Ep #55: Your Standards or Society’s Standards

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Hello, hello, my amazing friends. How are you? All right. Let me see what’s been going on, on my end. Oh, I know. This weekend, I was in L.A., Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, all the fun stuff and sunshine. I have to tell you guys, it has been like four weeks since we have had sunshine here. It has been cold, and dreary, and raining, and terrible.

I was so glad to have a few days break and get some sunshine. I just wanted to plug in directly into the sun and just juice myself up. It’s pretty terrible. I don’t know how some of you live out there in those cold climates. That does not work for me.

Anyway, let me tell you a little bit about L.A. One of my clients, her name is Susie, did a one woman show there called Wake Up Little Susie Wake Up. It was so good. She told her story, and I’m so glad I got to see it. What it left on me is this huge impact about telling our story. I fell in love with her community. I fell in love with the idea of creatively having this healing process through telling and re-enacting the story from the other side. I’m fascinated.

I have to say, you’re going to hear more about this because I will for sure bring it into my coaching practice. All of my clients who are coaches or I’ve trained as coaches that I work with for sure are going to be hearing about this. I am just super interested in factual art of being a creative of the way you have to articulate your story.

You think of 30, 40, 50, 60 years of story, and the way you have to pull out pieces, it’s so much like what we have to do when we’re niching in or when we are getting really narrow with our copy. You have to pull out just that one or two really strong things to hone in on. It did something to my brain, piqued my curiosity for sure, and it tickled my brain. You know how I like to say that. My brain likes to be tickled like, “Oh, my God. How do we do that?” I want to know more.

I’m interested in helping my clients articulate their story and their experiences in a way of it becoming a healing modality, not just for themselves, but representing the hope of overcoming for other people. We surely don’t want our experiences to be wasted. There’s a lot to be said about the wisdom and just what we get from being on the other side and the way our perception changes through the compassion, and empathy, and understanding of us actually experiencing something on deeper levels.

We are able to drop judgments and expectations and allow everyone to have their own personal, unique experience without judgment, without comparison, without labels. There’s something beautiful about that. Anyway, I look forward to diving into that and sharing it with you. Let’s get on with today. I’m already like three or four minutes in.

Grandparents Day was this morning for junior high through high school, which is a little weird. They’ve never done this before, and I have for sure never been to a Grandparents Day for older kids. I think it was part of a fundraising thing that’s going on at the school. Anyway, that was interesting.

What I took away from it I wanted to share on the podcast today. There is a conversation with some of my children about my grandchildren, and this topic came up because we were in the gym with the kids, and they were talking about what their grades were. There was one of them that was punished or maybe even two, yeah, two that were punished because of their grades.

It brought up this conversation about standards. According to the school’s standards, and we can say this social standards also. What is the social standard not to go to jail? You can run somebody off on the road. If you don’t get caught, then you won’t necessarily go to jail. You can run a red light. You can run a stop sign. You can shoplift if you don’t get caught.

There are things, there are standards, that we live by. There are sneaky things also that we kind of turn right on red before we’re supposed to or stuff like that. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about inner integrity standards, personal standards, compared to society standards, and we’ll just use the school for this example.

The grade that you have to make in order to pass compared to the grade you have to make in order to pass at home. This is how the topic came up. Legally, you won’t go to jail, and you can still get to the next grade. You can still be promoted. You can still play sports. I think you can have like a 1.5 average and still play sports.

That is good enough for some people and it is not good enough for other people. That is what the conversation was about. I recall us doing this at home. It was not okay to bring home Cs if you were capable of As and Bs. There might have been a slip up of a C, but the norm, you do the best you can, and then it’s okay if you have a couple of things you didn’t know on the test, and that brought your average down. So, you fell into the B or the B-. That was cool.

When you’re consistently making Cs, Ds, Fs, that’s not cool although you could still pass. Make sense? One of the kids had lower grades and it brought their average down, but legally, they can still play sports, but the parents decided he was not because he was not reaching his potential, and they didn’t feel like he was doing the best that he was capable of. They were like, “This is not okay for the standards of this home.”

We were having a conversation with them after about it. I remember we were that way, and I was thinking how hard it was because we didn’t have support of other parents, and the school system, and the community. So, it felt like we were going at it alone. In other words, it was silly that the kids were punished when they really weren’t bad, B, A, D, we’ll say with air quotes, and they really weren’t bad or the grades really weren’t bad. They weren’t terrible.

My question is, why do we settle for the lower standards? Have you ever thought of that? Why is that good enough? The society’s minimum is what we often reach for. Don’t worry, I’m going to tie this into business. I just want to get the point across here. I remember how hard it was, and talking to other parents about, and eventually, I found other parents who felt the same way that we did.

