Wanting to serve others always comes with a promise. Serving others is the place where your promise meets their expectations.

The ability to align promise and expectations and yet to move beyond everyone’s comfort zone is what makes the promise a bold one.

Searching for the right promise is finding the middle ground between overpromising, and “underpromising”. Defining the promise is only the first step in achieving it. It’s establishing an idea of what experience you’ll seek to create for others, what they can gain from the connection with you, and how you’ll contribute to it.

Actually, that first step is already the result of an alignment. The one between what you seek to create and for whom you want to create it because you know that they are the ones who will be able to benefit most from it. But once the promise is presented and someone else becomes interested in it, a new process of alignment starts. It’s a clarifying process that benefits all those involved by making promise and expectations more tangible. It’s also a contracting process during which boundaries will be set. It’s naming how things will happen, and what everyone will be asked to contribute, at the same time being clear about the limits of the reciprocal engagement.

It’s bold work. It requires transparency and it brings transparency. It builds on commitment and asks for commitment.

It’s a process that prepares the ground to transform a bold promise into an achievable one.

Jumping into the experience is more than getting started. It is giving the experience the time and space to unfold. It is caring enough to want the bold promise to become fulfilled.