Making Promises To Yourself Don’t Work. Never Will.
It’s the worst approach. Instead, try these two simple methods.
People don’t get weak or lose their motivation in the heart of a war or a battle. They don’t become weak in a melee of fire or destruction. People don’t get weak when faced with their biggest crisis or while facing an obstacle. People don’t become weak when they are trying to overcome a challenge.
So how do people actually become a weaker version of themselves?
People don’t suddenly become weak on some random day of the year. Instead, people are taken apart, slowly day by day. They are convinced to take an easier path every day — enticed by comfort and excuses that they provide to themselves.
Most of us are not defeated in one decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant “surrender” at a time that chips away at who we should really be. Just like a lumberjack does not fell a tree with one swoop of his ax. He chips it away at the bottom, one small cut at a time.
It is not like that you wake up one day and decide that’s it — “I am going to be weak today.” No, it’s a slow incremental process. It chips away at your will and motivation — it chips away at your discipline.
- We sleep in a little later.
- We wake up a little later.
- We miss a workout, then another.
- We start to eat what we shouldn’t eat and drink what we shouldn’t drink.
- We spend that extra 10 mins on a Social Media App. And then we jump to another one.
- We watch that 1 extra episode of our favorite season on Netflix.
And, without realizing it — one day, you wake up and you have become something that you never would have allowed. Instead of becoming strong — you become mentally weak. Instead of disciplined — you are disorganized and lost.
Instead of moving forward and progressing — you start moving backward and decaying. And those things happen without you seeing them. Without you recognizing them.
So, how do you stop this backward movement and the decaying progress? How do you plant the seeds of motivation, so that when the day and the time comes to accomplish what you want to; you have the necessary reserves and the mental strength in your arsenal?
The answer to that is — You have to be vigilant and be on your guard all the time. No, it does not mean that you spend your every waking hour being on your guard deciding on what to do and what not to do. That would be bloody exhaustive. You are not some improvised version of a To-Do-List. You are human, which means you are bound to slip up once in a while.
Promises To Yourself Are Empty & Hollow
The way to build these reserves is to start with making a couple of small promises to yourself every day when you wake up in the morning. If you are one of these groggy types when you wake up in the morning and the first thing that you want to do is throw that alarm clock across the room, then make those small promises the previous night before you hit the bed.
But you will say, “Hey, I keep making promises to myself every day, but hardly get to it by the end of the day. It does not work, so what the hell are you blabbering about?”
And you would be absolutely right when you say that. Keeping promises to yourself is absolute bullshit. It never works. It never has. Never will.
You see by nature, we are extremely bad at keeping promises to ourselves. It's how we are built and it's how we behave. Let me thrown in a few examples –
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will wake up early? And what happened instead?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will go for a run? Did you end up changing into your running shoes?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will go for a workout? Did you end going to the gym?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will not take your phone to the bathroom? What happened instead?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will pick up a book to read? Did you even start with the first page?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will call your friend and speak to her? And you end up spending 15 mins texting (out of which, a total of 10 mins were spent figuring out the best emoji to share) a friend instead of just calling her?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will write an article today? And then kept it on a back-burner for a month?
- How many times have you promised yourself that you will not break your promises anymore? How did that go, my friend?
You see, the list is endless. I could go on and on. And days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. You see where I am going. As years go by, your mental strength to keep promises to yourself starts degrading. You start procrastinating more than when you were 25 years old. You start spinning in an unending vortex of breaking promises.
Bottom-line — humans are not very good at keeping promises to themselves. Don’t worry, neither are chimps. After all, we belong to the same family. The reason it happens is that promises made to yourself remain only in your mind and it's easy to cheat when things are only confined to your mind. After all, no one heard it, no one saw it — so no harm is done if you break a promise or two to yourself.
So then you ask — “Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants what do you propose I should do? First, you scare the shit out of me that I am going to get mentally weak as years go by, then you ask me to make promises to myself first thing in the morning, and then you tell me that making promises to oneself does not work..!”
The Two Approaches That Work
Alright, let's then get to it. Now that you have understood that promises to yourself do not work, you are going to be more open to what I am going to share now.
The important thing is to not just keep these promises in your mind. To make it work effectively, do either of these two things –
Approach 1 — Pen It Down
Write it down. Seriously, take a pen and write it down. Don’t just write it on any random piece of paper, which can get lost as quickly as you found it. Go buy a small diary. Yes, a diary. Don’t go about downloading some fancy To-Do list App on your mobile phone.
To-Do lists on your phone only get done in the first few weeks of downloading the app and to show off to your friends that you are getting disciplined, but in reality, you are just making yourself feel less guilty by putting it all down on a To-Do List App. So at the end of the day, if you are not able to get to your promise, you can at least console yourself by saying — “Hey, I still have it on my To-Do List app and tomorrow is a brand new day”.