Thinking back, I’m looking at where our kids turned out, where their kids turned out, the kids who just got by and where they turned out. What happens is we take these habits and behaviors with us into the workplace, into college, into our families, into our marriages. You know how we do anything is how we do everything.

So, if you’re going for societal’s minimal to be enough, to be good enough, and that is the standard that you’re complying by, where else are you doing that? Now, whether this is for your children or for yourself, just think about the workplace. Are you showing up five minutes to or maybe exactly on the dot? Then you stop working an hour before checking out? You start putting your stuff up. You don’t give your all through the working hours.

I’m talking to you coaches too. No worries, not just people who go on the time clock. I’m going to get there. I’m just curious how many of you have noticed this? The standards at home compared to the society’s standards, or the school standards, or even the standards of what is legal or illegal and what is like barely on the line. Integrity wise, we know it’s not okay, but it hasn’t been made into a law yet.

Are we okay with that, or do we try to raise the bar? When I look at settling for the minimum and that being okay, and then recognizing. Once you’re aware, you’re recognizing that you’re also taking this into other areas of your life. Look a few years, like 10 years, down the road, and you continue doing that.

Are those the results that you want? Have you grown? Have you evolved? Where has it gotten you when you settle and you don’t challenge yourself? When you don’t raise the roof. We have this belief, and it’s up to us to push and raise the roof, raise the ceiling up a little bit higher. It’s up to us to evolve and push through the minimum standard and to create more.

What comes up for so many of us, I know for sure so many of my clients, is this challenge of change and it exceeding the average, exceeding the norm, brings up guilt and shame for wanting more from those who are okay with the minimum. Then rerun the risk of not fitting in, and feeling uncomfortable, feeling unworthy. It’s crazy because it’s like wanting to be better or wanting to create more and to evolve, wanting more, makes us feel less than. Is that crazy? I’m telling you.

I was so glad to have this conversation. I was talking to my massage therapist here, Linda, about it after. I was like, “Do you think this would be a good topic for the podcast?” Even as a massage therapist, and what she sees as the norm in service, or going beyond the norm, or exceeding the standard, and what can she add to the massage, like creating a signature package, or doing something unique that only she can do that’s special about her that she could give her client. That’s like raising the standard. It’s not just your typical massage, but it’s the signature massage where it goes above the norm.

The part about the discomfort, and the rejection, and the guilt, and the shame, I think that’s just part of our human conditioning. We’ll always feel afraid to be disconnected, afraid to be rejected, or judged, or abandoned, or labeled. Once we see that and we deal with the emotional discomfort of it, then we can move through, raise the ceiling, raise our integrity, shoot for more.

What we do is we involve everything around us, our neighbors, our co-workers, our family members. I’m watching my children do this, and I kind of felt bad because one of the kids was punished for a C, and we were laughing because she’s like, “I’m punished for a C, but she’s not,” pointing to her cousin because the standards are different at her house.

“That’s a rule at my house, and it’s not a rule at her house.” So, actually, “I’m the bad, I’m punished one, but we’re the same.” Does that make sense? It’s kind of funny watching it. I remember this coming up with one of our kids because she had a harder time reading in English and understanding than the other kids who just breezed through it. So, the standard was different.

It’s not like you need to be punished, you’re different, and it’s a bad thing. It’s more like meeting them where they are and pushing their potential without breaking them. What I think has happened is we have this minimal to make sure everyone does exactly that, but some with lots of potential have lowered their potential to the just the passing point. That, my friends, is in all of us.

We decide what that norm is. We decide what that ceiling is and what we want more. That comes from soul essence. That comes from the inner guidance, inner knowing, because I promise you, I did not have anyone pushing me. No one checked my grades. I never got punished. I’m pretty sure I signed all of my report cards or the majority of them, and I thought that was so interesting when I was raising my children.

It kind of gave me some ease that we all have this brilliance inside of ourselves whether there is someone pushing us or not. That is integrity. That is that inner knowing, that inner glowing, that is that part of us, that natural essence that has an agenda, a plan. It has a mission, it has dreams, and it’s up to us to get on board with that to bring our mind and body into alignment with our purpose and our passion, and to make contribution to the world to create, to explore, to have fun, to grow and evolve.

How does this relate to business? Here we go. We do the same thing. It’s like there is this norm or it’s even below norm because honestly, in coaching, you don’t have to have a certification. There is no governing body. So, you do not have to go to school or get any kind of proper training. You can just like, “Hey, I’m a coach. I can coach you on that. I’m a coach,” and that’s it. You just put the tag on the side of your name, and you go to work.

