We don’t think we’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t think they’re good at keeping promises.
Sure, sometimes things get in the way.
We can’t do what we’re going to say 100% of the time.
But I’m sure you’d like to think that when you promise you’ll do something, you nearly always will.
Something pretty big would have to stop you no?
And while we’re pretty good at keeping promises to others……..
Most of us find it much harder to keep promises to ourselves.
The promise that this time we’ll lose weight, get fit, etc ends up unfulfilled.
When we promise we won’t drink tonight?
I’m bad at that one.
When we promise we’ll have a workout, go for a run, etc?
When we promise we’ll pick something healthy from the menu?
When we promise nothing will ‘jump into our trollies’?
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Why do we do it?
Why do I do it?
What’s wrong with us?
What’s wrong with me?
I have a few theories.
- We often don’t fully verbalise the promise to ourself.
The thought “I’m not going to……” might be floating round our mind.
But actually saying it out loud is always more powerful.
Saying it out loud to another person is even better still.
Having someone who will keep us accountable is even better.
We keep our promises to others as we don’t want to let them down.
You can harness that same power by making a promise to someone who won’t just ‘let you off’ if you don’t do it.
- We make too strong a promise that we’re probably never going to keep.
The result is the first time we break the promise, it’s gone and we’re often back to not doing it at all.
Saying that we’ll never drink or eat certain things again is setting us up for failure.
I’ve tried not drinking for X amount of weeks before.
I’ll have a drink one night then be straight back to business as usual.
I generally try and stick to only having a drink on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night.
And find that much more doable.
And if I have another one another night, I try to put it into context and not ‘fall off the wagon’.
- We don’t always fully respect ourselves
We wouldn’t break our promise to someone else, in part, because it’s disrespectful.
So why treat ourselves any different?
The human brain is often very hard on itself.
We kind of know we’re just as entitled as everyone else to have the better body / life / job / relationships.
But don’t always ‘feel it’.
And when we break our promises to ourselves we feel worse about ourselves and respect ourselves less…..
Which leads to a viscous cycle!
But the more we concentrate on our achievements……..
All the times we do well…….
The more we think about all the good stuff we do……..
The more we respect ourselves.
And the easier it becomes to keep the promises to ourselves.
Easier said than done, of course.
But the only way to get there is to work on it 🙂
And remember, this is the sort of stuff we go through with our ninjas – myrise.co.uk/briefing-meeting to find out more 🙂
Much love,
Jon ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T.’ Hall and Matt ‘Find out what it means to me’ Nicholson