Episode #24: How You Are Not Getting What You Want
If you have a lot of good intentions, you might set up your schedule, make some goals, but then find yourself surprised that you aren’t accomplishing anything. What’s the catch in your planning? How are you not getting what you want?
Putting something on the calendar, but then not doing it is breaking a promise to yourself. Broken promises are a direct result of not doing something. You’re going to need to be honest about what areas in your life you’re not keeping bargains with yourself.
I know exactly how I break promises to myself, so I can speak easily on this topic. I like to be prepared, maybe even over prepared. I’m a planner. I like to schedule things on my calendar a day ahead so that I’m prepared for meetings or events. But I also allow myself to run over my schedule, which then cascades into my next planned activity.
Do you do this too? If you want to learn a new course, do you plan for it, put it on the calendar, but then forget to sign up for it? If we break promises to ourselves, we need to examine carefully why we didn’t follow through. Don’t waste time beating yourself up over a broken promise.
I want you to look for reasons as to why you’re not getting what you want. If we don’t know why it’s happening, then we can’t stop it. We’re looking for a pattern. Did you not plan enough time? Did you forget to plan in family activities? Did you let one activity spill into the next?
Your action plan for next week is to schedule out two entire days, and then try to adhere to that schedule. Pay attention to when you don’t follow the plan and make a note of it. Ask yourself why you didn’t follow the schedule. I want you to pay attention to where things go off the rails so that you can be more aware of how to make a schedule that helps you get what you want.
Hello and welcome to episode number 24 of the Strategy Corner where our goal is to get you to take action. I’m your host, Michelle Zink, the owner of Intentional Solutions Corp. On today’s episode we’re going to talk about a strategy on how you are not getting what you want because of broken promises to yourself. So, we’re going to strategize how you can stop breaking promises to yourself. Now, what I’m talking about is when you decide that you’re going to do something, you put it on your calendar and you don’t do it. Those are broken promises to yourself. Back in episode number four and five of the Strategy Corner, I shared with you my process for calendaring and then setting up a system to do things in certain days based off of the activities for that day. Now, even though I have this process, I break promises to myself as well.
Not as frequently as maybe most of you, but I’d still break promises. So, what I’m talking about is broken promises are a direct result of you not doing something. So, in life, if you want to achieve something, unfortunately the only person you can blame for not doing it is yourself. Now, I know that might sound harsh, but I also want you to be realistic with yourself and be open and honest with yourself where areas you are not upholding your bargain to yourself. Because only when you begin to look at that and be open and honest with yourself, can you see how you can make changes to stop this pattern of breaking promises to yourself. Now, I can speak about this topic because I know exactly how I break promises to myself and I know exactly how I can stop breaking promises to myself. So, let me give you some examples of how I break promises to myself.
Like I was stating, I schedule everything on my calendar. So, I like to stay ahead of the game. I like to, when I have a client or a project, I really like to get things done a day or two ahead of time so that this way I’m well prepared for whatever meeting I’m going to or an event or whatever I need to be ready for. But I allow things to get in the way. I allow myself to set up on my calendar a timeframe to check email messages and I allow myself to, if I have 45 minutes set to do that, I allow myself to go an hour and 15 minutes and that could run into the next thing I have scheduled. And what that does is it puts me behind schedule and so I might not get to the activities that really mean the most to me, which are the activities where I’m working on client work, where I am reaching out to individuals to set up meetings so that I can serve them properly.
And by doing that, I’m breaking promises to myself. I know the promise myself is to set up my calendar so that I have things done in an appropriate amount of time because I know that’s just me and I like to be ahead of schedule when I can. So, I can see totally when I break promises to myself. I also break promises to myself when I say I’m going to go ahead and eat X, Y, and Z and none of that includes a dessert and then someone brings out a cookie and I go ahead and eat the cookie. So, that is a broken promise to myself as well for eating healthy, trying to stay on target with my weight and really just staying healthy and making sure my brain’s clear. So, that’s where I broke a promise to myself by saying I’m not going to have dessert, but then giving in.
Another example is if you want to learn a new course and you know you need to sign up for something and you put it on your calendar and then you don’t go in and actually sign up for the course. So, it’s again breaking a promise to yourself. You said you wanted to learn a new trait or a new system in 2020 you put it on your calendar and then you don’t do it. Those are broken promises to yourself. So how you, how you are not getting what you want because of broken promises to yourself, all lies on you and on you scheduling things and then just doing them. Now, the reason why we don’t do things is because we don’t adhere to the guidelines that we set for our self and its human nature. It is so easy and believe me, I’ve been playing with time and playing with scheduling for so long and I still have an issue with doing something with the, within the allowed allotted amount of time that I say I’m going to do it.
In Brooke Castillo talks about how if you schedule 45 minutes, you just do 45 minutes. And then you reschedule another time if you don’t get it done. What I have a problem with is I’m in the groove and so I don’t want to stop and so I just continue on, but then that pushes everything else back that’s important to me at that time because what I do in my life is I decided ahead of time the things that I want to work on. I do have areas and times in my life where I don’t have things scheduled, but for the most part by a week, my work week during the week is scheduled. It’s planned. It knows what I need to work on because of the clients that I’m working with, so I know ahead of time what I need to work on. I decide ahead of time what’s most important and the thing is when you decide ahead of time, you’re using that part of your brain that can plan and schedule.
