How committed are you to your commitments? Here are a few related posts you may have missed.
“Stay committed to your decisions but stay flexible in your approach.”
“When we do what we have to do we are compliant. When we do what we choose to do we are committed.”
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Depending on when you are reading today’s quote, try these mental exercises:
If you read it early in your day, examine the activities in your schedule related to both your professional and personal commitments. How many have you agreed to out of obligation or to not hurt others feeling? What is the cost to your vitality and well-being for betraying or going against your natural desires and instincts?
If you read it later in the day, take a moment to reflect on the many times you said “yes” when your inner voice was whispering or screaming “NO!”? How fatigued or wrinkled do you feel and look at the end of the day having handed over many hours to others to get along and keep the peace?
Examine your days carefully through the lenses of the words MORE, LESS, START, and STOP. Do your best today to save your yeses for the MORES and STARTS and voice your no’s toward the LESS’s and STOPs on your list. Hopefully you develop only good wrinkles from the smiles that will result.
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How we carry our load of responsibilities when we are overwhelmed is very important to keeping our balance and not being crushed by the weight of things.
Breaking things down into smaller bites can help us to tackle even big challenges.
Steps I’ve found helpful include:
Schedule 15-60 minutes today to dump your brain and go through the steps above.
Be prepared to have this process take a number of days until you make this exercise a habit.
Share this exercise with a colleague, friend, family member, or a coach, to help you regain you momentum and the traction you desire.
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To what degree have you felt lost over the past several months?
Where did you once have clarity in your life, and to what extent do things now seem to be foggy?
Now is the time to be your own compass, to verify your “True North” and set forth with more confidence and commitment.
What are the values, beliefs, and priorities that generate the magnetic field within you, keeping you on course regardless of small or mountainous issues along the way?
How do you know when you are on the right path?
What personal or professional adjustments will you make today to better follow your own inner compass?
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Given our turbulent times, it is clearer than ever that hope is not a good strategy to right our world.
Wishful thinking and turning a blind eye to the objective truth has delayed the full mobilization of our world to come together as one.
Hope is, however, very powerful in that it can and will inspire our individual and collective efforts to cast the shadows of our challenges behind us.
How and in what ways can and will you mobilize your most hopeful energies and committed actions as we journey together to better our world?
What is your relationship to the character trait of integrity?
How do you relate to others who are more talk and less action?
To what degree can you be counted on in both good and challenging times?
What oaths, vows, promises, and other commitments have you made over the years in which your integrity was impeccable?
What has it cost you and those around you when your ratio of saying to doing exceeds the number one?
One place to look is in the area of trust and its impact on the important relationships in your life.
Please check out my Trust-o-Meter Assessment to explore potential ways you may wish to bolster your integrity and strengthen the trusting relationships you desire.
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In many areas of life, “Good Enough” is good enough.
Perhaps you, like many people these days, have pivoted more mindfully, professionally and personally, to dramatically reduce or eliminate certain life commitments, duties, or obligations.
In some cases, leaving these stones unturned makes sense.
On the other hand, there are those high-value priorities and commitments that warrant our fullest attention. What personal or professional areas of life deserve all you’ve got, and anything short of excellence won’t do?
Select one top priority project or area of your life in which you will leave no stone unturned until you realize your goal.
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Who are the people in your professional or personal worlds that seem to carry a very heavy load throughout their days?
How burdened do you feel given your own backpack of commitments, priorities, and responsibilities?
What are the costs to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being?
When eustress—the positive and productive form of stress—exceeds its limits, it cascades over the threshold into distress, which can significantly impact our immune systems and can even lead to disease.
Take 5 to 10 minutes to lift your foot off the gas pedal of life and do a Google search on “Stress Management” or “Self-Care Strategies” to help you lighten your approach to life.
Feel free to reply to this post with the strategies or approaches you commit to taking.
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To what degree are you an “extra credit” type of person? Recall your early educational experiences, in which a special teacher or a special subject motivated you well beyond just meeting expectations and passing the course. They motivated you to experience new levels of excellence, achievement, and of course, greater personal growth.
What about today in your vocational and avocational efforts? Where do you choose to go the extra mile and exceed expectations versus simply doing just enough to maintain your employment (for the moment) and get by?
To help you make the shift from compliant to committed, consider exploring the work of Dan Pink in his book, Drive, to see how greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose will help you choose and eventually realize a far more fulfilling and rewarding life.
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The Giving Pledge is a commitment by the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. You can learn more about this remarkable commitment to philanthropy and the causes they support by visiting givingpledge.org.
If you happen to not currently be on the list of the ultra-wealthy, I suggest you consider the Impact Pledge. There, we can all participate in a highly specific project by publicly committing our resources – especially time and energy – to a worthy mission to better our world. In such a way we can all participate in the design of a “key” solution that opens the doors of our most daunting local and world issues.
Consider visiting the Impact Pledge site to see how you might become a critical key to bettering our world.