Do you feel stretched thin, overwhelmed, or just plain cranky when you think of all that you have to do? It’s easy to make commitments to others, and find that list has spiraled out of control before you know it. 

What is the cost of making too many commitments?  It may not only compromise your self esteem, but even your belief in what you can accomplish.  Before you give up on achieving your goals, let’s do an audit of those commitments and see what really requires your personal attention and energy. 

In this episode we discuss: 

• How much time we give away to others 
• Ways that commitments add up without our awareness
• Reclaiming boundaries to resolve commitments 
• Why this extra time helps you conquer your goals

Resources for the episode: 

• Assess your own Wheel of Life (or “Life Pie”) to get a snapshot you your current wellbeing in 8 aspects of life  
• My conversation about “Closing Open Loops” with Robin Quinn Kheen, from the Thriving Life Summit archive  

Susi:

Welcome back. So happy to have you with me this week for another episode of Happified, and I am coming to you myself, to talk a little bit about cleaning up commitments. Don’t know if this is something that you have given any thought to, but it is something that I see a lot of in myself – I will raise my hand, but also in a lot of the people that I talk with, that I work with and who I share with in corporate teams.

So let’s take a look at how these commitments that we make can be weighing us down, might even be holding us back and reducing our self-confidence in our belief, in our ability to get stuff. 

Let’s go back to the top. Have you given any thought to this habit we have of making commitments, the things we say we are going to do for whom and by when, how about those deadlines that we impose on ourselves? Whether they are real deadlines, we have to turn out a project on a deadline for a client or help the kids get something done by a due date for school, or deliver the way that we want on projects and preparations for a holiday, or a birthday for a loved one.

How many commitments do you have floating around in your life and on your always growing to do list? 

This is something that when I became aware of it, I was really shocked. At first of all, how much energy I was putting out to commitments in a lot of different directions. And if you’ve ever had the opportunity to read Essentialism by Greg McKeown, it’s a terrific book that really helps illustrate the effect of that energy, when it is going in every different direction, as opposed to when we can channel our focus and energy to one thing. Terrific read, also fodder for great conversation. Perhaps that’s something we can have a talk about someday, if this is something that resonates with you. 

So once I started to take a look at not only the number of commitments that I had and the number of places those commitments were being made I also started to taking a look at at the time that those were taking up. I was invited to a number of different networking groups, different mastermind conversations. 

And when I started adding up the hours that I spent every week in those meetings, basically those commitments of connection. And I love being in community. If you know me, you might know it’s one of my passions to build and to support growing community because we are wired for connection.

It was about a part-time job. I was spending hours a week showing up at the convenience of other people and their schedules. And it was really limiting my ability to deliver on the projects that I was passionate about. So that was a real wake up call. That was a little time audit that I did near the end of last year.

And I’ll talk a little bit more as we continue on about as the process of cleaning up those commitments, it actually took me months to get some of those off of my calendar, but the weight that lifted was worth the time, the conversations, the commitment to cleaning those up. 

So, first of all, as I’m just beginning to open your eyes to this issue of commitments, let’s take a look.

How do you begin to audit this? Now one of the things that’s really helpful to have an eye on is this Wheel of Balance, if you’re familiar with that, I like to call it the Pie of Life. And I will share a link in the show notes to a document that I’ve created. It goes along with another presentation, but in that I have a great chart where you can take a look at the different aspects of your life.

Some of those are work, and your career, right? Whether that’s the daily or the arc of your total career. Personal relationships, personal physical health, personal growth and spiritual development. And those are just a couple of examples. And of course there are aspects that are important for different people. So you can always modify your Pie of Life and make sure that your personal values and goals are represented here.

When we know what those priorities are, when we recognize that life is not 90% work and 10% personal relationships, we have to find some way to balance the pie. Even if balance is a moving target, again, a conversation for another day, however you define balance. Perhaps harmony is a word that feels a little bit better for you.

And we’re looking at how these different pieces of pie fit together in our lives. How do your commitments support the balance that you want to create in this Pie of Life? How many of your commitments are to work? How many of your commitments are to social relationships. And does that leave you enough for your personal relationships for family and for your loved ones?

So as we start to take a look at the commitments we’ve made and where those commitments have been made to, we can start to be a little bit more objective. You might want to start a list. And in fact, as many of these exercises go, personally I tend to start a list and then leave it open and come back to it over time because things bubble up. 

We can take off the top layer, but then there’s always room underneath, an aha moment. So continue that list, leave it open for a couple of days even, and see what commitments you have made. 

Now here’s the problem with making a bunch of commitments and then not following through on them. We start to lose confidence in our ability to deliver.

When we say we’re going to do something and for whatever reason, it might be our own follow through. It might be because life moved the finish line, the target has changed. The players in the equation have changed. There’s a lot of reasons that other things don’t get completed, but when it happens consistently over time, we start to just take for – I don’t know that take for granted is the right word, but we just take it as a part of life that we might say, we’re going to do things and then not deliver. 

Now, when it matters, when we say we’re going to do things for ourselves, we’re going to commit to a deeper self care practice. We’re going to commit to a healthier style of eating. We’re gonna commit to healthier sleep habits. We have this evidence that we haven’t followed through before.

