One of our challenges in life is that we are always making commitments, and over time, we treat those commitments less seriously and they become trivial matters. I am pretty convinced that commitments that we make should never be trivial. Any commitment we make should be made with such gravity that it is life changing for us. I think a commitment is a high level promise to ourselves and others and calls into question our honor and integrity. A commitment should always be a defining moment. A, “I am not going to back out,” moment.
However, that is not how they are treated in the modern psyche. Marriage, Contracted Debt like Mortgages are all serious still but we have ways out. Divorce, Forclosure and other codified ways to escape this commitments are symbolic of our lack of discipline around covenant making in society. There was a time when peoples of the earth took commitments much more seriously, we even had Gods dedicated to the singular concepts of honor, such as Honos. We used to swear on things to maintain our honesty and integrity. These have always been close cousins to the concept of bravery and I think that is on purpose.
It takes a brave person to stand up for their integrity, no matter what. When you make a promise, a commitment, a covenant how serious are you? Take it to the grave serious, leave everything you have on the track serious, or are you just making bold statements to help yourself feel better? Bold statements to help yourself feel better should never be a replacement for commitments that you actually keep. A commitment to yourself or others should always be real and have consequence. The question becomes, how do you make a commitment real?
I have learned to tie commitments to actual achievements or results. This result is not the commitment itself, but rather, a manifestation that the commitment was kept. For example, lets say I make a commitment to be healthy. I am committed to a healthy lifestyle. That is a promise that I make to myself and others. So what manifestation could I come up with that would be a demonstration that I took this seriously? Using this example, I might set an achievement to be, “run a marathon.” This is something people do all the time, and for good reason. They want to be healthy, so they set a goal to run a marathon. This is a commitment followed by an achievement or key result that is a manifestation of the commitment.
That was the easy one, but in our lives we have much more serious commitments that take on a larger meaning. Sometimes that meaning is so wrapped up in our ego or representation of ourselves that we are afraid of identifying a key result because if we do and we fail, we worry what effect it will have on us. The question then becomes, how serious is the commitment? Are you just saying, “I want to be a great Dad,” as lip service? Or do you really mean it. Marking a key achievement or result is the next step exercise that makes your commitment concrete, real, accessible. I have also noted that in these big commitments, it is really helpful to mark not only a key achievement but a specific moment in that achievement that you can visualize in your mind.
The “great Dad” commitment might be identified as a achievement such as, “attend the graduate school graduation ceremony for my daughter.” This result has a lot of meaning behind it and identifies an entire sequence of events to get there. It is not good enough to just hope she goes to college, with this specific achievement in mind, you are now on the hook for helping to make that happen. This has consequence and real meaning. Often to come up with the achievement requires you to think outside yourself. For example, if I committed to be, “an awesome husband,” then I would need to find out what that meant to my wife. It is meaningless for me to pretend that I know what an awesome husband is. I need to find out from the person most impacted by the role. Apply this concept to your job or any other role for that matter.
Identifying the right achievement or result to affix to your commitment is not an exact science and it never will be. Remember the achievement is a manifestation of your commitment, and not the actual commitment itself. However the outward manifestation of your commitment has the power to solidify the concept of what you are committing to in your mind and will give you a guiding star to aim for in the dark times.
Guy
