I wanna dive into this. This is a huge focus of mine. It is just the difference between a promise and a goal. I feel like so many times people get so attached to goals. They are goal setting new year’s resolutions and saying, what’s your goal today? Or, what’s your goal this week? When I think about it, goals are kind of crap. I’ll be honest. I found that a lot of people, and maybe if you’re listening to this, you disagree. I’d love to hear you guys’ feedback and comments. A goal is, in the Marion Webster’s dictionary, there’s the definition of goal- the end towards which effort is directed. That’s it, the end toward which effort is directed. Okay. So, we have a goal. Then the definition of a promise, from the same dictionary is- a legally binding declaration that gives the person, to whom it is made, a right to expect or to claim the performance or forbearance of a specified act.

Why is a promise more effective?

So, if you were to ask yourself like which one would you think would be more likely to happen? Duh, the promise and the promise is something that we keep. It’s like a covenant, it’s an agreement between two people.  Yourself and someone else, you two, make this promise with meaning there’s a reciprocate to a promise. This is a huge part and a difference between a promise and a goal.

The third thing, which most people aren’t probably thinking of, is their audience and the audience could be an antagonist. It could be your community. That’s watching, you rooting for you, the cheerleaders, your social media fans, your company in and of itself. What ends up happening when we make a promise, there’s gonna be some kind of consequence, pain reward associated to where if we break this promise, it might be shame. We might lose relationships, or we might lose out on a little, or a lot of respect, and clout. Where if we don’t hit our goal 99% of the time, there’s no repercussion. It’s straight up like, hey, you didn’t hit your goal. But, who cares? And you, nine times out of 10, don’t care. This is why I want to talk about how there are three major problems that I look at when we talk about goal setting. I’m not saying don’t have an end in mind, don’t have a destination. Don’t have benchmarks in life that you’re trying to accomplish. I’m just saying, make them more of a commitment.

Problems With Goals

The three main problems that we run into with goals is the first one’s negotiation. The second one is false dopamine, and the third one is there’s no plan. There’s a statistic that says 92% of 17 million people that try to quit smoking each year, fail. 95% of people who lose weight, fail to keep it off long term. 88% of people who set goals for their New Year’s resolutions, fail at their attempt. 10% of the population has specific, well defined goals. But, even then seven out of10 of those people reach their goals 50% of the time. So, you ask yourself, if those are the statistics, are goals meaningful? If I have a goal to goal to stop smoking by the end of the year. It’s like, okay, how many years have you said that?

So, it’s funny because, I had a goal to get a six pack. I still do by the end of this year. I have been about 185 pounds my whole life. A lot of times I’ve tried to lose weight. I’ve talked about dieting and it’s like, oh, I have a goal to do a meal plan. I have a goal to do this. I have a, it like have a six pack I’ve goal to look at. There’s been so many times that I have done that, but, the reality is, it never happened. It wasn’t until I made a promise, not to myself, but to my administrative assistant.  I told him, I promise to pay you a thousand dollars every time I eat sugar between Monday and Friday. I remember the first time I had lemonade, I had to defend a thousand bucks. I contemplated. I’m like, well, I didn’t even know I had sugar! Like I totally spaced it. I forgot. But, then it’s like, no, but I made a promise. It wasn’t the goal about the six pack. It wasn’t a goal about the sugar. It was simply, I made a promise that I said, if eat sugar, I promise to pay a thousand bucks. There’s been many times since then that I’ve paid her a thousand bucks. She gets excited, obviously, in those days, but she has nothing to gain.

