Keeping promises to ourselves and trusting ourselves builds confidence.

But you can’t trust yourself when you’re living in your head and your nervous system is heightened. Because our heads and our thoughts will tell us the craziest things. 

If you find yourself constantly making / breaking promises to yourself, I’ve often found one of two things to be going on (though there could be many, many more, these are just two I’ve noticed a lot)

Reason 1: Your nervous system is really heightened and you’re living in your head.

Let’s say you just overate and you’re kind of freaking out and your like, ”okay this week I’m going to eat really clean and not eat sugar and work out every morning.” And then Tuesday rolls around and you’re tired and over it and don’t want to work out. Did that original promise come from a place of relaxation and truth? Or, did it come from a place of freaking out trying to alleviate the fear of what you love done “wrong?”

When we’re making promises to ourselves out of anxiousness/fear, they’re going to be very hard to commit to because they might not be what we actually truly want. Or, perhaps you are really relaxed and feeling good and you tell yourself, “Okay, I really want to focus on creating new music. Tomorrow, I would love to write a new song and I’m going to commit to writing at least one.” And then tomorrow comes and you didn’t sleep well so you have a lot of coffee and you just can’t sit still and your blood sugars messed up and you try to write but you can’t think of any lyrics and instead of writing a song you go for a run and have a glass of wine to calm your mind in other ways. Sigh. You may have wanted to create music and tried to but maybe your body was just too frazzled. It is much harder (though of course not impossible) to keep promises to ourselves when we are really worked up. 

Tip 1: Focus on keeping your nervous system relaxed on a daily basis. Pay attention to what works you up (caffeine, sugar, technology, lack of sleep) and practice incorporating techniques to bring you down (breathing, yoga, meditation, therapy, healthy nourishing, grounding foods, etc).

Tip 2: Don’t make promises to yourself when you’re in a place of fear or overthinking. Try to wait till you’re in a place of calm. This way you’ll at least know if that promise is coming from a place of truth. If it is, it will be easier to stick to.

Reason 2: A lack of self-love / people pleasing tendencies. Do you find it easier to keep promises to others than yourself? If, for whatever reason, you find it much easier to keep promises to other people, and you always show up when you say you’re going to show up or do something when you tell someone you will do something, but you can somewhat easily let yourself down time after time, there’s something deeper to look at here. These kinds of people pleasing tendencies tend to stem from a lack of self-love. Perhaps it goes back to what you learned from your upbringing / past experiences, but either way you can absolutely shift this and start to practice putting yourself first, loving yourself and knowing yourself as someone who is worthy as keeping committments to.

Tip 1: Start small. Make a small promise to yourself that you know you can keep. “I promise that tomorrow I will meditate for thirty seconds.” Or, ”I promise I will take at least twenty steps.” Do something that you know you can and will do and slowly build up. The point is to just practice keeping promises to yourself. 

Tip 2: Pretend you are someone else. If you told someone else you would go to the gym for them on Monday, would you go? Then go. You are the most important person in your life. Even if you don’t believe it yet. Just keep doing the actions as if you do believe it and over time your thoughts will match that. You are more than deserving of your own respect and of what you say you want. 

Tip 3: Meditate. Meditation gets us out of our thoughts, into our bodies, and the more we do it, the more we get to know our ”true selves” not the voice in our heads. Our true selves know what we want and when we act in accordance with our true selves, keeping promises to our selves ceases to be a thing we need to think about.

Tip 4: Work with a professional. Pretty simple but working with a professional (therapist, coach, counselor, etc.) can help you better understand why you have trouble keeping promises to yourself in the first place. Awareness is the first step and then we can work on shifting behaviors.

Lastly, yes, following through on promises to ourselves is so important. It builds our self-esteem and trust in ourselves. But, you know what’s even more important? Having compassion for yourself when you don’t. Loving yourself when you don’t. And getting to the root cause of why you didn’t. There is often an underlying message that wants to be heard. An underlying false belief.  
This blog post is not about ”not making excuses and always following through!” No. Likely if you are reading this, you’re someone who is already too hard on yourself and prone to beating yourself up. And, I promise you that beating yourself up will only repeat the cycle. What you need is more compassionate love, not more abuse from your inner critic.

Breathe, remember it’s ok, you are perfect, you are learning and growing, and there are ups and downs. And you CAN and WILL shift these patterns.

You’ve got this. 🙂