In today's episode I'm talking about the importance of keeping the promises you make to yourself. As with many things in life, our ability to keep promises to others is linked to our ability to keep promises to ourselves. If we break internal promises we're more likely to break external promises, both big and small. The idea of integrity is at stake here -- doing what you say you will do. Each time you don't keep a promise to yourself, you let yourself down. Your confidence is shook. You don't believe you'll be able to do it next time. And at that point you're sunk. Failing to keep a promise communicates that you don't value the person you made the promise to, which in this case is YOU. Failing to keep promises erodes trust. It messes with your self esteem, confidence, our experience of life. In short, there are many crappy consequences to failing to keep promises to yourself. Yet we continue to do it. For me, it wasn't until I became aware of (A) just how frequently I was breaking promises to myself, and (B) the impact that breaking those promises was having on my ability to keep my word with other people, that I truly started understanding the significance of my actions, and started making a change. Here's how to keep more of the promises you make to yourself (borrowed from this blog article):
- Make it concrete -- smart goals
- Write it down
- Start small
- if you can do the small, you can do the big (opposite is also true: if you CANT do the small, how can you do the big?)
- Do it no matter what
- you may make excuses, rationalize not doing it, have 100 great reasons why something else is more important -- do it anyway
- Hold same standard for others
Notes from this episode:
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