She has no skin in this other than she collects money. So unfair to her or unfair to me, maybe not cause many of you guys are like, why would you do that? Do that deal with me. But I look at it and I go, no, I’m doing the deal with myself because a goal does not have that deal. So when we look at the reciprocate of one, the promise is made with ourself first. So I promise not to make or eat sugar between Monday and Friday. I could very much so lie. I could very much so lie about the other day when I had a marshmallow,  or a bowl of cereal that I kept caving. It was a Thursday night and I look back and I go, interesting. I ate sugar and I’m not gonna tell her. Two days later I’m feeling this insane guilt trip, because I like to be very honest with people. I like to be very honest with myself. This is one of the things I’ve really tried to work on. I got to the point where I was like, it’s not worth my integrity. The thousand bucks, isn’t worth breaking a promise, not to her, but to myself. You know, when we set out to, to sell a certain amount of sales or when we try to commit, or maybe we, we give our investors a promise and we say, Hey, I’m going to, I promise to hit this revenue mark, or I promise to sell this much, or I promise to go out and work all the hours. That’s a different conversation than I have a goal to sell this much. It should have some different meaning.

You’re not gonna take a promise lightly. I think a lot of times people, they, they take a goal too lightly. Why? Because they artificially spit out whatever postures wants are meaning like society imposes these goals that they feel like validated from, by being like, oh, I’m gonna sell this much. I’m gonna make a hundred thousand dollars. That makes me feel validated. But they never really internalize why they wanna make a hundred thousand dollars. They don’t even think it through, they just throw out a number because it feels good and someone else is asking for a number from them. They didn’t really put much thought to it.  You know, I look at it and I go, there’s a thing called leverage. If you study coaching, and as I consult and I work with a lot of people,  I try to get leverage. Which means, what’s the pain associated and what’s the pleasure associated? What pain would you experience or what gain would you experience if we were to accomplish the goal, or not accomplish the goal?

Pain Factor

I thought about different business leverage factors. I listed these out and the first one is pain. So, or the, the pain factors is be letting someone down, getting beat by competition, losing money, losing people. A lot of times, you lose these relationships, legal repercussions, cost of not changing, repeated results. Everybody hates insanity when they’re just doing things over and over again; you have overhead or expenses. If you don’t grow a lot of people forecast growth, they tack on a lot of overhead now in anticipation of profitability relationship cost. So, if you start to stay, let’s weigh and put an actual, tangible value to the pain associated. If I don’t hit my goal or I don’t hit my target and actually, remember that on a constant basis and then also associate the pleasures.

Business Pleasures

The business pleasures, or the business factors of leverage could be change in salary or payout. So it’s like, Hey, I can finally start paying myself more. You know, that’s been something I’ve started to actually like taste for the first time in three and a half years in business is it’s like, oh, I’m hitting revenue targets where I’m actually gonna pay myself. Like this feels really good. Then changing profit margin stress level. I’m actually getting to a point where we’re hitting our targets where I’m like, oh, I can take a weekend off and not feel bad. I can be, you know, I’m gonna go disappear for a week. Stress, level is a huge one, freedom to do other things, time access, ability to conquer other projects. So, it’s like, you know, one of the projects that, and a lot of you guys don’t realize that I’m focused on this, is the door association. So we’re working on a lot of really cool initiative with sex trafficking, education certifications, public relations, a documentary we’re fundraising for. So, if anybody wants to get involved on a committee, it’s gonna be a very, very global effort and, uh, takes a lot of work. So that’s stuff like if I can’t free up and hit my targets and hit my revenues marks, then I can’t go give back and do something cool like that, you know?

Effects On Loved Ones

 Um, so another one would be the effect on those that you love, like, you know, meaningful friends, meaningful family, they see this energy getting sucked out of you. You know, passive and income opportunities could be a big one. Like, um, you could have, you know, different side hustles or real estate now coming in, you’re building like actual wealth. If you hit your sales targets and your goals and your budget, right. Uh, clout and the marketplace, you know, obviously authority, recognition, things like that. So there’s, there’s so many pleasures you could associate for hitting your numbers or hitting your, your, your business numbers. And so I’m sure there’s a ton of more. And I, and I think it’d be smart that as you set a promise, you actually associate okay. If I hit these promises, I’m going to accomplish this. Right?