Anyone can say I am a dot, dot, dot, coach. I’m a fitness coach, or I’m a life coach. It doesn’t matter. So, the standard is nonexistent actually. There is no standard. We have to decide that within ourselves. That is something that I have chosen to do with my business model, is to help raise the bar and help these coaches specialize, create this signature package or this signature unique way positioning that they do something different from anyone else.

What I do when they come in for training is we take their passion to serve. That’s the number one thing, is they all come in with this passion to serve, they want to help other people. Then we take a look at their skill set. Up until this point, what have you done? Were you a nurse? Were you in the coaching industry? Are you a yoga teacher? What is your skill set and your training up until this point?

Maybe you’re a mom of seven kids, and you’ve been married for 30 years, and that has granted you experience. For sure we could use that in the world. So, we take their skill, their passion to serve, what makes them unique through their experience this far, and then I introduce the coaching tools that I use, these healing modalities, integrate that with what they already know and do. Then we create a viable business with unique positioning from there. So cool.

We have a minimum, like a package, and how we charge. In the five step system, they plug everything into that, so it’s super organized. There’s already this structure. They plug everything into there, and once it’s integrated, then they embody it. In other words, they become her with all of those pieces integrated, and they embody it on a spiritual level.

It makes it a really beautiful process of living their legacy, their sole essence, their true inner being. It’s a way to tap into the work that they do, serve at a high level of integrity, and ease and flow with the freedom to evolve, experience, express in their unique way. It’s a beautiful thing.

That’s something that I feel like I can help do in raising the standards in the life and health coach industry, or let’s just say in the coaching industry itself because what I offer is integrative coaching, which is different from a life coach, is different from a health coach, or a money coach, a business coach, a sex coach. All of those things are amazing, but this is integrative coaching where we bring together mentally.

That’s mindset and the way you think, managing your thoughts, emotional processing, integrating the emotional experience, and having emotional maturity and regulation. That’s the ability to control your emotions and not react, especially under pressure.

The third is physically. How do you physically bring all of this to fruition in the material world? Tangible processing. How do you bring the mental and emotional work on a physical level, and then embody it all spiritually? That’s what makes integrative coaching different. Those are the four pillars of health, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. Integrative coaching embodies all of this, and I believe that raises the standard for us in the coaching industry.

Think about this in your own life, your family, your personal integrity, your personal standards. What is just getting by, and is that what you’re doing, or are you raising the bar? Are you raising the roof on the average, on the norm? Does that bring up guilt and shame for you? Is it uncomfortable standing out and standing above or beyond the norm?

This is your work, this is your homework for the week. If you are one of my clients, I expect to hear your answers. I’m joking. Come into the More Than Mindset Facebook group and discuss this if you want support and someone to give you feedback on it.

What comes up for you when you go above the norm, when the standard minimum is not good enough? Does that make you feel guilty? Does that make you work harder, and evolve, and want to do better? Does that make you more attracted to a high-minded community? Someone else is going to push the edge with you, someone else that is going to be more comfortable to push and to grow?

For a lot of us, especially you guys in rural areas, it is tough to want more. I am not joking. That has probably been some of the most painful events in my life, was the growing phases, wanting to do better financially. I grew up dirt as poor. You got it? I’m telling you, there was no $5 hanging around. Very often, there was no electricity.

I remember not having food, and I found some spaghetti noodles with a can of tomato sauce, and that was the meal. There was no money. There was no going to the store, going to the diner and picking up a burger, unless I babysat and happened to have some money. I did not have a car. My first car, you’re going to laugh. This is crazy.

My first car was $150, and he let me pay installments because it was my friend’s dad. The reason that the car was for sale is because it left us everywhere we went. If we went to the Purple Peacock, we for sure was riding home with someone else because that car was not coming back with us. Crazy stuff.

I know all about not having my needs met, and it was not comfortable. My first baby, I was alone. I had no family members in the picture. I had no support system in place. I had friends who thought my baby was cute, and they loved on him, and they loved me, but we ain’t got no dang money. Got it? So, I know all about that, and I didn’t want it.

I made that decision. When I had this baby, I knew it was going to be different when I found myself caught up in the system. I was like, “This is not good enough. I will never come back to this office ever again.” I was so humiliated, so ashamed, and I was not taught that. I was not taught to do it or to not do it. I was not brought up in that.

There was just something inside of me that knew it was not good enough. I looked around that room and I said, “I can do better than this. This is not good enough. I will never come back here.” I swear to you, that’s the kinds of things that I’ve done in my own personal evolving and growing. I don’t want to ever live that way again.

