Keeping Every Promise Except the Ones to Yourself

I could not believe my ability to honor commitments to other people, but make next to no progress on my own goals

And there is no better time that that is exemplified than during the end of the year and the holidays.

I used to prioritize things I didn’t even care about over myself.

Like work holiday parties over my commitment to get to bed at the right time

What’s up?

My name is Flint Mitchell from iAlign.

I went from a life of stagnation, scrolling, procrastination, and feeling behind

To one of clear, consistent, confident action and freedom

Right after university, during my first job, I would go to a bar with my colleagues after work to have a beer fairly regularly

At the same time, I was trying to get back into soccer shape and mountaineering shape.

But a year after I got out of university and was in that job,

I had clearly established the behavior of prioritizing my colleagues’ desire to go to happy hour and have a beer over my own desire to be healthy.

And as a consequence, I got overweight.

I ended up over the weight that makes me feel good about myself and my body.

And a client of mine recently expressed this in a way that I thought was quite poignant.

He said, “I’m 30 years old, and I can’t even honor a commitment to myself. It’s like I have stopped trusting myself because when I say I’ll do something, I end up doing something for someone else and not the thing I actually wanted to do.”

He said, I will do my best to not let other people down, but the minute it comes to letting myself down, I just don’t care.”

And this dude graduated with honors.

Really smart guy, successful, well-paying job after university.

But he just spent 10 years after he graduated passively working for other people and accepting the responsibilities of making them happy without ever prioritizing his own self, his own wants and desires.

In a really consistent place that I see this show up with these ambitious builder types is that they will start to pursue career objectives that sound good on paper, maybe to their parents or the people around them or to their boss, whatever their boss wants for them, et cetera, but aren’t things that they have ever qualified of if they would actually enjoy or want.

Like because they had success up until a certain point doing things for other people, they just started devaluing to the point where they didn’t even consider their own perspective on what they wanted

And look, if that happens for a little while, it’s fine.

But it can very quickly lead to this place where you blink and you look back and you go, “Shit, how did I end up in this job I don’t want doing this thing I don’t wanna do that I’m not actually interested in around these people that I don’t really care about engaging in these behaviors that I don’t really wanna be engaging in?”

It’s probably because you allowed, like I allowed in that story, the wants or desires of other people and usually, if we’re being honest, the wants and desires of other people are usually them just trying to comfort themselves, so they’re not necessarily healthy behaviors in the first place.

We allowed their wants and desires to dictate our own

And then the large decade-long consequence is that we end up in a life we don’t want

So if you’ve recognized that you have people-pleasing tendencies

Then the upcoming holidays are the perfect time, the perfect recipe for you to completely and entirely give up on your own goals, wants, and desires because there’s so much stress and there’s so much chaos

And you’re going to fall in the trap of trying to help everyone else, especially during a moment where everyone is stressed.

And if everyone is stressed even more than the normal amount, and you have a tendency to try to help other people accomplish their goals or support them and not yourself, their needs or demands, even if subconsciously, will increase, and therefore your output to help other people will increase, and the amount that you spend on yourself, even if it’s already at a low, will drop to zero.

It’ll drop to nothing because you’re spending all your time focused on other people and not on how you actually want to spend your time.

And any standards you wanted to enforce for your way of living go out the window

That’s what happened to me.

The standard that I wanted to hold myself to with regard to my health dropped off the face of the planet because I was doing things that other people wanted to do.

Or what other people wanted me to do.

And both of those are a recipe for disaster, for waking up in 10 years and blinking and looking back and going, ” Fuck, I don’t wanna be here at all. I didn’t want this life. How did this happen?”

And the kicker to all of this is that so many people in this world are acting reactively trying to comfort themself from the stress and chaos and noise of the world, especially during the holidays, is that they can’t even be satisfied.

So you spend all this time and energy, whether intentionally or not, trying to help other people and make them feel better and pursue their goals and not your own, and then they don’t even end up happy or pursue their goals because they’re avoiding it and they’re reacting in their own way.

And there’s nothing wrong with you or them for any of this.

It’s just you have to recognize that if you don’t prioritize yourself, like I didn’t, you will end up overweight.

You will end up scrolling your phone, engaging in whatever behaviors you don’t like.

Distracted focus, brain fog, all these things that occur because we prioritize other people and spend no time taking care of ourself and pursuing the things that we actually want and desire.

And until you give yourself permission to pursue that which you genuinely want and desire, you probably won’t identify the moments, the specific moments where you have a tendency to start to say yes to other people.

For example, I needed to identify the moments where I would have a tendency to say yes to things that would lower my standard of my health for myself.

That happy hour loop was just one example.

I needed to identify a way that made me comfortable to say no to the invite, because originally I felt bad saying no, ’cause I wanted to say yes and be friends and all that good stuff.

I needed to identify a specific way that I could feel comfortable saying no to the happy hour invite so that I could engage in life in a way that upheld my value and my standard of my health.

The only way to identify those moments is to start to become aware of them, and in order to start to become aware of them, you have to accept that it’s something that is worthy of changing, that your goals are worthy of pursuing.

And this holiday season is the perfect time to do that, because there are lots of predictable stressors and holiday party invites and friend invites and all these things that you know deep down are really you just trying to make other people happy and not things you actually want to do

With that, my name is Flint Mitchell.

I hope you found that valuable.

If you did, I would love if you would share it with just one person who you think it would also benefit

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Peace