One sure way to have a great day and feel better about yourself and your life is to make absolutely sure that you strive to the utmost to achieve your best in everything you do.

We often believe that the biggest stresses in our lives come from outside influences. That they are caused by other people, external circumstances and things we can’t control.

Though this may be true in some instances, if you examine your feelings carefully, you will often find that the greatest stresses come from knowing that we could have done better. Knowing that fear, or laziness, or inertia has prevented us from realizing our true potential, stopped us asserting ourselves or deflected us from taking action when the opportunity arose. This is a knowledge that eats deep into our self esteem.

So how can we ensure that no matter what stresses we are under, we ourselves are not the biggest contributor? One way is to approach each and every task that we undertake with the intention of doing our absolute best.

The first step is to strive for excellence within your capabilities. No matter what we have to do, from taking out the garbage to building a website; from dropping our kids at school to starting a business, there is a huge amount of contentment to be gained from doing your absolute best.

Make sure that the garbage bags are secure, that no waste is smeared on the trash can, that any recycled items are properly sorted and that everything is neatly placed outside for collection. Be a tip-top garbage dumper.

Resolve that your website is going to be the best in its field and if you can’t achieve that yourself, then hire the best people to build it. If you can’t afford that, change your resolution; aim to have the best home-built website in the business. Set your own benchmarks for excellence, within your means but make sure you live up to them.

Make the journey to school a highlight of your kids’ morning. Play guessing games or sing songs if they’re young enough, have quality time, one-to-one conversations if they’re older. Whatever you do, send them to school feeling completely positive about the day ahead.

Build your business in the same way. Declare your intention for perfection at the outset and live up to it every day. Give the best customer service, the best after sales care and the finest products in your field. Your customers will appreciate it and you will see a financial benefit as well as an enormous sense of satisfaction.

The last step is total focus and concentration. Give yourself the time and space to completely immerse yourself in whatever it is that you are doing at that point in time. Only by being completely present in the moment and concentrating solely on the task at hand can we ensure that what we produce is the best that we can achieve.

Apply this philosophy to everything you do for the next week and you will immediately begin to see that the way you feel about your life is within your control. When you look back at the end of the day at all the things you have achieved and, more importantly, how well you have achieved them, you will feel a growing sense of pride in what you are capable of and who you are.