Commitment and Results by John Seeley

If you truly want results, you must first determine your goals and commit to doing whatever it takes to achieve them. Change involves commitment. Commitment to yourself is the key to making change last.

How many times have you broken your word? How many times each day do you break your word? If you think you don’t break your word, answer some of these questions.

How many times in the last twenty-four hours did you say you’d do something, and you didn’t do it? Perhaps it was phone calls you didn’t return, or promised to be on time and were late for something. Maybe you said you’d eat healthy today, or you’d work out today. Possibly you said you’d obey all traffic laws, including speeding, or that you’d spend time with someone. I could go on, but count the times you broke your word. Even if no one else knows you did, or you didn’t get caught, one person knows about all of them. YOU.

Each time you break your word you lose some self-esteem. No wonder you doubt your ability to do something, if you break your word daily. Your word is key to how you create your life. If you don’t really believe or trust yourself, then you won’t create what you’re really capable of doing. You may convince others that you can do something, but if you have underlying self-doubt, even if it’s unconscious, you will have a tough time completing what you say you want to do. Keeping your word is essential to making commitments and keeping them.

Commitment begins the instant you decide, really decide, something. What does it take to do that? How much does it mean to you? What if you look ten years down the road and nothing in your life has changed? How would you feel? How long will it take you to decide to do something different in your life? How long are you willing to wait? What if nothing has changed in five years? How will you feel then? Time moves quicker than you think. How long will you wait? If nothing changed in a year, what then? Are you willing to take that chance? How long has it been since you knew you needed a change? How much more time are you willing to wait? Another month? Nothing changing? Another week? Another day? Another hour? Or can you change NOW? Commit NOW? Choose NOW? Decide you want something better in your life NOW! Don’t wait. Make the decision to shift your thinking NOW! Commit NOW! To quote the Nike shoe company slogan: “Just Do It.” NOW! Commitment is powerful. It’s a declaration to the world that you intend to do something. Miracles happen with commitment.

One key to commitment is deciding goals that are S.M.A.R.T. That is, (Specific, Measurable, Appropriate, Realistic, and have a finite measurement of Time.) Take Specific for example. If you say you want more money, how much more money do you want? When you say, “I want to have a one hundred thousand dollars per year income before taxes by the end of this year,” that’s specific. It’s also Measurable.

Appropriate has to do with several factors. Does it meet your needs and wants? Does it interfere with someone else’s? Think of the interference like this; “I want to be in a relationship with Mary,” versus, “I want to be in a romantic relationship with a loving woman.” You may or may not be in a relationship with Mary, but as far as intentions, Mary’s life is her own. Remember, you might get that or something better, so don’t limit yourself.

Realistic is a little more gray. Realistic is about believability, your believability with your goal. A good rule of thumb is to make your intention fifty percent believable or fifty percent unbelievable, whichever works for you. So, if making fifty thousand dollars is believable by the end of the year, then one hundred thousand dollars is fifty percent believable. One million dollars is not realistic, at least not in one year. In five years, however; it could be realistic. It could still happen, but stretching your reality and your comfort zone to that level might be more challenging. There must be a reasonable finite measurement of Time to each goal as well.

Once you have chosen your goals, write them down, and verify that they meet all the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. Now that you know where you want to end up, go back from there, and determine what objectives you’ll have to meet along the way to create the results you want.

Break them down in reasonably timed pieces. Break them into monthly, weekly, and daily tasks, keeping the S.M.A.R.T. criteria in mind. When you have the objectives broken down in small pieces, you need to commit yourself to doing them and to the specific action steps. Make sure you build in guideposts to determine if you are on track, and make adjustments if necessary.

Once you’ve truly committed to yourself and to your goals, you will achieve them, as long as you believe you can. If you need help believing, just remember all the people who went before you. They created so much more than anyone would have ever believed. Landing a man on the moon began with a belief that we could. It began long before we knew how. It began with commitment.

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy stated, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” The President convinced others to believe with him, that it could be done. On July 20, 1969, when Astronaut Neil Armstrong took his, “One small step for man and one giant leap for mankind,” that remark defined intention, belief and commitment.

Belief in yourself and belief in your goals is free. Why not choose to believe? Why not win in your own dream? Are you ready to go for it? Yes? Great!

I leave you with a quote by Les Brown,
“ Life takes on meaning when you become motivated, set goals
and charge after them in an unstoppable manner.”