STAY TRUE TO YOUR PROMISES
Telling the truth about your life’s circumstances is only one part of your personal manifesto.
Keeping your word once you’ve given it is also a critical component of the contract.
Keeping your word means staying true to promises you make, especially to yourself.
Believe it or not, we tend to betray ourselves even more than we do others.
It is to ourselves that we must first begin to give our word and keep it.
This means not only telling the truth, but also learning to make promises that we can keep in the first place.
Having faith, or trust, in ourselves is absolutely essential to anything we want to accomplish in life. We lose that trust every time we do not keep a promise to ourselves.
If you broke as many promises with a small child as you do with yourself, you would not be surprised if the child didn’t trust you and walked on eggshells around you.
Similarly, breaking your own personal promises to yourself erodes your self-esteem.
It deafens you to your own innate wisdom.
Whatever you neglect to honour – the promise to work it out, eat well, save money, spend less, be more patient or play with your kids more, or any other vow that matters to you – these betrayals of self, and the associated guilt and shame we often feel, become an undetectable poison under our skin.
The fact is, although we live the false sense that the core of our worldly success is our goals and being better and smarter, the true work is being able to trust ourselves implicitly.
When you do this, you have confidence in yourself, confidence that shines through and acts as a beacon for success.
The secret to keeping your promises is to simplify.
Make your every promise small enough to be do-able.
Don’t make an all-encompassing promise that all but sets you up for failure.
Instead of saying “I won’t eat anything fattening today” say “I will keep my word to watch my nutrition today and make conscious choices about what I eat.”
You can still choose to blow your daily intake on an ice cream cone, but you do so consciously.
Instead of saying ‘I won’t raise my voice at work anymore”, say “I will keep my cool today” – or for the next hour, or what time period is short enough so that you can keep your promise to yourself.
Small promises allow you to be someone of your word.
Your word is the glue that holds your best life together, and every broken promise to yourself is a crack in the foundation that supports your life.
If you don’t keep promises you will not be punished or suffer some grave fate, It will simply make it harder for you.
You may not be conscious of where you are breaking promises, so if you feel life does not trust you, as you’d like, take a look at where you are not keeping your word.
Then start keeping your word, or simplify what you promise so you can keep it.
