Live Vividly Keeping Your Word
It's 11:11 on Wednesday, make a wish ✨
Growing up, you knew things were serious when you made a pinky-promise.
It was almost as serious as a double-dog-dare.
As adults, we blur the line between promises and social gestures, and it makes us unreliable. This edition is about making your words match your actions to communicate more powerfully.
I didn’t realize how rarely I followed through until I dated a life coach.
He was obsessively rigorous about keeping his word, and he got results.
I was 24 or so and still giving the “right answers,” whether I would really follow through on them or not.
Once I paid attention to it for a few weeks, I saw it everywhere:
Badly underestimating my arrival time
Saying I could take things on when I really didn’t have time
Saying I’d probably attend an event when I had no intention of going
On and on. They were normal things, but normal levels of slightly inaccurate promises added up to make it difficult to run a client services business. I had to re-habituate following through every time.
The more I practiced, the more my confidence grew, and the more consistent my client referrals became.
Once my word and outer world were 1:1, everything in life started moving far more smoothly.
I still remember a conversation I had with a larger-than-life friend who seemed to make unreasonable things happen all the time. I asked something like, “What do I do to be a full time artist?” and he said, “Make art.”
I felt sort of dumb in that moment. At the same time, I realized how much I’d been saying I wanted all these grand things while doing other things that didn’t match.
I make far, FAR less promises these days. And by now, when other people try to tell me who they are, I think, “We’ll see.”
Our word trains our environment.
Like a child responds to consistent boundaries and actions, we train all the people in our life by how close our actions are to the things we say. They learn to rely on us or overlook us, to respect us or manipulate us.
This means life gets a lot easier when we stop saying things we can’t guarantee.
Read about all 4 communication habits in the full article: How to Take Back Personal Power With Words You Don’t Say
Run a 24-Hour Experiment
Notice how often what you say matches what happens.
For one day, only say the things you can absolutely guarantee.
How do you feel about yourself afterwards?
LOVE THIS! In Kaballah it's believed that your words carry weight. The better you are at keeping your word, the more weight your words have, and the more powerfully you can influence reality. The worse you are with your word, the less weight your words have, and your ability to influence life is diminished.