BTG 182 - Keep your promises

Hello and welcome to breaking the guard. On today's episode, I want to talk about the importance of keeping your ward. I may have mentioned this way back when referencing the four agreements by Domig. Great book. I would highly recommend you read that. This has some inference to that, but I'm also going to go a little bit more. There is an agreement in that book that's mentioned, which is be impeccable with your word. And that has a lot of meanings, but I'm going to focus on one particular meaning, which is to always keep your word in the sense of live up to your promises. Right? I feel it's one of the most important things you can do as a person of integrity is to honor your promises. We are showered with people who love to make big promises and never deliver. Pretty much every politician in my lifetime has has done that before. And we all hate it when people do that. We lose a lot of respect for people when they make big promises or even small promises and are just unable to fulfill them. It's one thing if you make a promise that you intended on fulfilling and just couldn't. It's another thing if you make a promise that you had no intention of fulfilling and just made it to get somebody to do something for you. I really can't help you if you're the type of person who does the ladder. to me, you're just not somebody that I can work with. If you are just going to give me false promises just to extract something from me real quickly, whether it's a vote, it's money, you know, it's a favor, whatever it is, and then like, oh, you know, shame on you. You're just a scam artist. And to me, to be blunt, you're worthless as a friend or of any relationship. So, I'm going to address the more innocent, which is you made a promise that you couldn't fulfill. You tried, but you came up short. To those, I would say be careful of what you promise. Your reputation is everything. And if you have the habit of constantly falling short on what you are offering people, on what you are promising people, you are not going to develop a good reputation. People may forgive a transgression here and there, but if that is ultimately what you always end up doing, it's not going to work out well for you long term. So there is a few aspects to this one. under promise overd deliver. You should be very sure at the very least that you can deliver something that the customer, the friend, whoever the other person is that you're making this promise to that you could deliver. Even if you know it may be not the best work that you've ever done or it might not completely satisfy everything that they wanted. At the bare minimum you will produce something that will be acceptable. Now, there is nothing stopping you from overd delivering, which is if somebody said, "I want I'm going to give you $10 and I expect you after a month's time, you're going to turn it back into 20 bucks. There's nothing stopping you from giving them 30 bucks instead." That would be an overd delivery, right? And generally what happens when you overd deliver to people is they're wowed because you did extra. You promised X and you gave them X and you also gave them Y. And that is a way of easily winning somebody over and being somebody who still maintains their integrity, still has high standards, but you didn't have to stake on the highest possible standard that you could deliver. So that's a safer way of making a promise. You make a promise that is a little more modest, but you give more than that or you had the intention of getting more than that. But at the very least, even if everything doesn't work out right, I should be able to deliver on the modest uh promise that I made. It might not be as awesome to the other person because you're being more realistic. As I said, it's modest. Like I said, you'll have the chance to wow them if you're able to overd deliver. But if I start off at the moon, you know, I'm probably going to fall beneath and I'm not going to give them anything and they're going to be dissatisfied. So underpromise, overd deliver. I think that is a better model for being able to keep your word. If you overpromise, it's very easy to underdel, which is a terrible thing to do. That is one. The second thing I would say is only promise things that are directly in your control that I would feel is realistic for you. And I I'll give you the example. If I make the promise to somebody that I'm going to be able to win the Olympic gold medal, and that's a big promise. There's really no room for overd delivering and there's tons of room for underdelivering. There's also a big problem in that you're not the one that will ultimately determine if that becomes true. I know you say, "Well, if I'm the athlete, if I'm going to go for the gold medal, my performance will dictate that." Not necessarily. You have judges, you have referees, you have the other competitor, there's lots of other people involved, and you don't even decide if you win. It's ultimately going to be the judges. So, you could actually win and you could be cheated. It's happened before. So, you're promising something that's not yours to give. That's a big problem. What I could promise is I'm going to go out there and give the performance of my lifetime. I'm going to train super hard. I'm going to, you know, diet very well. I'm going to take every step possible in my preparation to achieve my ultimate goal. That is a big promise, but it's fully within their capability to do that. Whether that results in a gold medal or not is a different story. Now, that's not something that I would imagine somebody would Well, I don't know. It depends who you're making that promise to, right? Like if a co if I'm a coach and my athlete tells me that I'm