I was pregnant in my $150 car, and I had no home to go back to. I had to sleep in the car. These were shitty days. I did not want to continue living that way. There was no one breathing over my shoulder. No one telling me to do better. No one telling me I should have done something. No one. There was no guidance at all. It is inside of all of us.

We all have that internal voice. If we can get quiet, quiet the mind, quiet the defensive brain, quiet the fear and tap into your integrity, to your personal standards that once more, and rise above the guilt, and the shame, and the discomfort of what other people may think. Really sit with yourself. Is it enough to just be at the minimal standard, to just settle, to just be average, or do you want to exceed that because you want to experience it?

Not because you need to be better than someone else or not that what you have is not enough. Just because you want to experience the growth and because you want to evolve, and you want to be part of a higher-minded society, and because you want to help others expand by being an example of it just because. Think about that and how you can become one of these coaches who raised the bar.

I’m not talking about having to get a certain kind of certification to raise the bar. I’m talking about who you are in the value that you offer. Get super specific about it. What do you have to offer that someone else doesn’t? Go to town. Grow in that, become a specialist of that. Typically, it’s going to be either health, wealth, or relationships. Those are the three problems that people pay for.

Health is huge. You can take that from fitness, to food choices, to chronic pain, illness, disease, autoimmune. There are so many areas to go with health. How to create a vibrant, healthy life, and can you coach? What you would do is you would just go to work and get super specific on one particular area of health.

Identify with that. Find your unique positioning, how you want to brand yourself. What’s the position that you want to take? If it’s wealth, are you a financial coach? Are you someone that helps with scarcity? Are you someone that helps them build their business? In the wealth industry, specifically who do you help? Is it someone in banking? Is it someone in maybe it’s yoga, maybe it’s health and wellness? What industry do you help, or how do you help them specifically to improve their wealth?

Then relationships? Is it a relationship with themselves? Is it relationship with their business, with their partner, with their children, with their parents? Find that unique positioning according to your experience, your specialty, your passion to serve. Maybe it’s moms having a better relationship with their children, or moms having a better relationship with their husbands or with their dads.

Find one, and raise the bar, guys. Go out and be the very best in that industry and don’t look back. You just seriously decide, sell yourself on it, and then sell them on it. You won’t even have to sell them on it whenever you’re super clear and specific because you will be branded with that. As it integrates on all levels, and then you embody it, you become it. It’s super easy to plug into a system once you have a body.

I can sit here and just turn on this mic and just talk. I have embodied this work on every level. Mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, occupationally, the way I am in my relationships, the way I serve in the world, on all layers. For sure, spiritually. I am who I am as a spiritual being having this human experience in the material world. I am for sure 100% embodied in that.

Do I still have fear and doubt? Heck yes. I battle it every single day. Every single day. Those who are around me know this. You heard the podcast a couple of weeks ago with Danielle and I, and I talk with her every single week, and this comes up every week, this self-image. I still have bits and pieces of myself as the homeless person, the homeless pregnant person. I still have fears about that, even though I know I have overcome it, I know I have changed it, and I’ve lived 30 years outside of it.

In my cells, there’s still a part of that belief that I still am carrying around. I know that because of the doubts that I hear in my head every day, but I work on it. I keep working, I keep evolving, and it gets more of a distant voice. It’s not screaming in my head anymore. It’s just a little whisper.

Anyway, if this sounds like something that you want to do to raise the standard in coaching and you want to become the coach who has a unique positioning, who is serving from the passion that she brings to the world, and you want to integrate this with your skill set and learn about all of these tools that I bring to the table in mind body wellness, holistic integrative approach from my experience as a yoga teacher, a meditation teacher, massage therapist, health coach, life coach, hypnotherapist, like I integrate all of those beautiful modalities and I teach you the tool sets from there and we integrate it with yours.

I have the Mind Body Business Mastery Program coming up. February opens for enrollment, so just send an email to Kim at kimguillory.com. I know this is time sensitive. We’re in February right now. The actual class won’t start until March, but you get one on one coaching with me until then. So reach out if you are ready to step into high value service, if you’re ready to raise the roof in the industry, if you want to become the most amazing coach in your unique positioning and specialize, create this signature package that only you can deliver. I would love to help you do that.

So reach out if that is an interest to you already, guys. Until next week, I want you to really think about your standards. The standards that you were brought up in, the standards that you set for yourself, for your family, for the industry… are they just the minimum? And are you willing to exceed the average to exceed the norm? Put yourself out there. Stand above, not be ashamed of being brighter. Right. It’s pretty scary.

All right. I love you all.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More than Mindset.