As good as your word…

I’ve been thinking about this idea a bit today after a conversation with a friend. When it comes to society in general, I think it’s kind of logical why traits like ‘trustworthiness’ or ‘consistency’ are important.

Society is built upon this idea of mutual cooperation and if you can’t develop trust, or have some consistency as an individual then it doesn’t really do you any favours in trying to participate in society (would you do business with someone you didn’t trust?)

We often use sayings like ‘my word is my bond’ or being ‘as good as your word’ to describe people who carry themselves with a certain level or trust and integrity.

However my train of thought on this wasn’t so much about how you are perceived by others but actually how you perceive yourself.

There’s been a little clip doing the rounds about why you shouldn’t hit the ‘snooze’ button on your alarm due to the concept of sleep inertia, however I like to view these things from the lens of ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’.

If it’s acceptable for me to hit that snooze button and delay on waking up, what other tasks is it then acceptable for me to delay?

It might sound extreme, however I think that this little analogy of being relaxed with the alarm clock is no different to how we talk to ourselves.

If I tell myself that I’m going to do something, however never carry it out, what signals am I sending my own mind, heart or being?

I remember an old friend of mine telling me about this concept of ‘mind chatter’. Essentially it was the idea that when there are these niggling thoughts in your head telling you to do something (kind of like your conscience) you should listen to it… and by listening to it, you get more attuned to doing the things you’re supposed to be doing and over time, this will become a positive habit in terms of how you live your life.

The more you ignore the ‘mind chatter’ then the less you hear, because you weren’t going to do anything about it anyway.

It’s like how sometimes you think of someone you may not have spoken to in a while - I actually try to make it a habit that when I do think of someone from the past I reach out to them, perhaps there is some strange reason I’ve thought of them and who knows what might be happening in their lives, the best case is that nothing is wrong and I’ve gotten to chat to an old friend.

Anyway, my musing for today was in relation to how we talk to ourselves. This particular friend of mine was commenting that they didn’t really want to talk about aspirations etc because it’s all just talk and that it seemed like nothing came out of it.

This applies to so many of us at various stages in our life, that we may have had some grand aspirations that we never brought to life.

Sometimes our aspirations may really be too grand, however I think a lot of the time we probably more just failed to take the first step.

Whether it was fear, laziness - you choose a reason… because we didn’t hold ourselves accountable to our word on the first step, we never even started.

Failing to start we then beat ourselves up about it and it becomes like this negative spiral of feeling depressed we didn’t set out what we achieved, guilty we didn’t achieve it and demoralised to try and start again.

This is why it’s so important that when we think about being ‘as good as our word’, it’s not only to other people, but most importantly to ourselves.

If we accept that we don’t do as we say, it becomes acceptable to not do what we set out to achieve.

From that perspective, I definitely feel like there was merit in talking about it, if nothing else than to allow a friend get some negativity out and realise that we all go through this.

The even better news, is that being ‘as good as your word’ doesn’t need to be some grand master plan, it can be as simple as doing the little things (making your bed, putting away your clothes, taking that cold shower) all of those little wins will start to build into something bigger and the fact that we are as good as our word, means we will trust ourselves to take action on the bigger things, simply because we have proven it to ourselves on the small things.

What do you think?

Do you trust yourself enough to be as good as your word on the things you set out to achieve? Or is this something you need to work on to build the trust within yourself?