On Keeping Promises to Myself

It has been a focus of mine over the past few weeks to learn how to keep the promises I make to myself. Being able to do so successfully is a sure-fire way to trusting oneself more, and having more faith in the resolutions we set ourselves. There are three ways it usually goes for me, only one of them good, but I’ll go through them all. The first is the most appealing one. Making a promise to myself that is just so unbelievably easy – something I would do regardless of this so-called commitment. This usually manifests as promising to uphold habits I’ve already nurtured and developed. The trust that should come out of these promises helps lay the foundation for new habits and routines to take hold, and applying it retroactively is useless at best. Not to say recognising one’s achievements isn’t helpful, but that is only what these shallow promises want you to think they’re doing, when they’re actively serving as a detriment. Yes, I’m anthropomorphising them. No, I don’t care.

Then comes the second kind of these promises – the unrealistic ones. Pivoting hard in the other direction brings me to these different but equally nasty promises. These are the ones that involve me promising myself I’ll do some impossible or, at the very least, improbable task – overestimating my abilities so much that it quickly stops being optimistic and veers into delusion. They always paint a rosier picture of me, someone who can solve all my problems and go further – and they’re so comforting to believe. They are at their most insidious though, when on the surface, these unrealistic promises are indistinguishable from the easy ones. That adds a level of an assumption that, once left unfulfilled, makes me feel even worse than I would have done already.

The final kind is a careful amalgamation of the first two. On their own, those self-promises have good qualities that are vastly overshadowed by their drawbacks. Easy ones, for example, can give you the small victory they need to stay motivated, or to draw you out of a slump. The impossible ones can add to that motivation a sense of aspiration, the ability to be both content yet simultaneously wishing for more. Wishing is the wrong word. It implies instant, or guaranteed success. Those good, impossible promises point us toward that slightly better version of us, but don’t hang us out to dry, and in doing so offer or point us in the direction of a roadmap – confirming that what we want is a tangible goal. This all being said, it’s something I have to work on a lot, and I will for a while. It would be much easier if these were all conscious decisions we made, but I often only recognise it after the fact. Regardless, self-awareness in that regard is still an important step. As someone who isn’t at all comfortable with uncertainty, this process can be frustrating, as I find myself without a clear idea of how to handle my emotions and subconscious monologue. But it can only improve with conscious effort, and so wallowing in self-pity and discomfort is the least productive course of action. If only it weren’t such an easy one.