We often think our standard is what we hold on our best day. It is not. It is what we hold on our worst one.
And most of us have never honestly asked ourselves what that looks like.
Last week I talked about comeback seasons. This week I want to talk about the thing that decides whether a comeback season builds you or breaks you. The standard you refuse to drop even when everything is telling you to.
At the end of the day we are all leading something. A team. A business. A family. A comeback. Ourselves. And the standard we hold in those hard moments is the truest measure of the leader we are.
As you know from this newsletter, there are two voices we all carry, and they’re in a constant battle that I call ‘The Run Within’.
Voice One shows up first.
It always does. And in a hard week it has more material than usual. The results are not there yet. The gap between where you are and where you want to be feels wider than ever. Just this once, it whispers. The circumstances justify it. Lower the bar a little. Nobody will notice. You can get back to your standard once things improve.
Voice Two is quieter.
It knows something Voice One does not. It knows the standard is not something you return to once things get easier. It is something you protect precisely because things are hard. And it says hold the line. This is exactly the moment the standard matters most.
The question that sits underneath every hard season is one most of us never ask directly.
“What standard am I actually holding right now?”
Not the standard I talk about in team meetings.
Not the standard written on the wall or embedded in the values document.
The standard I am living in my worst week, because that is the real test. That is the one the people around us see. And that is the one that either holds everything together or quietly begins to unravel it.
Here is what I know from my own comeback. The temptation in a hard season is to give yourself permission to lower the bar. To tell yourself the circumstances justify a temporary dip. That once things improve you will get back to your standard. That right now just surviving is enough.
And sometimes surviving is genuinely all you can do.
I have been there. There were days during my run around Australia where getting up and taking the next step was the entire standard. The output was small. The effort was everything I had. And that was enough for that day.
The distinction I think is critical is this. There is a difference between adjusting your expectations of the outcome and dropping your standard of the effort. One is wisdom. The other is the beginning of a slide that is very hard to stop once it starts. And it almost always starts with Voice One convincing you that just this once is reasonable.
I am in my running comeback season right now, and I am nowhere near the times I was running before my run around Australia.
That gap is real and I am not pretending otherwise. What has not changed is the standard of how I prepare, how I show up to every session, and how I treat the process and the people around me. That standard stays regardless of where the results currently sit, because I know the results are a lagging indicator of the standard.
If I drop the standard now while waiting for the results to come back, the results will take even longer to arrive.
Voice Two reminds me of that every single morning. Especially the mornings when Voice One has the loudest case it has ever made.
I see the same pattern in the leaders and teams I work with through my keynote The Run Within.
The teams that hold their standard in the bad weeks are the ones that come out of the hard season with their culture intact. The ones that drop it, even temporarily, even with the best of intentions, almost always find that getting it back is harder than they expected. Standards are not just about performance. They are about identity. And when a team starts to identify as one that cuts corners when things get tough, that identity becomes self-reinforcing very quickly.
I have seen leaders go through restructures, losing streaks, budget cuts and team changes and hold their standard through every single one of them. Not perfectly. Not without struggle. Always with Voice Two loud enough that the team never lost faith in what they were building toward. On the other side of those hard seasons, those teams were stronger, more cohesive and more capable than they were before the difficulty hit.
And I have watched others, equally talented and equally well intentioned, let Voice One win just enough in the hard weeks that by the time things improved, the culture had shifted. The shift was hard to trace back to a single decision, and it was unmistakably real.
The difference was not talent.
It was not resources.
It was not even the severity of the challenge.
It was which voice they listened to when Voice Two was hardest to hear.
This is Voice Two doing some of its most important work. Not in the big visible moments. In the quiet Tuesday morning when nobody is watching and it would be so easy to do just enough and call it a day. Voice Two in those moments does not ask for perfection. It just asks you not to drop what you know you stand for.
I truly believe the standard we hold in our worst week is the clearest signal the people around us will ever receive about who we are and what we are about. Not our best week. Not the week we won the championship, closed the deal or hit the number. The week it was hardest to hold the line. That is the week that defines us.
And it is the week where Voice Two either gets a little stronger or a little quieter, depending on what we choose.
So here is your question this week.
Think about your worst week in the last few months. The week where everything felt harder. The results were not coming and Voice One had more ammunition than usual. What standard did you hold that week? Which voice won? And is that the answer you want to give yourself next time the question comes up?
Because The Run Within is not tested in the good weeks. It is revealed in the hard ones.
Thanks for reading.
Sean
