It’s a big part of life to challenge yourself: to learn new things, to reach out and make new friends, to expand yourself in some way.

We often call it raising the ceiling. It’s what drives the coaching profession, for sure – people want help to pay attention, to stay in their conversation of choice, and to be held accountable to reach a little farther, and try a little harder to get better results in some area.

It’s great to stretch – and it’s also great to check in with yourself. In your life, as you reach higher and raise your ceiling, what happens to your floor?

Thinking of it in these terms challenges you to stretch in both directions – while it’s easy to picture stretching to reach higher, remember to look for the places where you can benefit from stretching to reach down and pull up your floor.

Raising your floor gives you tremendous personal power. As you take responsiblity for anything that might be holding you back, you demonstrate to your inner mind that you will make the deliberate, courageous choices which create the life you want. Valuing yourself in this way ensures that you gain respect for yourself, which creates a dramatically stronger upward spiral of choices, decisions and results.

Harsh as it may sound, this sometimes includes friends or acquaintances who are no longer on the path that you are on. One key element of self care is surrounding yourself with people who support your growth, and whose growth you want to support as well.

If you choose to not raise your floor, and just tolerate what isn’t working, you are seriously limiting how high you can stretch. Avoiding doing so is a choice to not do it.

An action around this would be to take a clear personal inventory: Is there anywhere in your life that you need to raise your floor?