After the initial novelty is over, you will have a compilation of To-Do List's on the App, that go all the way up from your ass all the way up to the Himalayas. And you never get to climb it.
So write down those small promises of the day with a pen (not with a pencil, because you can easily erase that damn thing. I don’t trust you one bit, neither should you trust yourself.)
Then for heaven’s sake, don’t keep that diary in your drawer or leave it at your desk before going to work. Carry it along with you. And don’t leave it in your car. It's easy to just pop it on the back seat. See, I told you not to trust yourself. Keep it in your bag/purse or in your pocket (which means you need to buy a small-sized diary, duh).
Now you might say to me, “Have you been living under a rock? Don’t you know we are in the middle of this Covid19 situation and everyone is working from home? And I don’t go to the office anymore..!”
Got it. You have a point. You see, I have not been watching or reading the news at all for the last few months, so I really don’t know whether we are still in pandemic mode or not. The way things are going across the world (my friends keep me abreast), I guess people believe there is no longer any pandemic and they can do whatever they want. The right to behave like an Idiot is part of the human DNA code.
Alright, let's get back to your biggest problem of working from home. Bet you already have set it up in your basement right where your bar and game room is. So, once you are in your home office, keep the diary on your work desk (I would prefer the bar counter). And keep it open so that your promises of the day are visible to you and it acts as a constant reminder of what you are supposed to accomplish during the day.
However, if you are one of those lucky (or unlucky since you won't have access to your bar during work hours) sods who gets to go to the office, and if some peeping Tom comes along and spots that diary on your desk and asks you about it, don’t shy away from telling them what it is. Rather you will come across as more intelligent and disciplined. (Time to show off a little bit). Nothing to be ashamed of keeping an open diary on your desk, not until you have penned down something that involves some steamy private moments with your partner or spouse, or your ex.
Ok, where was I? I got sidetracked with the peeping Toms and steamy moments.
Any promises that you made to yourself to complete in your office, just get it done. And when you do it — don’t just tick the promise in your diary, or scratch it with your pen.
Take 10 seconds to write these words against the specific promise — “I kept to my promise”.
These are a few powerful words. Remember words have influence and power over you. When you start seeing more of these “I kept to my promise” notes in your diary, you will know that you are developing a life-long attitude and gaining mental strength.
At the end of the day, once you decide to wrap up at your office, don’t leave the diary back on your desk. Take it along, you will need it to make new promises for the next day.
Rinse & Repeat every day.
Approach 2 — Initiate An“External Voice”
If you don’t how to write (just kidding), or are one of those who don’t keep a pen at home; go ahead and share your “promises of the day” with your spouse or partner, or your kids. Tell them what you intend to accomplish today. It could be the tiniest of things, as simple as saying that “I will take a 15 min walk today” or “I will call my mom today” or “I will drink only 1 cup of coffee today” or “I intend to slap you today for being naughty”
Tell you what works for me. I share my small list of daily promises with my 9-year-old daughter. You see it's difficult to break a promise with your kids. Sometimes we can get away by breaking promises with our spouses or partners and friends. While they are very good at holding us accountable when we falter and can push our buttons when needed most, but we humans are also very good at giving excuses.
We are blessed with a strong vocabulary that allows us to create a symphony of excuses, to justify why we didn’t do what we were supposed to do. With kids, you will feel ashamed to give excuses (hopefully..!)
It’s our second nature to provide excuses. We are so damn good at it, that it would not be bad if everyone added the word “Excuse” as their middle name. For eg, my name would then read as Rupesh Excuse Bhambwani. Sounds just right, doesn’t it?
Anyway, you decide what works for you. If you don’t have kids, go borrow one from your neighbor. I don’t care. If the borrowing angle does now work, just don’t let that stop you from sharing your intentions of the day with your spouse, friend, partner, colleague, or even your boss (only if have a chilled-out relationship with your boss).
Now here is what happens, when you share your list of these tiny promises of the day with someone else, you now put yourself under an invisible pressure (a good one) to make a serious attempt to keep to your promise.
It's not like you will be reporting to your Platoon Commander at the end of every night about how you fared during the day or how you messed up the day by shooting some innocent civilians instead of the enemy. Hell, if you think having a Platoon Commander works for you — then go ahead and do it.
This invisible pressure is an “external voice” that works to remind you all day long to keep at your promises. Internal voices can be easily suppressed, just like how you swipe away notifications from your phone.
It's easy to just shut off the internal voice when someone walks up to you at the office and says let's go get another cup of coffee. Or when you are just back from work and instead of changing in your running shoes, you allow yourself to sit down on the couch for 5 mins.
