Making + Keeping Promises
This month has been far from perfect…I’ve been working long hours and stopped tracking my time a few weeks ago. However, even though life continues to feel a little chaotic and scattered, I somehow managed to make promises and actually keep them. Yeah!!!
I know I’ve mentioned this at least once or twice, but for the past few months, I’ve been going through the Handel Groups Online program called, ‘Inner U.’ One of my favorite features of the program is that it includes twice monthly group coaching calls! I absolutely love hearing from the other participants in the course. There’s always something that I can take from what they’re doing and apply it in my own life.
This month I’ve focused on keeping two promises. The first is to practice/study Mandarin 5 days a week (Monday-Friday) and the second is to work on the Inner U program for 15 minutes in the morning before I check email.
Just having these two simple promises in place (with clear consequences) has been huge for me! I think that it’s easy to go through our days and years and feel like we haven’t really accomplished any of the goals that we want to make happen. Therefore, even when life gets incredibly busy, I would suggest making at least one simple promise to yourself.
Getting Started
I would also recommend trying something that you can do first thing in the morning. Among other things, this is a great way to give yourself a confidence boost to start the day. For example, as I’m writing this, it’s Monday evening. I had to work this past weekend and then our modem stopped working at about 11 PM last night. Knowing that I had classes to teach this morning, I was feeling a little stressed wondering whether or not we’d be able to get internet in time.
Spoiler alert..I did have to cancel my first two classes but had the internet back up and running for the rest of the day. As soon as the internet was up, the first thing that I did was go through my 15 minutes of Inner U. While it would have been easy to say, ‘forget it’ I’m so glad that I did it. I knew that even if I didn’t get everything checked off my To-do list for the day, it would be ok.
So, let’s make this actionable. Think about these two questions.
1. What is one promise that you can make to yourself? (for example, mine is doing the Inner U program for 15 minutes each morning).
2. What is a consequence for not following through? (for example, no TV show that evening).
I know that this is the briefest of overviews, so I would HIGHLY recommend either checking out the Inner U program or the book Maybe It’s You by the founder Lauren Handel Zander.
P.S. Next month I’ll give you an update on how my promises are going!
Making + Keeping Promises
