Is It Magic?
My husband and I are on a short vacation this week. Yesterday I got a text from my kids. They snapped this picture and sent it to me.
My book had arrived from the printer.
I stared at that picture for a while, amazed to see my dream in front of me in actual, physical form. Honestly, it felt a little miraculous.
But the truth is, my book exists not because of magic or miracles or manifesting. It exists because of my ability to exercise my persistence and keep showing up for myself. (Incidentally there are couple incredible chapters in the book on those very subjects.)
For each of us, real power begins to come into our lives when we keep the promises we make, especially to ourselves. As one of the fitness trainers I follow on Instagram recently posted, “Not a whole lot feels better than doing the things you told yourself you were gonna do…”
Looking at this picture of my book, I couldn’t agree more.
What I have learned in my life is that keeping our commitments to ourselves allows the possibilities of our life to open up because when we do all the little things we say we’re going to do, they start adding up to the big things.
Today there is a box of books sitting at my house with my name on them. Each book has 251 pages of edited manuscript and a gorgeous cover. Next week we are going to have a little launch party and by the end of next week this book will be in people’s hands. Other people will be reading and thinking about the words I have put on the page. There’s even going to be an audio version. I could not be more proud and excited.
But again, none of it happened by magic. Those printed, bound books are sitting in that box today because of the accumulation of lots of little commitments and promises that I made to myself and then kept.
Last fall I had an idea for a book that I thought could make a huge difference for people, no matter their career, no matter their goals, no matter where they were starting, no matter their level of qualification. But in order for me to turn that good idea into an actual book, I had to put actual words on an actual page. This may sound obvious, and perhaps even easy in theory, but I know from experience when you open up a Word document and there is a blank page staring back at you with all its intimidating emptiness, the task becomes a little more daunting.
It was so daunting at times, that my own brain tried to talk me out of the project as often as it could: Where do I start? Why am I doing this? This was a bad idea. I’ll work on it tomorrow. There’s plenty of time. I just need to gather more information first. This is impossible.
And honestly, when you think about creating an entire book out of nothing, my brain was probably right: it was impossible. But what I discovered was that I didn’t have to write an entire book at once—whole, perfect, and ready to print. I just had to put one word at a time on the page. I like to think of it as keeping one tiny, infinitesimal promise at a time.
The key was to simply make small, weekly writing goals and then always, always keep that commitment to myself. Even if I didn’t want to write. Even if I didn’t know what to write. Even if I didn’t know how to turn my thoughts into paragraphs. I kept the commitment to myself and just kept showing up in front of my computer.
I think this is the secret to anything you really want:
- Identify the goal.
- Break it down into steps.
- Put those steps on the calendar—tell yourself when and where you need to be in order to complete just one small step in the process.
- Keep every commitment you put on your calendar. In other words, show up for yourself.
- Then, persist. Simply keep on keeping on until it’s done.
Could it really be that easy?
Well, it could be that simple. But it is never easy.
Keeping our commitments to ourselves is difficult because we are the only one who knows about it. When we keep our commitments to ourselves, we are the only ones keeping (or not keeping) ourselves accountable for those promises. In some ways, it’s easier to show up for other people because we care what they think about us and we don’t want to let them down.
I think It’s time to care what you think about yourself. It’s time to value yourself and your dreams and your commitment to yourself as much as you value the opinion of others and fulfilling your obligation them. When you know you can count on yourself to do what you say you’re going to do, there is absolutely nothing you can’t accomplish.
The more commitments you keep to yourself, the better you will be able to trust yourself. This has a two-fold benefit: not only will you start accomplishing some pretty incredible things, your relationship with yourself and your feelings about yourself will improve with every promise you keep.
Remember that whatever you commit to, your brain will try to talk you out of it at some point. This does not mean you should ever listen to it. When the moment for action arrives on your calendar, your brain will try to tell you that you “have more important things to do,” that you can “let it slide this one time,” and that “it doesn’t really matter.” Don’t believe any of it. Especially when the things we have promised and committed to are hard or uncomfortable or scary, your brain will want things to be easy more than it will want you to reach your goals.
Those moments of decision, when we fight to keep our promises to ourselves, are the places where our achievements really occur and we become the people we really want to be.
I wrote this book to help you achieve massive success in your life. One of the ways to start is to keep your commitments to yourself (show up) and then keep doing it (persist) until you achieve what you want.
What about you? What have you been able to achieve by showing up and by persisting? Have you read Chapter 10 yet? It’s one of my favorites!