An external voice is more powerful. It has more firepower. That’s the one that you don’t want to mess with. Because when you look in the eyes of your kid (or the borrowed kid from your neighbor) or your partner at the end of the day, you will know you fell short.
That’s the fuel that will get you to keep your promises the next day. And the day after that and so on. This way you get through the week. Then a month. By the time you realize, you would have conquered a year.
Final Thoughts
Making promises to yourself is a weak force, which makes you weaker as the years go by.
On the other hand, when you announce your intentions to other people whom you can trust, or when you pen it down; you set a stage for yourself to gain mental strength every day. Similar to how you would “up” your fitness level every day by committing yourself to 30 mins every day, rather than 1 hour once in a while.
This is what gets you to build your reserves of mental strength and motivation when you need them the most. You can then slowly and gradually make debits from this reserve account as you please. So when the crunch time comes, when you are pushed against the wall, when you get called for war duty (aka getting groceries from your supermarket these days), you won’t have to go looking for Motivational books or podcasts to get your going.
Even if you do pick up one of these books, every author states the same thing — you gotta practice and take action. Without action, there is no progress, no learning.
Mental strength does not appear at your doorstep one fine sunny day, just because you read some book or heard a podcast or saw someone deliver a TEDx talk on Youtube.
We all have a tendency to slip into our comfort zones, after all, it feels cozy and warm. It's a known place to retreat to. No one disturbs you in your zone. Once in a while, you will make some promises to yourself or you will wait for the New Year to make some resolution. And as the year goes by — maybe, just maybe you will hit a few targets on the way.
But if you want to stay prepared to face any unforeseen challenges or obstacles (I guarantee it will come) that may come tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow, then having a fully loaded arsenal of your mental strength is the only sure-shot way that you can win the battle.
For that, you need to load up today, starting now.
Now, go borrow that neighbor’s kid. Remember, beg, borrow, or steal — whatever works for you. (If you get caught in the act, don’t blame me for not giving you a hint earlier about making a promise to pen down some steamy moments with your partner/spouse or ex)
In my publication Any Given Sunday, I mostly write stories about parenting, being a dad, motivation, fitness, and some off-beat controversial topics.
I am also very passionate about F1, and run a publication — Formula One Forever where writers from across the globe contribute to this publication
Some more thought-provoking stories from Any Given Sunday —
Dad Stories
⭐ Say Hello! To The 4 Year Old Forrest Gump
⭐ If You Don’t Pick Up Your Kids Now, You’ll Surely Regret Later
⭐ How to Extract A Commitment From Your Teenager?
⭐ That Day When Dads Took Charge Of Their Kids For 1 Day
⭐ Your Kids Need To Sleep For Atleast 8 Hours. Otherwise, The Consequences Are Quite Severe
⭐ Teachers, Stop Asking Children To Click Pictures. Instead, Do This One Thing
⭐ If a 9 Year & 4 Year Old Can Climb 69 Floors, What’s Really Stopping You?
⭐ The Real Truth About The Discovery Of The Indus Valley Civilization
Motivational Stories
⭐ If I Miss A Rep, I Punish Myself. And The Results Are Amazing.
⭐ Top 15 Quotes from The Navy Seals That Will Motivate The Hell Out Of You Everyday.
⭐ 5 Simple Reasons You Are Not Motivated, And What You Need To Do About It.
⭐ To Merely Want to Do Something Is Not Enough. You Need To Take Action.
⭐ To Earn Respect, You Have To Look Sharp
⭐ How To Manage Negative Talk From Negative People?
⭐ Making Promises To Yourself Don’t Work. Never Will.
⭐ When Disaster Strikes, Just Say The Four Letter Word.
⭐ Fail You Must. History Is Full Of People Who Failed & Bounced Back
⭐ Achieve Personal Glory By Embracing Your Challenges With Open Arms.
⭐ Why You Should Apply For A Job That Says, “Men Wanted For Hazardous Journey”
⭐ Be Different. Become Different
Off-Beat Stories
⭐ The Information Tsunami Is Sucking You In. And You Don’t Even Know It. (Part 1)
⭐ The Information Tsunami Is Sucking You In. And You Don’t Even Know It. (Part 2)
⭐ Women Should Stop Trying To Walk Shoulder To Shoulder With Men (Part 1)
⭐ Women Should Stop Trying To Walk Shoulder To Shoulder With Men (Part 2)
⭐ Women Should Stop Trying To Walk Shoulder To Shoulder With Men (Part 3)
⭐ 26 Amazing (Or Not) Things That We All Can Do During Humanity’s Downtime
⭐ Trust Your Common Sense To Beat The CoronaVirus
⭐ Why 2500 deaths/day is Creating a Bigger Panic and Emergency than 17,000 Children deaths/day?
