I have to tell you, this word is huge in our family.

We have a joke about it, because my dad's name is STAN. And both our parents have always ..."encouraged" standards.

At times, however, especially in some areas of my life, I find that I create a set of standards for others that perhaps is nowhere in their sights, nowhere in their minds, nowhere in their vocabulary, nowhere in their reach. In fact, my standards and my goals and beliefs about success are just that: they are mine. I very often go through life thinking everyone must also believe the same. Everyone else must share my ideas, and if they don't, I am all too eager to introduce them and sell them on the many amazing reasons I believe in them myself. I sometimes am surprised to find someone at odds with my wonderful and diabolical plans and thoughts. Gasp! You *don't* think this way?! How odd! You must be fixed!

At some point in my life I hope I learn to hear myself out loud preaching at some poor sap and recognize, in their deer in the headlights WTF moment, that holymother I better change subjects because this person does nooooot get it and is completely offended. Right now, I'm not there. I'm so not there. Right now, I am falling way short of that recognition. I still blurt out whatever I think "need to be said", I still preach and rant, I still am not as understanding and benevolent as I certainly ought to be. I just don't have the capacity to be NICE sometimes, apparently. Too busy trying to make people into me, for some reason.

Some people are deeply, deeply attached to "their story" and their beliefs about what is holding them where they are. They truly, to their core believe they "can't" do this or "can't" do that, and they have a list of reasons to support their position. Telling them otherwise is to no avail. You could write them a letter, spell it out, draw a picture or have an intervention and they'd still be stunned to hear that they can be or do or have something different than the life they've created. They're quite content to tell you their limitations. They KNOW them. They KNOW why they are where they are. Either they believe they deserve it, or can't move above or beyond it- they just are where they are and you sometimes have to let them lie in their own bed and hope to GOD they have a Byron Katie moment. Maybe what I'll have to learn is to say... "So how's that workin for ya?" when I see someone struggle.

So I apologize- in advance, and in retrospect- to those I have already wagged fingers at, and those I will wag fingers at. It's not my place. And I need to shut up.

The only thing any of us needs to know is:

Your life will simply be as good
as you allow it to be.