On The Suite Spot, sports psychiatrist Dr. Derek H. Suite, MD brings together neuroscience, performance psychology, spiritual wisdom, and lessons from elite sport...practical tools for the people who can't afford to choke when the pressure rises.
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Now, stay tuned for this weeks episode Making Moves Monday!
Science Soul Success
Today in this episode we break down why standards matter more than goals when life gets hard, and how the “floor” we refuse to drop below shapes our performance on our worst days. We share a real story of an athlete who gets unstuck by changing his environment and letting higher standards rub off.
Suite Spots • defining a standard as the floor rather than the ceiling • why goals fade on hard days while standards stay present • a talented athlete’s rut and the turning point that changes his play • the power of environment and proximity to veterans with higher floors • asking whose standards we are living under • Carver and Scheier’s thermostat model for self-regulation and metrics • a small weekly move: choose one standard, write it down, assess the room
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Success and ocean. Welcome to the sweet spot. Welcome to the sweet spot.
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Welcome back to the sweet spot with Dr. Derek Sweet, a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in sports and performance. In the sweet spot, we explore what it takes to stay steady and perform when the pressure is on and the moment matters. Stay tuned for Making Moves Monday.
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Blessings, greetings, and welcome. Welcome back to the Sweet Spot, Sweet Spotters. How are you doing? I hope you're doing well. I trust you're doing well. It is well with you. It is well with your health. It is well with your family. It is well with your employment. It is well, it is well, it is well. Even when it doesn't feel well, you and I get to say and clean and declare, it is well with our souls.
So before we dive into today's topic, I just wanted to remind you that we have already discussed this subject matter months ago when we covered a series called The Standard. We also discussed this for those of you who listen to the Spirit of the Game podcast with Alan Houston. We covered this word standard in that podcast as well. So I invite you to go back into this podcast and look it up, and also to check out the Spirit of the Game podcast with Alan Houston. So look, a standard, as we discussed in the past, is not the ceiling, it's the floor. It isn't the ceiling that you're reaching for. No, that might be your goal, that might be your North Star. But a standard is the line you refuse to drop below the floor. It's the quality you hold on to on your very worst day. When you're tired, when you're losing, or when nobody is watching. That's when your standard is operating. Whether you understand that or not. You see, a goal pulls you up. A standard keeps you from sliding down. Goals live in the future. Standards live in what you do right now. And here's what I've learned in over 15 years of doing peak performance work. On the hard days, the goal is nowhere to be found. Seriously, on really hard days, on days when everything and the kitchen sink is being thrown at you, the goal sometimes is hard to see, it's hard to remember, it's hard to find. So you don't rise to your goals, you fall to your floor. Yeah, your standard. So the whole game is how high have you set your floor? And whether you hold it when everything gets hard, when the unexpected comes, the diagnosis, the pink slip, the injury, the disappointment. That's what this series is about. You don't rise to your goals, you fall to your floor, your standard.
So let me tell you about something I saw around standards that might make sense to you. A few years back, a young guy, an athlete, very talented, super gifted, but ran into a rut. His game just got flat. He just wasn't able to execute the skills that he ordinarily would be able to do and that would come so easily to him. And nothing was wrong on paper with this guy. He trained, he showed up, he was doing the work, and yet he was still in a rut. He couldn't perform in games the way he was supposed to perform. We changed one thing with this guy. One thing. These were veterans who treated a Tuesday in February like it mattered at the playoffs. This is what happened inside of a month. That same young player was completely different. Just by going in and hanging out with these two veterans and working with them. There was no Dr. Sweet magic here. Okay, there wasn't. He thought that he was better because he had raised his effort level. But what he had really done was to change the environment he was hanging out in. He changed the room he was standing in. And that environment, that change of scenery, being with these veterans, going out and hanging out with them in the mornings and following them around. That is what changed his game and got him back. Yeah.
There's a power in the environment. Who you're hanging out with, what your standards are versus theirs. And sometimes their standards, the standards of those around you, if they're higher, can lift yours. So that's what I want you to sit with today. You're always meeting a standard. You and I, we're always meeting a standard. Every day, whether we choose it or not, we're meeting a standard. The quality of your work, the way you speak to people, what you let slide, when you're tired, all of it is being held to some bar, to some standard. The only question that matters is this did you set that bar on purpose, or did you inherit it from whoever happens to be around you? That happens. Sometimes you're just running on somebody else's standards, somebody else's floor. That's the thing to keep in mind. Whose standards are we operating under? And remember, the sweet spots about science, soul, and success. So let me give you some real science under this. And it really surprised me the first time I understood it.
