Stop a minute and take a look around- is our country working and living in an “excellent” manner? Have we forgotten what it means to do so?
What does excellence look like? Is it about smiling and opening a door for someone just because we can? Is it about welcoming a customer into our business without being told to do so? Is it about putting things back where you find them in a store, or at home? Is it being treated better than you ever expected to be? Is it about thinking before we speak, so we are not rude or unkind and offend one another? Is it a lifestyle and mindset of being thankful and grateful so we value striving towards it rather than accept the standards of just doing enough to get by?
A recently published survey tells us that 80% of the top companies in America say their customer service is good to excellent, while only 20% of their customers agree. A big disconnect isn’t it? The standards for a good to excellent way of living is in the same disconnect mode, don’t you agree?
Is it possible to return to a culture where excellence is the norm rather than the exception? Ready to find out? What is excellence anyway? Excellence is defined: “as a quality of being outstanding or extremely good!” Doesn’t say we have to be perfect at it, but we should seek to have it as a defining quality in our lives.
Is there a simple way to begin to make excellence your norm? I heard a speaker who once said that: “our lives (jobs, marriages, companies, families) are made or broken ‘in the daily’. That it’s not the big things that hurt or heal, accomplish or fall short. It’s how we live the moments of our everyday lives that matters.”
” Will Durant shared in 1926 that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Think it will be hard to set about making a habit of excellence in everything we do? Not perfection, but being the best we can be, because we know it brings joy and helps others want to make some changes too! I’m willing to change, or you?
Have a Terrific Tuesday being excellent!
“Simply” Sue