NOTE: Real estate folks - headʻs up! This weekʻs advice might even be practical for you!
Aloha, welcome back to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. I keep writing, hoping “They” keep reading. Substackʻs dashboard tells me that of those of you receiving this via email, about 40% of you open each one. Almost that many people find their way here and view (maybe even read) a given post without being subscribers. Make it easy on yourself please, if you click over from Facebook or LinkedIn on the regular. Some Sunday I might forget to share. It costs you nothing to enter your email address below.
Although I titled this essay as if I might tell all, tell you what I, capital I, want to do next year1, I would rather talk about what YOU want to do next week, next year, next phase of your life. I want to know whether you are Declaring Futures. Call it making a business plan, putting an offer on a home, journeying in search of your personal legend, starting a course of IVF, telling your parents you want to learn to weld rather than go to college. All of these are forms of Declaring a Future. My premise: Declaring a Future starts with Declaring a Commitment that is capable of creating that future. My further premise: Declaring a Future actually should start with knowing What You Care About.
This is not the first time I have written about commitment. For example:
I wrote about commitment as something you embody, an embodiment that is tangible to others even if you donʻt know the path to fulfilling that commitment, even if declaring the commitment is scary as hell.
I wrote about the mechanics of establishing an actionable commitment to another by initiating an offer or a request.
I donʻt think I ever wrote explicitly about care as a precondition for embodied, actionable commitment.
My heroes, my role models of commitment, care deeply. They care about something larger than themself. They are my heroes because they care about the collective wellbeing more than they care about their individual achievement. I can name heroes and role models because I know who I am and what I care about. It never works well the other way - trying to fit what you care about to someone elseʻs model.
My heroes act from a very big level of commitment - but the principle of care applies to whatever level of responsibility for the future you are ready to take at a given moment. Over on Always Inspiring my friend (and likely yours) Matthew Ferrara ostensibly vlogged and wrote this week about 10 Ways To Fire Up Your Sales Today Frankly, in the abstract I donʻt really give a shit about firing up your sales or mine. But what he is saying is that you have a choice. You can choose a mood of resignation. Or you can choose to honor your commitment. Or you can choose to make a bold new commitment. Once you decide to show up for your commitment, you can design or adopt actions to create (or fire up) that future.
My real estate career was the fourth or fifth iteration of what I was going to do with my life. I was 49 at the time I got my license twenty years ago. I had already been a manager in corporate life, been an entrepreneur, been a consultant. I was surprised to discover that what passed for business planning for real estate professionals was a one-page worksheet with a formula like this:
Step 1. How much money do I want to earn next year?
Step 2. What is the size of my average transaction? Will the market change that up or down next year?
Step 3. How much commission will I make on that transaction at prevailing rates in my market and the split offered by my brokerage?
Step 4. Divide how much I want to make by the average commission to get the number of sales I need to do next year.
Done.
YIKES! Within a few years I felt compelled to offer free business planning workshops to our Hawaiʻi Life agents, using an Appreciative Inquiry framework that asked questions like “Tell me about a transaction that made you feel most alive, most fulfilled, really good about this work?” The answers were never “Thatʻs easy, it was my biggest transaction.”
The answers were about personally meaningful transactions. Stories of being of service. Stories of working collaboratively. Stories of innovating and problem solving. Stories that inspired. Stories that lifted the energy of both the teller and the listener. Stories that left them eager to design a business that created more of that. Stories that could give birth to an articulation of a commitment with more power than “I will sell 20 homes next year in order to meet my financial goal.”
But the work of knowing yourself, of owning what you care about, is a lot harder than using external measurements to define your worth and your future. My first question if you said “I want to make $200,000 next year,” would be “For the sake of what?” To hit a different level in your brokerageʻs leaderboard? To be in the top whatever percent of agents in your market?
If those are your answers, I will ask for each answer again, “For the sake of what?”
I have been reading a book by a certified personal finance consultant and journalist that makes an analogy between budget culture and diet culture.2 Which makes sense if you have ever heard and related to the variously attributed saying “You can never be too rich or too thin.” But honestly - you can. At least in my view, with my values, you can definitely be too rich morally. You can definitely be too thin if you are currently starving in Gaza or Congo or Sudan or any of the other places in food crisis domestically or abroad. 3 And the point of this being that beyond the amount of money you need to live a dignified, secure life, your financial goals should begin with knowing what you care about enough to be in action for it.
One of the exercises we do regularly in Equine Guided Education is have a person declare their commitment and see whether the horse they are working with believes them. I have never seen a horse respond to a spoken commitment with a dollar sign in it. I have often seen horses fail to respond - or even respond negatively - to inauthentic commitments, by which I mean a declaration of commitment stemming from what we think we should be doing rather than from what our heart and soul begs us to be doing. But if a horse feels your commitment - they will follow you anywhere.
You want to fire up your sales or your love life or your pickleball game or your level of daily contentment? Figure out what fires you up inside and take responsibility for the things you truly care about. Declare your commitment out loud. Choose to lead your life rather than letting your lack of introspection and imagination lead you.
Oh my gosh I have some super exciting ideas in the category of Next Year I Want To…and I promise to share them eventually. They are still ripening on the vine of this uneasy and still delicious late summer/early fall.
I will forgive you if you click away right now to buy You Donʻt Need A Budget by Dana Miranda. Because you should.
An astonishing 1/3 of households in Hawaiʻi struggle with food insecurity, defined as not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Think about that as you book your $1200/night room at a resort here.
I declare that you inspire me!