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If you have a problem keeping your word… Noticing and handling that may be your first step towards growth and to becoming a person…
Keeping your word, especially the word that you gave to yourself is a big issue… This article is digging deep for the causes and the solutions.
Keeping your word has two elements: the word you give… and the behavior that follows.
The self-consciousness I talk about in another article makes you make promises that are not possible for you to keep. Either the promise is too vague, or you have no business to promise what you are promising.
I’ll attend to this aspect of no integrity in another article… For now I am going to write about the behavior that follows the word.
At the present time in history, half of all people promise then pretend to be too weak to deliver, the other half pretend to be already good… with no need to promise.
You are likely either a sniveling excuse for a human, a windbag. Or you are a self-deluding effect of circumstances who claim they always get the short end of the stick in life.
I have been removing or threaten to remove people from my coaching programs, left and right, for inactivity.
If they don’t have at least one written coaching conversation with me a week, they are put on the ‘to be removed’ list. Why? Because if they are not doing the work they shouldn’t be in the program.
My integrity depends on their integrity… Them running a weakness racket makes ME a racketeer.
If they are not here for the coaching… then I have a good idea how their life looks… because…
How you do anything is how you do everything.
This was probably one of the most shocking things I learned in self-development, right up there with ‘you think you see everything, but you only see what you have already seen‘.
Both insights were upsetting, and started to break up the worldview, the mythical, magical worldview, that said ‘I can do anything I put my mind to.‘
I realized that everything means, for me, maybe, 1% of all the things…
Some of us seem to have no ability to sustain any activity without an outside have to, need to, want to, or should.
I, for example, cannot be trusted as far as eating goes. There, in the area of eating, there seems to be no correlation between my conscious decisions, my word and my behavior.
I may be able to sustain a desirable behavior for a day, a week, a few weeks… but as a rule, I notice no connection between my word and my behavior.
Others may have the same issue in the same or in a different area, where they cannot seem to sustain a behavior.
My programs have homework, assignments. Doing them on your own seems to be an area where this disability is most noticeable to me.
The lack of capacity to keep your word causes you untold suffering, and often causes this weakness to grow.
Imagination creates the dream. Mental toughness creates the money says Steve Siebold…
Mental toughness is the capacity that allows winners to stay in the game. That allows winners to take the steps that make no sense in the moment. Take the steps that are hard, or draining, or time-consuming, or menial, or inglorious, or unsuccessful.
But even with mental toughness, if the dream only lives in your mind, it will also die in your mind…
As a preemie, I was born in a hospital that didn’t have incubators. I was born to a mother who didn’t want another child. I was born with physical weaknesses, and I don’t think I have ever truly overcome them
Which means: To be well, I would need to eat in a certain way that is neither very enjoyable, nor very socially compatible with how others eat.
I tend to forget the reason for the many limitations. And when I forget, the limitation doesn’t make sense. So I start doing the things that make me sick. Other people can live forever with the same behavior.
After a few weeks of that, when I am starting to be really sick… I wake up.
Sometimes the few weeks stretches to a few months…
Obviously I am doing what YOU are doing: keeping my WORD in my mind… forgetting what I said, forgetting why I said it. And I have been doing it for 70 years.
If I were my client, my food list would be written down in a format that I can take it to the grocery store. But, of course, a shoe maker walks barefoot…
But, seriously, anything that isn’t PRESENT for you, doesn’t appear when you need to remember it, will never happen.
Out of sight — out of mind.
Of course, you’ll think ‘I’ll remember it’ but you won’t.
What is missing is the ability to be with ‘not yet’.
OK, I am going to make that shopping list… and get myself on the hook.
Promising gets you on the hook.
Only people who are willing to be on the hook have a meaningful life. And the rest: they live a meaningless life… no meaning, no joy. No meaning: no accomplishment. No meaning: no success.
PS: Part 2 of this article is here. Click
