#48: Keeping promises with yourself

Hello friends,

Happy Father’s Day!

This week, I’m going to talk about a topic that I love: making and keeping promises with yourself.

It’s something that people aren’t always thinking about, but I’m going to highlight how keeping promises with yourself can have huge benefits on your mental health.

Additionally, I’m going to walk through what happens to our self-esteem when we don’t keep the promises we make with ourselves.

Weekly Action Point

☕️ Delay your caffeine intake for 90-120 minutes after waking up ☕️ 

Most people wake up and instantly turn on the coffee pot. Numerous studies show that caffeine timing plays a huge role in how much benefit it gives you.

For this week, I want you to try waiting 90-120 minutes after waking to ingest your first caffeine.

You’ll be less likely to experience an afternoon crash and reap more of the alertness/performance enhancement that caffeine provides.

For many of you, this will feel weird. You might hate it.

I encourage you to try it out for a week and see how you feel.

Worst case, you decide it doesn’t change anything for you, and you go back to how you normally do it next week.

Promises With Ourselves

We make promises with ourselves all the time.

They could be fitness-related, like when you tell yourself you’re going to commit to working out a certain number of times each week.

But we make promises with ourselves in essentially every aspect of life—work, relationships, fitness, personal finance, etc. Most of us make multiple promises to ourselves every day.

Have you ever thought about what happens to your mental state when you either keep these promises or break them?

Most of the promises we make to ourselves are small, trivial things. It may seem like it doesn’t matter if you keep them or not.

I think these small things snowball to have a huge impact on our self-respect, confidence, and motivation.

Let me start with what happens when we fail to keep promises with ourselves.

Breaking Promises

Let’s say you and a friend agreed you were going to meet somewhere at 6 am to do a run before work.

You show up bright and early, but when 6 am rolls around, your friend doesn’t show up.

At 6:20, you get a text that says, “So sorry, man, I slept right through my alarm. Same time tomorrow?”

No big deal. You tell your friend yes and agree to meet again tomorrow.

The next day, you show up before 6, and again, your friend is nowhere to be found.

At 6:05, you get a text that says, “I just have a crazy busy work day, maybe we could try Monday next week?”.

You agree to run on Monday before work, and then your friend again doesn’t show up, presenting some other excuse for why they couldn’t make it that day.

Let’s say this happens 5 more times. Are you still going to trust your friend to show up when they reschedule for the 6th time?

What emotions do you think you would have towards this person for cancelling on you 5 times in a row?

Frustration, anger, annoyance, distrust, disappointment, and sadness are a couple of possibilities that came to my mind.

This is exactly what happens when you break promises with yourself. Except for instead of a friend not showing up 5 times, what if you are breaking a promise with yourself every week? Or every day? Or multiple times per day?

In the same way you wouldn’t trust a friend to show up after bailing on you 5 times, you lose trust with yourself when do don’t do the things that you tell yourself you are going to do.

The things you tell yourself start to lose meaning.

They start becoming empty promises.

This damages your confidence, and you start to feel like you aren’t able to do hard things.

This causes people to get stuck in place, never making progress towards their goals.

If your friend was always bailing on you and breaking promises, you’d probably lose a little bit of respect for that person.

So, how can you respect yourself if you are always bailing and breaking promises with yourself?

Keeping your promises

On the other hand, the opposite is true when we keep promises with ourselves.

When you tell yourself you are going to do something, and then you do it even if it’s hard and you don’t want to, you feel powerful.

You feel like you are on top of the world and are motivated to continue doing things like that.

The sense of accomplishment you feel when you keep a promise with yourself is a feeling that you can’t get from anything else.

And the best part of keeping promises with yourself?

They don’t have to be major, life-changing promises for you to benefit.

If you tell yourself you are going to walk for 10 minutes after dinner, and you actually do it, you’ll feel amazing that you accomplished what you said you were going to.

We make small promises with ourselves all the time. I’m confident that if you started worrying about keeping daily promises with yourself, you’d see the best fitness results of your life.

Instead of thinking about big, long-term goals like losing a bunch of weight or building a bunch of muscle, maybe you can think about small daily promises with yourself. By keeping these promises day after day, you’ll likely end up losing fat or gaining muscle or whatever your goal is.

And guess what, even if you see no physical change at all, you will feel better about yourself.

You will feel more confident, have more self-respect, and be more resilient if you keep the promises you make to yourself.

At the end of the day, who the heck cares what the mirror or scale says? Isn’t the whole point to feel good about yourself and improve self-esteem?

If you take anything away from this week, let it be this: if you tell yourself you are going to do something, do it. It will have a bigger impact on your quality of life than you can imagine.

Ben’s Best

I liked this take on the viral ground beef hot honey bowl. Easy and delicious, what more can you ask for? Give it a try!

calwillcookit

393K followers

View more on Instagram

In the theme of keeping promises with yourself, I’ve been telling myself for YEARS that I want to start making video content in some way.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to start an Instagram account creating my own food reels. I plan to make recipes from countries around the world, both using the traditional ingredients and then with some healthier swaps.

I don’t know anything about filming/editing food videos (yet), so it’s a learning process. They might suck at first, but that’s ok. Figured the only way I’ll learn and improve is by doing it.

I hope to have this account up and running within the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for some of those videos in the Ben’s Best section :)