We All Need to Operate From Standards
Dr. Saul Miller was my mentor during the years I was doing mental performance coaching for hockey players. He's one of the most respected sport psychologists in hockey — decades of work with NHL players, and the person who shaped how I think about performance under pressure more than anyone else.
He mentioned recently that he appears in Chris Pronger's new book, Earned. Pronger — Hall of Famer, Norris Trophy winner, Hart Trophy winner — writes in it about the three standards he operated from throughout his career:
Be the hardest worker in the room.
Fuel my body with appropriate nutrition.
No more excuses. Take ownership.
Three lines. That's the whole framework for an eighteen-year NHL career.
I've been thinking about that ever since, because the structure is doing something that goals don't.
Standards Versus Goals
A goal is an outcome. It lives in the future, it can be reached or missed, and once you've reached it, it's done.
A standard is a floor. It's not something you achieve — it's something you don't go below. It operates every day regardless of circumstance, motivation, or how you happen to feel about it.
Pronger's standards aren't aspirational. They're non-negotiable conditions of being himself. Be the hardest worker in the room isn't a thing you accomplish on Tuesday and check off. It's how you show up to every room, forever.
That distinction matters enormously for anything you want to sustain over decades — and intimate life is exactly that kind of domain.
Why Goals Fail in Intimate Life
I've watched this pattern in coaching clients and lived it myself.
A man decides to improve his intimate life. He sets goals. More frequency. Better communication. Try new things. Be more present. All reasonable.
The goals produce a burst of effort. Something improves for a few weeks. Then life reasserts itself — work intensifies, a kid gets sick, the ordinary friction accumulates — and the goals quietly lapse. Six months later he's back exactly where he started, with the added weight of having failed at something he said mattered.
This isn't a motivation problem. It's a structural one. Goals require sustained enthusiasm to survive, and enthusiasm is not sustainable. Standards don't require enthusiasm. They just require that you don't go below the floor.
The couples who sustain something alive over decades — and I've now talked with enough of them to see the pattern — are not operating from goals. They're operating from standards they don't think about anymore because the standards have become identity.
My Three
So I wrote my own. Three standards for my intimate life and for the work I do in this domain.
1. Stay grounded.
This is the foundation, and it's the one everything else depends on.
Grounded means: settled in my own body, not destabilized by Brittney's emotional state, not seeking her approval before I'll express something, not managing her experience instead of being present in my own. It means I'm the one holding the field rather than needing it held for me.
Everything I've written about masculine presence, about desire without need, about not being responsible for my partner's happiness — it's all pointing at this. The man who is grounded brings something. The man who isn't needs something. Those produce entirely different relationships.
Practically this standard means I do the somatic work. The daily breathwork isn't optional or mood-dependent. It's the practice that produces the ground, and the ground is the standard.
2. Bring it home.
Whatever I'm developing, it comes back to her.
This one exists because I've watched men — and been one — turn personal development into a project that runs parallel to the relationship rather than into it. You read the books, do the practices, develop the capacities, and somehow the marriage stays exactly the same. The growth happened in a separate room.
Bring it home means the practices are in service of the actual relationship. The breathwork is so I can be present with Brittney. The desire work is so I can express wanting to her. The shame work is so I can show up without the commentary. If something I'm developing isn't landing in our life together, I'm doing it for the wrong reason.
It also means bringing my actual self home rather than the managed version. The desire, the heat, the wanting, the anger held in a container — all of it comes through the door rather than getting left outside for her comfort.
3. Tend the fire daily.
Not weekly. Not when I feel like it. Not when conditions are favorable.
Daily.
This is the standard that most directly reflects what I've learned about how any of this actually works. The breathwork produced its first real shift around day eleven — not day one. The pelvic floor research uses six-month protocols before measuring meaningful change. Presence is a trait built through accumulated repetitions, not a state you access on demand.
Tending the fire daily means some form of contact with this dimension of my life every single day. Some days that's a full practice session. Some days it's five minutes of breath. Some days it's a text to Brittney that carries actual desire rather than logistics. Some days it's writing one of these posts.
What it never is: nothing.
The fire doesn't go out because of one bad day. It goes out because of a hundred days of nobody adding fuel.
Why Three
Pronger used three. I used three. That's not coincidence — it's the practical limit.
Standards only work if you can hold them in your head without effort. Three fits. Seven doesn't. A list long enough to require consulting is a list you'll stop consulting.
The test is whether you can recite them in the middle of a hard day without looking them up. If you can't, you don't have standards. You have a document.
Write Your Own
If this frame is useful, the exercise is straightforward and worth actually doing rather than just reading about.
Ask what the floor is. Not what you're aspiring to — what you're unwilling to go below. Those are different questions and the second one produces better answers.
Make them behavioral rather than aspirational. "Be more present" is a wish. "I do
the practice daily" is a standard. The difference is whether you can objectively tell at the end of the day whether you met it.
Keep it to three. Maybe four. Not more.
Make them about you, not about outcomes. Pronger's standards are entirely within his control — work harder, eat well, take ownership. None of them depend on whether the team wins. Mine are the same. Whether any given encounter with Brittney goes well isn't a standard I can hold. Whether I showed up grounded is.
Then hold them when it's inconvenient. That's the whole thing. A standard you abandon under pressure was never a standard. It was a preference.
The Larger Point
What I appreciate most about Pronger's three lines is how unglamorous they are. Nothing about talent. Nothing about outcomes. Nothing you couldn't have written yourself.
The power isn't in the content. It's in the fact that he actually operated from them for eighteen years.
That's available to anyone in any domain — including this one. Especially this one, where the default is drift and where almost nobody has ever thought to set a floor.
Stay grounded. Bring it home. Tend the fire daily.
Yours will be different. Write them anyway.
Ready to go deeper?
If this resonates, there are two ways to take the next step with Coelle.
Download the Coelle app — Guided audio intimacy sessions designed for couples who are ready to stop performing and start arriving. A daily practice that makes "tend the fire daily" genuinely achievable. Download Coelle here.
Work with me directly — I offer one-on-one sex and intimacy coaching for individuals and couples, drawing on my background in sport psychology and years of personal somatic work. Book a free discovery call here.