excited. I'm like he knows what's what's up, right? Like he understands what I'm seeking out of a coach is maximum effort, maximum dedication. I don't need promises of gold medals or silver medals or whatever the case is. I need to know that his heart and mind are locked in on the goal, which is to give a best possible performance. And as a coach, that's what I'll be the instrumental in doing. So knowing what to promise or how to promise something is also important. Now you might think, well, this is a lot about promising and keeping your word when we're talking to other people. But what's more important is to yourself because we make promises to oursel very often or at least I do. And if you can't have integrity with yourself, God forbid everyone else, right? Like if you can break your own word to yourself, how are you going to hold up to anyone else? That's why I went through the effort of explaining different ways of making promises because when you put goals in yourself, you are in some form making a promise to yourself. So it's important that you make it in a way that is attainable and in a way that you can overd deliver. You have to give yourself some room to navigate that. And I'm not saying this is the only way to do it, but I'm saying this is what I feel the best way of doing it and not setting yourself up for failure. I'm sure there's people that went out there and made promises of winning a gold medal and went ahead and did so and amazing. But I'm sure there's many people who did the same thing that didn't, right? Cuz there's only one person that can get the gold medal. So you want to be able to, I feel, have that integrity with yourself and of course with all your friends and people that you have relationships with. But if you're offering things that you can't give, you're going to set yourself up for failure. So in summary, if we had to do this in a very short concise manner, when I make a promise, I want to make it where I have room to overd deliver, which means be more modest in what you're going to offer and allow yourself to be able to overd deliver. I'm telling you from a sales perspective, if you're in the sales world, this is the easiest way to make lifetime customers when you're able to consistent consistently overd deliver. And if you do this with friendships, people really really appreciate that. I know I do. I I do my best to try to offer that to other people as well. Under promise, overd deliver. Second part, understand what you should be promising. Like I said already, you can't promise things that are outside of your control. That's like going to a blackjack table and promising somebody, you give me $100,000, I'll turn this into $100 million. You can't promise that because you're relying on luck. You can only promise that you're going to play to the best of your ability and that you're a pretty good gambler. But that's not that reassuring. And I feel this is why people tend to overpromise. They know when they big give a big promise it's a lot more enticing especially if people believe in you. But I feel that's a bit evil because you are twisting their trust in hopes that you can achieve something that you're not sure that you can because it's out of your hands. So be modest, be realistic and focus on the things that you can deliver on. So when you go around and you start giving your word to people, you want your word to mean something. When you have a lot of integrity and you say you're going to do something and other people know that you have a reputation that hey ex if so and so says this, it's going to happen. That's very powerful. You don't want to be the guy that when, oh, you know, so and so say he's going to show up, you're like, I don't know, he's pretty flaky. Sometimes he does something like that's not a great reputation to have, right? You're not somebody that's trustworthy. You're not someone that's reliable. That's that's rough, right? Like that's not something that you want to have associated with you. Of course, everybody makes mistakes and you might forget something. you might miss an appointment or something like that, but you really, really, really want to minimize that. I do my best to hold myself accountable for what I say and what I promise. And I feel that's for whether I'm talking about a business deal or talking about something in the rel relationship or I'm talking about even just going to training. If I'm gonna if I told someone I was showing up to training and then I don't show up, man, I feel like an ass. Like I'm I'm I mean I'm sure I missed at some point that I didn't tell somebody, but normally I'm going to let someone know, hey, I'm not coming today or I can't come. Sorry. like uh you want to be sure that you can hold up your word and if not, you know, at least give somebody some remedy in between so that they're not sitting around waiting for you or hoping that you're going to hold up your end of the deal. I I say this because I feel like this is something that's important in training and it's especially if you're somebody who has lots of goals and ambitions and no doubt if you're in the martial arts you have ambitions. Everybody wants to be a black belt somebody at some point. Everybody wants to be better than what they're currently at. But if you have no credibility with yourself, you have no integrity with yourself. That's going to be difficult. You have to be able to hold yourself to the fire and be able to stand true. So being honest and being able to fulfill your promises and make your word impeccable are a huge are a huge part of that. That's my take at least. If you learn something or agree, disagree, feel free and to comment and share that with me. Otherwise, I'll catch you all next week.