What Have You Promised Yourself?

I recently attended the wedding of a very good friend from college. It was a beautiful ceremony and reception filled with laughter, joy, love, and one hell of a Snapchat story.

It was, to be sure, much like we would all want our wedding day to be. But one thing stood out to me above anything else.

The vows.

The mood throughout the ceremony was light. There, nervous laughter, jokes, and the young lady performing the ceremony stole the show with a hilarious story of an old couple taking the definition of “what’s mine is yours” to the next level.

But when the happy couple began to exchange vows, the energy in the room shifted. There was an exciting tension that touched each person taking witness. No one wanted to miss a word. The act of 2 individuals promising so much to one another was pure and raw and special.

The idea of an oath.

Bearing witness to this and feeling that energy left me with this thought. Reciting our wedding vows is one of the very few times in our lives that we take an oath — a promise we make, in front of witnesses, binding us to some future set of behaviors higher than those we currently display.

When you think about it, that’s a pretty big freaking deal.

I shared this thought several times before in a different setting — when overseeing an initiation ceremony in the fraternity world. As I’ve written about before, I have served as both a professional staff member and volunteer for my fraternity and one of the greatest privileges that comes with this is to oversee an initiation ceremony.

The small details of these ceremonies are secretive but the basic idea across the fraternity and sorority world is often the same — a serious, reflective setting with some sort of altar, candles, and a series of promises made to be a better version of yourself.

Each individual takes the oath separately to join, making promises before their peers about the actions they will take to serve their organization, their peers, and themselves.

When overseeing this event for a group of 18 and 19-year-olds, it can be difficult to capture just how important a moment this is. I typically turn to the conversation of taking an oath.

I tell these young men that, along with perhaps a couple times for religious purposes, your wedding day, and to commit to joining a couple other organizations, this is one of the very few times in your life you will take an oath.

Again, that is a big deal.

In the fraternity world as in marriage, we always turn back to the promises we made during this oath to evaluate and guide our behavior. Are we staying true to the principles we promised that day? Are we thinking of those promises to guide our everyday actions?

There is a reason renewing your wedding vows is so popular. They are powerful and revisiting them only adds to that power.

But what about a personal oath?

Seeing the exchange of vows at the wedding made me think… if an oath is so rare and so strong and so powerful, why don’t we have a personal oath? A set of promises we have made to ourselves to guide our behavior and hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Could making one help with commitment? Habit formation? Self-discipline? Performance? Happiness?

I began to explore this concept, searching for intelligent people giving their opinions. And to my surprise, I couldn’t find a ton.

The best I could find was a video we wrote about a couple weeks ago, from Dr. Eric Thomas. In the video, titled “You Owe You”, Thomas talks about how we are quick to get angry at others when they don’t meet a guarantee — a product doesn’t last for the year it was supposed to, a friend breaks off their plans, or a coworker doesn’t meet a deadline. We get pissed.

But we almost never hold ourselves to the same standards. As Thomas puts it, “We want people to make guarantees to us, but we aren’t willing to make guarantees to ourselves.”

To be fair, we make promises to ourselves all the time. We set alarm clocks, we say we will go to the gym, we say we will stop procrastinating.

But, as I have noticed with myself, after we break these “promises” over and over again, it becomes routine to do so.

The idea behind writing out a personal oath is to give these promises power and meaning. To make sure breaking them can no longer simply be routine.

Putting this into action.

A personal oath is meant to represent a set of behaviors to guide you in every situation. It is values-based. Principles-based. A series of guarantees to which you must hold yourself accountable to achieve the level of success and happiness you know we want.

It turns out, coming up with one of these is hard. My original plan for this article was to include the working version of my own personal oath, but it turns out the 2 days since the wedding was not anywhere near enough time to get this done.

I have ideas to be sure. They call for absolute honesty, doing the right thing over the easy thing, and running 5 times a week. But I have a long way to go.

And that’s the point. This exercise shouldn’t be easy. It should take time.

I think we all have a loose idea of what promises we would like to keep to ourselves every day. But the point of this exercise is to get those promises on paper. To ensure they are there for you to see every day. To revisit. To evaluate. To make sure they are being done on purpose.

I am working on it, and I invite you to work on it, too.

What values, principles, and promises do you want guiding your actions every day? What can you commit to? What do you want to promise to yourself?

Brainstorm ideas. Write them down. Form a rough draft. Throw that version away. Write it again. Revise it. Perfect it.

And then live it.

Life is too special to not keep the promises we make to ourselves.