Keep Your Promises

Keeping your promises is one the most precious gift you can give yourself and those around you.

When my children were little I read somewhere how important it was to keep your word to your children. That is a true struggle to change your automatic responses. "Mom, can we go to the park after lunch?" Automatically me: "Yes". Thunderstorm rolls in.

I had to learn to leave room around my answers. For the what ifs, for the maybes. With 7 little ones there was always a what if in the air. "We will try." "We are planning on it." "Have we checked the weather yet?"

I am thankful for this introduction into keeping promises because as mom's we intend the best, but things come up so we have to learn to use our words more carefully.

Something I heard yesterday that I thought was particularly interesting. Don't say yes to something that you don't have time to do today. As I've mentioned before, we have this belief that our future selves are better, stronger, etc... We also believe our future selves have more time than our today self. Don't say yes to something that you don't have time for today. Don't assume your future self has more time.

On to your self and I think the really powerful work. Start with baby steps. If you want to eat healthier, make and keep a promise to yourself that you will add one healthy thing to a meal. Maybe it's, I will eat a green vegetable with lunch daily. It can be a spear of broccoli.

You stack up enough days of eating a green vegetable daily and you will slowly rebuild faith in yourself. If you think you have perfect faith with yourself, you are either already keeping your promises to yourself or you aren't seeing reality. As you rebuild faith in yourself, you will learn to pause before making a promise.

Thinking of a crying 3 year old because You promised you would go to the park. Your inner self is doing the same thing. 😢

Ways to start small: