile, and say let's get this back to zero. I pick up strokes on the mental side alone.

One team member shared her process, and it was perfect. When she is in a bad mood, she does not act and does not make decisions. She waits until it passes. That is what a standard looks like on a bad day. You have a process, so the mood never gets a vote. The CEO closed the call with the line I want you to keep: your thoughts are not your actions. You have receipts that prove otherwise. For more on that reset, read how to stay positive when things go wrong.

Does your inner circle set your standards?

Yes. John Wooden said you will never outperform your inner circle, and every person on a growth path runs into this.

One team member shared that since writing his personal manifesto, he noticed a close friend only ever wanted to hang out when the plan was binge drinking. He chose distance, and it felt like leaving someone behind. I told him what I heard from an entrepreneur named Bobby Castro at a private Q&A years ago, when someone asked what to do about a circle that carried him through his lowest moments and now held him back. The advice was simple. You do not make a big announcement. You fade away. A non-response.

People are in your life for seasons and reasons. I have had groomsmen from my wedding move on, and there is still love there. The season changed. The CEO added something I loved: invite them into what you are doing now, a three-mile walk on Thursday at six, and most of them will say no thanks. You never pushed anyone out. You just kept walking. You can still bless them from a distance.

How to raise your standards starting today

1. Pick one number you already hit every day. Reps, pages, calls, minutes with your kid, dollars saved.
2. Add one. Write the new number down.
3. Attach it to something that already happens. The gym, the commute, the bedtime story, the checkout line.
4. Give it a deadline. By 10 a.m. works for most people.
5. Catch the new ceiling. When the new number feels normal, go one past it, and switch the decision mid-set.
6. Write your bad-day process. Yours might be "I do not make decisions in a mood." Mine is "get back to zero, then one more."
7. Tell someone. Share your one-more with a partner or a team and come back in two weeks with receipts.

Implement at the speed of instruction

The CEO ended our call with candor. He told his team he was dissatisfied with how little of the teaching had turned into action, and he asked each person to commit to one do-one-more within the next ten minutes. The ideas were easy. After ten minutes they drift, and two weeks later the call was just a nice hour.

That is the standard. Implement at the speed of instruction. Pick your one more before you close this tab.

Doubt your doubts. Anchor in your declarations. Then go find the next marker past the sign.