It’s not spontaneous, it’s not giving into the last whim. It’s the part of your brain that actually knows what’s best for you and thus you can schedule even better. So, for me, the breaking the promises and the thing that I’m working on is making sure that the time I allot for things that I actually do it during that allotted time. Another way that I break promises to myself is, especially maybe on the weekend, if I work on Saturday morning, I don’t tell my family that I have scheduled out from 8 to 10 to work. And then I just assume that I could fit it in, fit it in, and do it while we’re all hanging out in the morning. Well, by doing that, I’m not setting myself up for success. I haven’t communicated properly with my family. And so thus when we get up, it’s okay, let’s get some chores done.
Let’s do the laundry. Usually do laundry on Saturdays, let’s do this, let’s do that. Meanwhile, all I can think about are the things that I’m not getting done that I promised I would for myself. So again, I’m feeling bad and I’m feeling discouraged, but again, it’s in my control. I should have told my family ahead of time and I should have set that up for success. So, I’m telling you this all so that you’re aware of when you actually break promises to yourself and how little and how simple it could actually be. Now, once we realize we break promises to ourselves, we do not beat ourselves up. Meaning we don’t get upset with ourselves. We don’t tell ourselves, see, we can’t follow any schedule, see, we don’t know how to be an executive. See, we’re not a leader. See, we’re never going to accomplish anything.
No. All you’re seeing is that opportunity to actually engage with yourself and determine ahead of time the things that really mean a lot to you and that are important. You know that planning ahead of time and then scheduling them and when you don’t, you just look at it. Well, that’s really interesting. Why did I say I was going to work from 8 to 10 on Saturday and not do it? Oh, I see. I forgot to tell my family and so then they didn’t support me in that time. Okay, well next time I’m going to go ahead and let them know. Okay, so it’s working through these little hiccups we have and getting us back on course. Seeing with the time I need to and I want to and I’m choosing to this week to actually adhere and play with not going over the time that I have allotted for things and then rescheduling things if I do go over, because allegedly I say allegedly because I haven’t learned how to do this yet.
Brooke says, Brooke Castillo, and I’ve mentioned her before, she’s from the life coach school. She mentions how if you set up a timeframe to do something, you can actually get it done in that time frame and I’m really trying to work on that so I’m going to play with that this week and see how it goes. But the thing is that I need to stop breaking promises to myself so that I can actually make some traction and move the ball forward on some of these goals and objectives. And then also just to make myself feel more confident. I know when I’m scheduled and I have things done ahead of time that I feel more confident walking into a meeting. I am a planner; I like to have things set up. I know that these are the things that I need to make myself 100% and to serve my clients to the fullest.
So, the better I can schedule that ahead of time and then not break the promises to myself the better. So, now what should you do? What’s your action call for this week? What I would like for you to do is schedule two days, just pick two days during this week and schedule them. Put things on your calendar that you really need to get done, things that align with your work goals, your personal goals possibly things that you wanted to achieve in 2020, maybe there is one course you want me to sign up for. Go ahead and schedule two days. And it doesn’t have to be two consecutive days. It could be two separate days, but schedule them. And then what I want you to do is I want you to try to adhere to them and try to follow that schedule. And then I want you to note and write down when you don’t follow them.
And what we’re looking for is the why. Why didn’t you follow the schedule that you had set up for yourself? So, number one, you’re going to go ahead and choose two days this week and schedule them 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM or you could do as soon as you wake up. So, if you wake up like 6:00 AM till 10:00 PM, whatever time-frame you want to do, we want to schedule two days, doesn’t have to be right next to each other. Could be a Monday and a Thursday, could be a Wednesday and a Friday. Whatever you want to do. And then you want to try to follow it and then you want to make note of when you don’t follow it and just ask yourself why, why didn’t I follow that? That’s really interesting. Why didn’t I do that? And we’re just looking for reasons so that you can start figuring out for yourself why you are not getting the things that you want because of broken promises to yourself and how we can stop that from happening.
The thing is we, if we don’t know why it’s happening, then we can’t change it. But if we start to track and write down why we’re not doing something, we’re actually going to start seeing a pattern. And once we see a pattern, we’ll be able to change it. So, the goal here is to figure out how you can start not breaking your promises and the way that you have to even do that is have promises, number one, right? We have to schedule something that’s a promise that you have for yourself. And then note when you don’t adhere to those promises and just ask yourself why so we can start changing those things. So, you can start realizing, Oh, I didn’t maybe plan enough time or maybe I didn’t realize that my daughter or my son had an activity that day and I didn’t even have that time to work on that thing.
Or I didn’t ask my family if I could go ahead and take the time to work on this or I didn’t let my roommate know that I needed peace and quiet for an hour to work on a project. So, that’s what we want to do this week. We want to go ahead and schedule something. We want to go ahead and try to adhere to it. We want to note when we don’t and then we want to ask ourselves why, so that we can utilize those things that we learn to help us in the future stick to and not break our promises. Okay. If you guys can go to iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, and subscribe to the Strategy Corner, that would be great. Also, you can go to my website, intentionalsolutionscorp.com and sign up to get my weekly blog post, which also has a link to my latest podcast. Until next time, remember: through action and growth progression happens. Let’s take action together. Thank you and create an amazing week.
