Keeping your word….TO YOURSELF!

“Mommy, I am going to take a bath and go to bed now….”

“Ok….”

Although it is only 7:35 p.m., I know that for her to say this (at this time) means that she recognizes that she is dead beat and needs rest, since she is usually up working until too late. 

It is now more than one hour later, and I hear the silence of her working hard.  Yes… I said it… the silence of her hard work is different than that of her deep slumber.  Needless to say, she did not take a shower nor is she asleep.  She is working, I am sure of it!

It is just as I thought.  She is in her room fine-tuning her School Based Assessment (SBA), because for as long as it is not submitted is as many things that she will find that needs to be fixed, revamped, adjusted, etc.  This offspring of mine will NOT stop until she is finished.

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While I admire her work ethic, and I say this to her all the time, I find myself asking the question, why is it so difficult for us to keep our word/promise to ourselves, but find it easier to keep our word to others.  We keep our word sometimes even to a perfect stranger – sometimes to our own detriment and inconvenience. 

Human beings are interesting.

Many of us have included on our list of deal-breakers in friendships, romantic interactions and even those with family members as “people who do not keep their word”.  In other words, we will declare publicly that we do not like someone who does not keep their word.  Let me hasten to say that I am not suggesting that keeping our word to others is not important.  Hear me out, please.

I argue that as important as it is to keep our word to others, it is MORE important, in my estimation, to keep our word TO OURSELVES.  I am not talking about keeping our word about buying ourselves that one gallon of ice-cream and eating it in a day (touché) or drinking that big bottle of wine with that huge chocolate in one go or promising to finish an entire season of our favourite TV series or treating ourselves to a meal that is calorie-riddled, when we get paid.  After all, these are all promises that we have no problems keeping for very obvious and temporary gratification reasons….

….still, no judgements here.

I speak, categorically, about keeping our word in relation to all other things that are good for us – mind, body and soul; for example, rest and recreation, worshipping more, being positive, cutting toxic energy, being kinder to ourselves (and others), getting regular check-ups, setting high standards for ourselves and KEEPING those standards, the promise to exercise, being deliberate about our mental health, and the list can go on for days.

Why are we afraid of doing those things that we have promised ourselves that we would do to help us to be the better version of ourselves?

It is time for us to take this deliberate mandatea step further.  We must be honourable to ourselves before we can even think about being honourable to someone else.  I find it sad that we would operate above and beyond for others and not give ourselves the same commitment and love. 

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It is now three hours later, and the offspring is finally showered and off to bed.  However, my duty as her mother is to gently remind her about being deliberate about rest and keeping her word to herself.  The fact that she told me earlier that she was going to shower and rest is her “need-for-rest indicator”, so I will remind her about that.  This way, I am helping her to keep her word – to herself.

In the meantime, who is going to remind me to keep my word to me to get up and exercise tomorrow….?  LOL.  No one should have to do that…. 

….I need to keep my word to myself!

On a serious note, we all need to be held accountable when we do not honour ourselves.   If we are not at the point where we can keep ourselves accountable, we are encouraged to find someone out of our core group, who will be willing to help us do that, and do it!

Let us endeavour to love ourselves a little bit more each day by keeping our word to ourselves.

Blessings!