There are two psychologists, Carver and Shear. They describe the mind like a thermostat. They said the mind is a thermostat. Now, a thermostat, when you think about it, holds a specific number, right? It sensors the room and it corrects the gap in the room. That's what a thermostat does. Your standard is that number. And here's the part that stops most people. Without a standard, you don't have anything to correct towards. There's no bar, there's no gap, there's no signal. You can't want to improve with your whole heart and then have no number that you've set, nothing to measure it by. You can't want to improve with your whole heart and have no metric. If you never set the number, your mind has no way to know when you've drifted. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the first move is to choose the number, to choose your metric, to choose what you're measuring by. And the fastest way to move is the one most of us miss. You don't have to grind, you don't have to grind higher by getting so forceful with yourself all the time. You can just change what you're around. Change your surroundings and let the surroundings do the lifting. Like that athlete, that young athlete I just told you about. All he did was start hanging out with people that had higher standards, whose floor was set higher than his. So instead of getting in there for eight, he was in there at 6 a.m. because he was around folks that are like that, right? So that's what I'm saying is you don't have to grind it higher by force. You you can change your surroundings and let the surroundings do the lifting for you. We we calibrate ourselves to the people that are around us. You know that whole saying you're like, show me your five friends, your next your top five, who said your your closest buddies, and we can kind of tell what you're gonna be like. Yeah, we calibrate to the people near us. You put an ordinary performer in a room full of elite ones, and the floor for that performer rises. Nobody even has to give a speech. Just because he or she is in that room with elite performers, the behaviors begin to change. I've seen it a thousand times.
And the ancient wisdom, you know, here on the sweet spot, we're all about science, soul, and success. So, from the soul perspective, the ancient wisdom was way ahead of us on this. In the book of Proverbs, I'm thinking it's chapter 27, but Proverbs said, As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. That speaks directly to what I'm talking about today about standards. That's not poetry, it's it's the mechanism by which your standards can be raised. Lao Su, the author and philosopher, you know La Su. We talk about him here on the street all the time. We quote him all the time. He knew the size of this too, he knew all about this. He wrote that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You've heard that a million times. But we hear that and we think about distance. At least I do. But really, what it's about is about the first standard. It's not really just the first step, it's the first standard that you set. Because every mile after it inherits the shape of your first honest step. And sometimes you have to take a step back and look at what's going on in your life and what's happening before you can take that first step forward.
So here's the move this week, sweet spotters, sweet champions. Here's the move, and it's a small one on purpose. Pick one standard. One the quality you're gonna hold on your very worst day, because that's where standards are revealed. It's on your worst day the day you don't feel like working out, the day you don't feel like being nice, the day you don't feel like getting up and going for it. Yeah. Pick one standard, the quality will hold on your worst day. Write it down where you can see it. Type it into your phone, but put it somewhere you can see it, and this will be the standard that you're gonna begin your journey with. Then look at the room you're standing in and ask, is this raising the floor or is it quietly lowering the floor for me? That's all. That's it. So, sweet spotter, sweet builder, wherever you find yourself today, whether you're chasing a title, whether you're on the grind, maybe you're just trying to get off the mat, pick one standard that you're setting for yourself. The floor that you're not going below, and hold it. Because the floor you keep on your worst day is the move that changes everything above it. Let me say that again so that it sinks. The floor you keep on your worst day is the move that changes everything that happens above it. And that's not a small question, that's not a small thing. It might be the whole game, your whole game, your whole success might rest on your ability to set a small standard, the floor you will not go below. This is how you make your move. This is how you take action and how you win. For science, for soul, and for success, stay in the sweet spot.
If this spoke to you today, I want you to subscribe if you haven't subscribed. It builds our community of sweet builders, of sweet spotters, and sweet climbers. And if you know someone who could benefit from hearing about the power of the standards that they're setting, or who might need to shift their standards, or at least check around them and see who am I hanging out with and what are their standards. Share this episode. We love inviting new people in. And if you haven't commented or made some determination about whether or not this is valuable to you, I invite you to do that today too and give us a rating. I'll see you next time. This is Dr. Derek Sweet. Be blessed.
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Thank you for listening to The Sweet Spot with Dr. Derek Sweet. If today's message was helpful, please feel free to share it and subscribe. There's no cost to subscribing, and it helps others to discover the show. We hope you'll join us again for another inspiring message from Dr. Sweet and the Sweet Spot team. Forces onions and soul and six months stay with the sweet spot.
