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The Goal You Never Wrote Down 🪞
The number and the date are only half a goal. The other half is how you want to feel getting there.
Dear Diamond Polisher,
Have you ever been so close to a goal that you almost ruined it yourself?
Yannick runs a small software company in Tokyo with his co-founder, Takeshi. In September, he told the whole team they would close a ¥1.5 billion funding round by December 1, and he wrote it on the whiteboard in his office.
In November, the investor’s offer arrives. Good terms. Takeshi wants the lawyers to check one clause before they sign. Yannick looks at the whiteboard: sixteen days left. He says yes, but his jaw is tight.
That night he barely sleeps. His chest feels heavy, and his mind keeps running the same loop: if we reopen this, we lose the deal, and I lose face in front of everyone.
The next morning, alone in the office, he replies to everyone, lawyers and investor included: “We accept the terms as written. There is no need to reopen this.” And he presses Send. Takeshi reads it on the train. He feels his face go hot. His own co-founder has overruled him in front of the lawyers and the investor, without a word to him first. He puts his phone back in his pocket and says nothing.
The investor sees two founders who disagree, and slows everything down. The money arrives three weeks late, but it arrives.
He did it. The goal on the whiteboard is reached. He expected pride, relief, maybe a celebration with the team. What he feels is a heavy knot in his stomach. He is tired, short with everyone, and Takeshi now eats lunch alone at his desk. One question keeps coming back: I got what I wanted, so what’s wrong with me?
The answer comes a few weeks later, in the back of a taxi, and it surprises him.
This letter is about that answer. We all set external goals: the number, the date, the result. Very few of us set the internal one, how we want to feel and think on the way there. It’s invisible, so we skip it. Leave it blank, and something else fills the space, often fear, and without noticing, we get in the way of our own goal.
🧠 ONE SENTENCE BEFORE THE MUSIC STARTS
Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement, Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
At Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks asked people to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” into a karaoke machine that scored every note for pitch, volume and rhythm. Just before the music started, each singer said one sentence out loud. Some said “I am anxious.” Some said “I am excited.” The ones who said they were excited sang better. In another study, people gave a short speech on camera after saying a sentence like that, and judges rated those who said “I am excited” as more persuasive, more competent and more confident than those who tried to calm down.
One sentence about the state they chose, and the result on the outside changed. That’s an internal goal at its smallest. Yannick never chose his sentence before pressing Send, so fear chose one for him.
💎 What PhilBot Asked Yannick
In January, late in the afternoon, in the back of a taxi on Roppongi-dori, Yannick opens PhilBot on his phone.
Yannick PhilBot, I want to share a strange feeling. The round closed, and I can't feel happy about it. It was painful towards the end. And now I'm on my way to announce the next goal to the team: twenty new accounts by March.
PhilBot The round, and now the accounts. Both worded right down to the date. What did you write down for how you wanted to feel getting there?
Yannick Nothing. I wrote the number and the deadline. I never wrote down how I wanted to feel while reaching the goal.
PhilBot So what filled the space instead, that morning you pressed Send?
Yannick ...Control, I think. Maybe under that, something closer to fear. Of it slipping. I've never said that part out loud.
👆 Step 1: the internal goal was never named, so nothing of his own was steering when the pressure came.
PhilBot Try the three rules of a well-formed goal, and point them inward for once. What's the positive version of "not afraid"?
Yannick Grounded. Trusting the process. Trusting Takeshi.
PhilBot Specific enough that you'd know it was there?
Yannick I'd know because I could hear an objection and not need to win it in the same hour.
PhilBot And good for the people around you too, not just the deal?
Yannick ...Yeah. Especially Takeshi. That's the one it would have protected.
PhilBot Now that you’ve answered these three questions, what do you see when you look back?
Yannick If I had set my goal with these three questions from the start, reaching it would have felt good. And Takeshi and I would still trust each other. I would have paid more attention to how I felt along the way, and made sure it stayed positive, for me and for Takeshi.
👆 Step 2: the same three rules that shape an external goal shape an internal one, and looking back shows what they would have protected.
💎 The Diamond Insight:
An external goal on its own is half a goal. Write both, and the second one keeps something else from running the first.
🌅 THE GOAL YOU SET FOR SOMEONE ELSE
That afternoon, in front of the whole team, Yannick wipes the old date off the whiteboard and writes: “20 new accounts by March.” Only the number, again. Some people take it and run, energized. Others start staying late, answering clients at eleven at night. On a Friday in February, his head of customer success, Mika, puts an envelope on his desk: her resignation. “This quarter,” she tells him, “there was no room to breathe.”
When you hand someone the what, the number, the date, hand them a second thing too: an invitation to name their own internal goal for getting there. Theirs, chosen by them. It’s the same permission you’d already give them with the how, and for the same reason. It’s the part of the goal that’s actually theirs to own.
In April, Yannick stands at the whiteboard again, with the team in the room. He writes the new target, “25 new accounts by June,” and underneath it a second line: “Energized, with room to breathe.” Then he hands out yellow sticky notes and asks each person to write their own second line and put it on the board under his. Two months later, the notes are still there, and nobody has resigned.
🏹 This Week's Challenge:
Before you set your next goal, personal or for someone on your team, write two lines instead of one. Line one: what you want to achieve. Line two: how you want to feel earning it, worded with the same three rules, positive, specific enough to notice, good for the people around you. Notice what changes when the second line is there.
Try This with PhilBot 🤖
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PhilBot AI Coach Use this prompt with PhilBot, or with any AI, to pair an internal goal with the external one you just set: "Here's the external goal I just set: [describe it]. Ask me three questions: what I want to feel while I earn it, worded in the positive, how I'd know that feeling was actually present, and whether that feeling would be good for the people closest to this goal too. Help me write one line I could put right next to the external goal." Or turn it inward: "What external goal am I chasing right now with no internal one written next to it, and what state might be running the show instead, without me having chosen it?" |
Two goals were always meant to travel together, one you can point to, one you can only feel. What's the goal you wrote down this year, and what's the one you never did?
With warmth and the goal underneath the goal,
Philippe & PhilBot 🪞
Keep shining.
Équilibre k.k. | Tokyo · 20 years of inspiring leaders to shine ✨
P.S. You’ll notice I sign every letter “Philippe & PhilBot.” PhilBot is my AI coaching companion, and these letters are genuinely written together: the heart and stories are mine, the craft is ours. I sign both names because I believe leaders are learning to create alongside AI, and I’d rather be open about that. 🪞
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📖 Book One The Diamond Quest: Finding Your Diamond The story behind everything in these letters. The first two chapters are open to read online now, and the full book arrives by the end of the year.
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