Broken Promises

If I asked you how often you broke promises to your son or daughter, what would you say?

How often you broke promises to your sister, your mom or your husband?

I’m not talking about when something major or if an emergency comes up. Rather, breaking a promise because something ‘more important’ came up.

Rarely, if ever. Right?!

You rarely break promises to the people you love and are deeply committed too.

Then why do you break promises to yourself?

Are you not important?

Are you any less important?

Breaking promises to yourself is a double whammy.

When you break a promise to yourself, you don’t move forward, don’t achieve, don’t feel that amazing feeling that you fulfilled a commitment that would make you better and was important to you, your life, your business.

Breaking promises to yourself leads to a ‘path of inertia,’ one of the main negative consequences of continued broken promises.

That’s the first whammy.

The second whammy:

All of the thoughts of blame that come after.

You "should" on yourself.

Said another way…

You shit on yourself.

I Should have! Would have! Could have!

Should-ing sits with blame. We blame ourselves for not following through. For getting distracted and letting that commitment get derailed because of things more important.

But when we don’t show up for ourselves, for our goals - that promise to lose the weight, exercise or stand up for yourself in a meeting, ask for a raise, fire that employee — that inner critic runs amok in our head creating negative drama that plays on repeat. It zaps your energy — almost always more energy than the commitment would have taken.

Should-ing also impacts your self-esteem.

A double whammy.

But there’s more.

Putting yourself first and stopping the broken promise cycle is actually keeping promises to your kids, your husband, your family, your team, your business.

Fulfilling promises to yourself to do better or be better is just as important as following through on your promises to others.

When you fulfill on a personal promise, you show up better for the people in your life.

When you are happy, accomplished and feeling good about keeping your promises to grow and to do something for yourself, the people you love will see how happy you are; see you at your best.

And….

They see who they can become.

They see behavior they can role model.

Do you want the most important people in your life to break their promises to themselves? No. Do you want the people you love to not achieve all that they can become because they don’t prioritize themselves? Of course not.

If you don’t want that for them, then show them how it's done.

Have the courage. Stop the shoulds.

Start doing the things you’ve promised yourself to become the person that you want to be!