Keep Your Promises You Make to Yourself

When a friend tells you to meet up on a Saturday evening, you expect her to show up. When she doesn’t and she calls you something came up, you become disappointed. It’s normal. Then you agree again to meet up with her on a Saturday evening. But….she doesn’t show up. Again. “Yeah I’m so sorry I would arrive too late I had this thing I needed to get solved!’ “Let’s meet next week! Next week should be completely fine!” Okay you think. You’re disappointed and angry but you consent to next week’s appointment. When Saturday evening arrives, and you are in the coffee shop, the phone rings. Your friend is again not showing up. What will you think when this happens? Will you trust your friend when she says she wants to meet up? Probably not. The truth is, we do this to ourselves all the time. We make promises to ourselves, big ones, and we break them. Over and over again. Will this affect our self-esteem? Oh yes it does. With every promise we break we add more weight in the bucket of no self-esteem. Make small promises to yourself and keep them. That’s how you build momentum. That’s how you increase self-esteem. The more self-esteem you gain, the less you need comments and likes from others to give that to you. Comments and likes are never a good source to gain self-confidence. On the contrary, due to the compare and despair phenomenon, our self-esteem only decreases. I wrote it a few times and will write it again: improve the story you tell yourself about yourself when you’re by yourself. Start making small promises to yourself that you will keep. Then make you start making them more audacious.