From your first job as a valet to your last job as a greeter at Wally-World, you will be met with countless challenges. There will be disagreements with coworkers, shady business practices, and frustrating clients that will test your patience. You will have to decide when to compromise and when to show fortitude, and those decisions will determine who you are. Each decision is a chance to build and reveal your character, and at the end of the day you are responsible for your response. Successful people take action and improve themselves through every ordeal; making it and themselves better.

Whether you are just starting your career, in the middle of your journey, or close to retirement, there’s always space for improvement. Yes, it is tiring, but it’s also worth the effort. By bettering our work relationships and maintaining a strong ethical stance, opportunities will present themselves we previously hadn’t considered. Plus, it’s about building beneficial habits. It may be frustrating to adopt new methods, but they eventually become secondhand. Easier, seedier paths may be tempting, but each time you take the higher road you build prestige and clout.

The following are some tried-and-true ways successful people improve their relationships and maintain a strong work ethic:

1.Be a team

Think collaboratively, not competitively. If you are going to be competitive, do it against yourself – or at least against the rivals in your industry. Your business team, whoever they may be, are your support and you are theirs. Teamwork supersedes individual skill, and there are countless business metaphors to support that claim (cogs in a clock, legs on a centipede, etc.). When you collaborate well with coworkers, major and immediate challenges can be overcome with ease.

You won’t always want to work nicely with others, and that’s where you need to redouble your efforts. Remember, people won’t always want to work with you either. Perspective can rejuvenate our patience for others. Another tip: Remind yourself why each member is a valuable member of the team, and how you can continue to benefit the team.

2.Maintain your standards, don’t measure against others

Ethical standards must be implemented on both macro and the micro scales. For example, the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society is a society dedicated to helping the public understand new issues that arise in an information-saturated world. If public information has an entire council dedicated to ethics, then you can maintain ethics in your own work as well.

Working ethically isn’t towing the line. It’s working with high standards and genuine respect. It’s easy to rationalize decisions by comparing your choices to others. Live your life to your standards instead of making bad choices look better by comparison. When you run a red light, you don’t say, “at least it wasn’t murder.” It wasn’t murder, but it still wasn’t right. Be better – don’t run red lights.

3.Assume that they know more than you think they know

Pro-tip: When working with/for others – especially hostile others – stay frosty and overestimate what they know. There’s nothing worse than finding out someone knows you were talking trash about them (really, just never talk trash about work where you may be overheard). When there is an issue at work, assume people know more than you do. When your boss asks leading questions, assume they know something you don’t. Then, take whatever you think they know, and add a little more. Paranoid? Maybe. Overprepared? Absolutely.

And being overprepared isn’t a problem. When, not if, you are caught off-guard by a situation where someone knows something surprising, you won’t actually be caught off-guard. You’ll have labored under assumption they knew more than you, and prepared yourself accordingly.

These strategies are based in authenticity. Don’t do things because you are supposed to or are told – do things because you want to and are fully committed. Convey your thoughts and ideas and do it with respect to others. Being a “yes man” will lead to issues later and being confrontational will prevent progress in the first place. Just be true to yourself and, when in doubt, try to use one of these methods of improvement.