Quick Shifts Activation: Your Embodied Standards of Working
Define the non-negotiables that shape how you show up, serve, and sustain yourself in your work.
There’s a version of building a business that looks really good from the outside.
You’re booking clients. You’re showing up online. You have a website, an offer, probably a Notion workspace with a color-coded kanban board. Things are moving.
And yet—something still feels slightly off. Not broken (don’t be dramatic!) Just… misaligned. Like you’re playing a role you designed for yourself a year ago, and nobody told you it was okay to update the script.
I see this come up in a few different flavors:
You’re growing, but the growth feels scattered. You’re saying yes to things that don’t quite fit, and you can feel the drift but can’t name it.
You’re questioning whether your work still reflects who you actually are now, not who you were when you started.
You’re newer to this and trying to build something intentional from the beginning, so you don’t end up in a version of your business that you have to burn down in two months…or two years.
The common thread across all three: you haven’t yet named your standards.
Not your values (we’ve all written those). Not your mission statement (useless, I’ve covered this). I mean the actual operating principles that dictate how you show up, how your work feels to the people in it, and what you will and won’t do regardless of the pressure or the payday.
Your Embodied Standards of Working are the difference between a business that runs you and one you actually want to be inside.
They’re what you return to when someone makes a request that feels slightly off and you can’t articulate why. They’re what keeps your brand coherent across offers, content, and client experiences. They’re the gut-check you’ve been doing instinctively but have never written down.
Once you name them, they become a compass. And decisions get a lot cleaner.
If you want a quick version before going into the full exercise, start here:
What do people consistently say they get from working with me? And am I actually delivering that on purpose, or just hoping it happens?
Sit with that for a second. What came up? Because that’s usually where your first standard lives.
The full exercise is below. Inside the paid section, I’m walking you through all five steps: how to identify what people actually get from working with you, how to name your core commitments, and how to turn those commitments into clear, written standards you can actually use.
Not as a brand exercise. As a business tool.
🔒 Continue reading for the full guided exercise
Inside, I’ll walk you through how to surface your standards, write them clearly, and make them specific enough to actually use when a decision gets hard.