So when we struggle to make change, then we have this evidence that we have trouble following through on things. It’s important to recognize that these commitments, when not checked off the list, start to undermine our confidence in ourselves. And that’s where we really need to clean things up because one of the core issues that I see, recognizing and supporting personal boundaries and celebrating the things that we can do and create for ourselves, is we don’t believe that we can. 

Or we don’t believe that we’re worthy because we haven’t been able to follow through or deliver in the way that we think that we should before. 

So now that we’ve gotten a little bit objective and we realize the weight of these commitments that remain. And in fact, I would love to refer you to – I’ll share a link also in the show notes to a terrific conversation I had with Robin Quinn Kheen on her insights as to open loops and the weight that these can have on us and our success, very similar line of conversation. She calls them open loops. I like to take a look at how we can clear, clean up these commitments.

It’s important to recognize that now, a little bit of the heavy lifting on the front end is taking a look at what commitments it’s time to take off our list and how can we do that? How can we relieve ourselves of some of these? 

Maybe that’s delegating, maybe that’s asking for help. Maybe that’s going back to the source and saying, “I recognize this is something that I can’t do right now. And I need to let you know, this is beyond my capacity.” Maybe it’s looking at boundaries where sometimes these commitments are almost unspoken and come up without us recognizing we have been a part of this agreement. And this cleaning up can be difficult, right?

This is a place where I really have to come back to time and again, shoring up my boundaries, cleaning things up after I recognize that my boundaries have been crossed. One of the powerful insights I received from Brent Brown and her work in emotions is the identification of resentment as a form of envy.

If you feel that you resent a person or commitment that you have, take a look at where you might be a little bit envious, where you might be recognizing someone else has boundaries that they enforce and you have let yours be crossed in some way, or someone else has done the dirty work, but by not enforcing boundaries, you’ve overcommitted, you’re over-giving and you begin to resent the person or the commitment that is in front of you. 

As we start to clean these up, we can start to lighten the load. We start to make space for ourselves to recover because when we’re overcommitted and trying to show up and deliver for everyone and everything all the time, that’s a recipe for burnout. We don’t have any time to recover, to hit the reset button and to feel restored.

So as we clean up our commitments, then we start to bring back some of that time that we need for ourselves. Maybe that’s your self-care practice, and maybe self-care as you typically see it identified or marketed to you doesn’t resonate. But maybe self-care is, as I mentioned, a healthier sleep practice, finding a healthier way of eating that supports you and your unique body and needs.

These are things that take a little time and investigation to find out what exactly works. We can’t always be an afterthought, because as we’ve been talking about with boundaries, no one else is going to help enforce those for us. No one else is going to observe them and stake that claim for our personal wellbeing.

And if you have an issue with putting yourself first, with committing a little time and effort to digging into the self care practices that help you feel restored and nourished, think about the example that you are setting for the people near you, for your dear friends, for your children. If you’re raising a family and ending this generational celebration of stress, of overwork, of putting ourselves last, and the effects of that down line.

We don’t recognize while we’re powering through the work week. The compounding effects of stress on our physical health until it’s far too late, until sometimes decades later, when we have mounting health issues, chronic health challenges that we need to address. It’s always easier to work upstream, to hit the reset button, to feel more nourished, to feel more balanced so that we are not cleaning up the mess after the fact. We can start to eliminate those issues that arise from chronically stressful lives that we live in. 

So a couple of points of support here. I think it’s important to take a look at that Pie of Life. Identify where your personal priorities are, where you feel a little unsupported. I won’t say you’re not measuring up. Let’s just say where you’re feeling unsupported, and where you can look for ways to bring yourself some more support as you identify those commitments that you’ve made. 

And what really matters, those points where you really want to deliver. And those points where you might have felt pressured into making a commitment. You might have let unspoken agreements add up, and those commitments that you don’t close out, those commitments that you keep pushing down the line. 

Take a look at, is it possible that those are starting to hold you back and lose faith in your ability to get stuff done? Because I know you, you work hard, you do the things, you want to show up in the best possible way that you can.

And you enjoy sitting down every now and then to relax and enjoy the fruits of your labors. Maybe instead of ‘after the finish line’, sitting down, taking a look around and celebrating your success along the way is an important way to recognize how capable you are, how much you do, how good the work is that you turn out and how precious you are for the people around you.

As we celebrate those successes, and especially as we celebrate those completed commitments, we restore our faith in ourselves. We build back our confidence and we feel more capable as life serves up challenges down the line. 

I’d love to know what you think about this conversation about commitments. Is it something that resonates with you? Is it something that maybe you see in other people? Sometimes it’s easier to be objective and see outside before we see it in ourselves. Let this topic sit with you and then come back. Let me know, share a comment. If you’re catching the video, reach out through happifiedlife.com 

I always love to hear from you, and if you want to join the community over on Facebook, in my group Live with Less Stress, you’ll always be the first to know about live events, conversations, where we can get together and actually have a dialogue about what’s going on, how stress is showing up in your life and how you are reclaiming control, how you’re hitting, reset, how you’re cleaning up your commitments, ao you feel better and lighter and brighter as you keep moving towards your goals. 

Thanks for joining me today. So happy to have you with me, wishing you a wonderful day, and I’ll see you back here again real soon.