171 | The Gap and the Gain

As lawyers, it’s common for us to focus on what we haven’t achieved (the gap) rather than looking at all the progress we’ve made (the gain). This concept was discussed in the popular book, The Gap and the Gain.

In this episode, let’s talk about how the gap and the gain show up in our personal finances and the importance of focusing on the gain more often.

• • the concept of the gap and the gain
  • how the gap and the gain shows up in personal finance
  • the discussion I had in my membership about defining success as achievement of a goal
  • why only looking at whether you achieved your goal or not is not useful
  • an example of looking at the gain, rather than the gap, when you don’t achieve your goal
  • the importance of celebrating all your achievements and acknowledging your progress
  • not achieving your goals, especially when you’re first starting out with managing your money better

The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Episode 69: Celebrating Your Achievements

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom, and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far today we are talking about the gap and the gain. You may be familiar with this book the gap and the gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I read it earlier this year and if you’re not familiar with it, it is all about changing what we focus on when we’re trying to achieve our goals. A lot of times we put our focus on what the authors call the gap, which is how far we are currently from where we want to be. But instead of focusing on that gap from where we are now to where we want to go, the author suggests that we focus on the gain, how far we are from where we started. As a high achiever, I have a tendency to focus on the gap and how far I am from my goals. And I was thinking about this concept in the context of personal finance, because I find it’s also common with my clients, probably a trait that a lot of us lawyers have, where we are so focused on what we haven’t achieved but we forget about what we have achieved. And I think as with a lot of other things it’s a lot easier to see it for other people, but we can see it for ourselves as well with practice and with intentionally directing our focus. So we can intentionally direct our focus to how far we’ve come versus how far we have to go. I was just talking about not hitting goals this week in my membership, and we were talking about how defining success only as achieving your ultimate goal is not useful. It’s a very black and white way of looking at things and it ignores the gray area, the progress that you’ve made, even though you haven’t hit the goal yet. And it’s this exact concept of the gap in the gain in action, because when achieving the ultimate goal is the only definition of success. If you don’t hit that goal, then you’re focused on the gap from where you are to where you want to be to the ultimate goal, but you ignore how far you’ve come from where you started. So let’s look at an example to illustrate this. Let’s say this month, you want to save $2,000 And for whatever reason you don’t hit that but you get halfway there or 75% of the way there or 90% of the way there is that truly failure. Right by this definition, the ultimate goal is the success but is reaching 90% of the goal truly failure. What if you hadn’t saved a dime in the last six months, and this month you’ve saved $1,800 Is that failure just because you didn’t hit the 2000 that you want it to when we’re focused on the gap, this ultimate goal being the end all be all we missed the progress. So in this example, you say nothing before, so anything you save is an improvement over what you had done previously. But if you only focus on the gap from where you ended up to where you want it to be, you missed that. But by focusing on the gain, you can see how much progress you’ve made and that motivates you to keep going. This goes back to something that we’ve talked about in a previous episode with celebrating all of your accomplishments, even the ones you think are little or too small to really pay attention to. That helps you to show yourself that you’re doing good things. You can be proud of the progress you’re making. And that motivates you that keeps you going same thing here with focusing on the gain and how far you’ve come from where you started. When you only focus on what you didn’t do or you discount what you did because it wasn’t as much as you wanted to do. You’re basically telling yourself that the progress you made doesn’t matter. It wasn’t enough because it wasn’t what you ultimately want it to achieve. So how motivated are you going to be to keep going if that’s what you’re telling yourself, but when you’re learning to improve your finances and you’re learning to manage your money better, you’re not always going to get to 100% of where you want to be. You’re not always going to stay within your budget, especially in those first few months. You’re not always going to save the amount you want to save or pay off the amount of debt you want to pay off in the timeframe you want. But instead of looking at and focusing on that gap between where you do get to and where you want it to be focus on the gain. Focus on what you were able to achieve and how far you are from where you started. And that doesn’t only go for the tangible improvements, like how much you pay off or how much you save. Something that I always teach my clients is to look at those intangible improvements to if you’re feeling better about your money if you’re thinking more intentionally about your spending than you were in the past. All of that is still improvement. That’s still a gain. And if you focus on those things, and you show yourself that you’re doing things that are working and you’re making progress, even if you’re not exactly where you want to be yet, you’ll be much more motivated to keep going versus if you’re always focused on the gap and what you haven’t done and how far you still have to go. Focusing on the gap. You’re just going to end up discouraged and ultimately giving up. So look for those small markers, those things that show you that you’re on the right track and that show you how far you’ve come from where you started, and acknowledge those things, celebrate those things. That doesn’t mean that you just say oh, well the goal doesn’t matter. Like your goals still matter. You still want to look at how you can improve and how you can get to that goal next time. But you do so from a more positive place when you can recognize how much progress you were able to make, which means you’re much more likely to stay motivated and actually achieve it versus when you’re beating yourself up and focusing on how you didn’t get there. So those are my thoughts on the gap in the gain and helping my clients stay focused on the gain is one of my favorite parts of my job. So if you want help with staying focused on the gains in your finances, so you can go further faster. I invite you to join us in Money Mastery you can head to rho thomas.com/join to learn more. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. If you enjoyed the episode and you want to help another lawyer find this show, please consider leaving a review. Those reviews help the show get pushed out to more people and think about when you’re buying something online. How often do you look to the reviews to decide whether to get it or not? That’s what people do with podcasts too. So you leaving a quick review with your thoughts about the show will help someone else out and it would mean a lot to me. So thank you in advance. As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently week after week. You’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.