How to Stick To Your Promise
- Oliver
- Oct 19, 2020
- 3 min read
Firstly, you must have the self-awareness to understand and realize when you are performing a bad habit. You cannot begin to fix something that you do not know is broken. This self-awareness is incredibly powerful if you can develop it to the point where you catch your thought process before you perform a bad habit. Some examples of bad habits are staying in bed after you wake up for a prolonged period for no good reason, binging a show when you have urgent and important tasks to tend to, putting off your responsibilities and chores because you are not in the mood to do them. You get the idea. Unpleasant habits typically revolve around gratification— placating your desire immediately.
Secondly, you must come to understand the reasoning behind your unpleasant habits. Tackle one at a time and start with the simplest one. Let us say you do not drink enough water in the day. This one is incredibly common and the easiest to fix and has enormous benefits. After all, water composes the majority of our body. One reason you might not be drinking enough water is forgetfulness. You do not remember to drink water throughout the day. This forgetfulness is incredibly easy to remedy. Open your phone, go to your calendar, and create an event titled “Drink water, you minx.” Now, go into the options and do two things. Set the event to occur every single day and set it to become an all-day event. Now, whenever you open your phone, you should see “Drink water, you minx”. Nice. Whenever you see that, do your best to sip water. Try and think of other positive habits that you want to do and pop them into your calendar. (For more on scheduling see "The Schedule")
A trickier bad habit of tackling would be your proclivity to stay in bed longer than necessary to the point where it just is not good. So, you know this is a bad habit, now, why do you stay in bed after you wake up? Is it because you cannot be bothered getting out? Why? Do you have nothing to do? Impossible, no one on this earth has nothing to do. Is it because you do not have the motivation to get out and tackle your day? Because if it is, we can work on that. The first thing you are going to do is set your alarm slightly earlier than usual because you plan to stay in bed. Then when the alarm goes off, get out. You satisfied your desire, did you not? You set your alarm a full 30 minutes earlier to allow yourself a 30 minute in bed session, did you not? So, get out. Start your day. It is a balance of kindness and strictness. Be kind enough to yourself to allow for a guilt-free in-bed kickback session but be strict with yourself when your allotted time has elapsed.
Thirdly, now that we are aware of our negative habits and the reasoning behind them, it becomes imperative to maintain proactivity. Start with your more straightforward negative patterns, then when you get those under control, move on to the more challenging ones. You will relapse, accept that. But trust the process and be kind and gentle with yourself. You are trying to change, are you not? You are reading this for one!
Keep at it, you know this is not easy, but you cannot give in to your desires because every time you do, you are delaying your inherent potential from manifesting.
To recap, this is how you stick to your promises
Understand when you are about to break your promise, i.e develop self acute self-awareness. This is just a matter of practice. Keep thinking about your actions.
Understand the reasoning behind why you are breaking your promise to yourself, then act on that. Forgetfulness? Reminders.
Continuous improvement, do not slack off, stay on top of it because it takes time before any 'habit' becomes a habit.
You can do this, you always could.
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