Why Can't You Be Trusted?
At work, at home, on social media — you break your promises all the time
You have done it millions of times.
The first time was the worst; you felt like a bad person, letting down not only others but also yourself, your moral standards, and your self-respect.
You broke a promise. Someone was now sad or in trouble because of you.
Since then, you got used to it. But you still don’t like it. Life is somehow forcing you to be a bad person, and, at times, you hate yourself for this, perhaps even more than those you let down are hating you.
But there are some simple tricks to do better than that.
A complex mind in a complex world
You are complex and simple at the same time.
Your simple mind
Human beings are equipped with a very capable brain — it can solve complicated calculations, see connections and consequences, it can even develop intuition; a sense of things that it doesn’t understand itself but somehow seems correct.
But it cannot multitask.
It cannot maintain several threads of thought for a lengthy duration. One thread will take over, and the others will be left waiting, or dismissed altogether.
Even if you feel that you can have problems focusing, this is indeed what you are doing all the time.
Do you know this feeling of forgetting time when you are engaged in something interesting? Suddenly you realize that an hour has passed — or several hours. You had a really enjoyable time, perhaps with others who also had that. Isolated there is nothing wrong, but you suddenly realize that you had promised to be somewhere else along the way, meeting someone — or making a phone call — or doing some shopping.
Your complex mind
Human beings are social beings. Even the most isolated and hostile eremite is part of a larger society. We cannot escape that, and therefore we make good use of our social skills.
We smile and nod when others are talking to us, to show that we are on the same page. We even do that, at times, if we do not understand a word of what they are saying — because we are polite.
Being polite means doing things that we honestly wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for trying to make another person feel good.
We, as social beings, want to make other people feel good.
So we say yes to a lot of things just to be kind. We promise to drop by and have a coffee someday, and we promise to read that article or book that a friend has written and wants our comments on. We promise a lot of things, non-stop.
Your mind is being trapped in the single-tasking mode again and again, where you see the problem at hand and focus on this. Therefore, you promise something new every other moment, since every other moment is exactly a new moment, a new task.
And it all accumulates into a big pile of promises that your brain cannot easily make a combined plan of.
Happy days for the vendors of planning calendars and other tools to help you organize this mess!
The complex world and how you fit in
You are part of something bigger, as you are a social being, we stated that already. It means that you have friends, family, a job with colleagues and bosses, customers, study activities, a home with bills to pay, a stomach to fill with food that you need to buy and cook — and then on top, all those many promises you make all the time.
You are a piece of a multidimensional puzzle called society — a lot of things happen all the time — and a lot of promises are made. And you cannot see through this, as your mind really is single-tasking in one dimension only.
Internet, social media, telephones, emails, TV, radio … it all adds to the complexity; nothing of what we are filling our lives with today is simplifying anything.
Especially social media is ruining your ability to fulfil your promises, and it is breaking down your sense of morality because it is so easy to spend 10 seconds on clicking like or even writing a comment that you agree. What you may be doing this way is to indicate to someone that you want to participate in an activity — a webinar, a meeting, reading something, whatever it could be. And you can indicate this hundreds of times in a week and forget about all of it the moment after you have done it.
Social media presents you with too many social politeness obligations to handle properly.
Even your yoga class is making things worse, by itself being another obligation, having a time schedule and some communication needs, payments, learning needs, etc., connected to it — causing you to promise things all the time.
There is no escape, or so it looks. The world is very complex and very demanding.
There is an escape — a simple trick
If you think carefully about it, you really should not promise things all the time if you have no idea how to fulfil the promise.
A simple deduction
Yes, at the moment you see no problems in fulfilling a promise to meet with someone “next week” or “sometime soon” because it should be easy to arrange. After all, you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — over a few weeks it definitely should be possible to spend 2 of those many hours on this particular purpose.
But this deduction is wrong:
Firstly, you do not have that many hours. Some of them are not available at all because you sleep etc. and spend some time on that.
Secondly, those hours have already been taken by other promises that you just don’t remember in this new moment of being focused and polite.
Thirdly, there will be other things coming up, more promises. You need to make room for that. Otherwise, you will certainly break some of the promises.
The logical deduction
Looking at why promises are being broken, it is not too difficult to understand what to do to avoid that — start with implementing these five principles in your way of dealing with promises and planning:
Instead of promising things all the time to do in the future, try to fix the situation on the spot — often you can help people with whatever they need, such as reading a text, within the next few minutes. And then make sure that you finish this without a half promise to continue later. Make sure to say something like — “So, that was it!” — for yourself and the other party to clearly be understood as a full stop to that thread of activity.
Say no to unreasonable demands. This often happens at work but can happen in your private life as well. You may say no in a diplomatic way but do say no if the demand is ruining your other plans or steals your sleeping time. Make sure that you do not promise to give what you do not have. At work, your boss may be a psychopath who will then fire you — if that happens, be happy about it, and move on in life to something better.
When you do need to promise anything for the future, make sure to take it seriously. Make sure that the other party understands that it is serious — you must check immediately when you can do it, how much time you can spend on it, and clarify what can be expected from you during that planned time. Don’t leave the situation with an open end like “I will see how I can plan this; I will get back to you” — it is the direct road to disaster.
Leave room in the plan for future promises. Never fill your plan completely. You may get ill, there may be something urgent coming up, or something in the plan may require extra time. Make sure that this can happen without too many needs for adjustment, and without too many needs to excuse that you cannot fulfil your promise.
Leave room in your planning for doing nothing. That room may be filled with short notice by something urgent that comes up, or you can simply enjoy having a corner of the time-space continuum for yourself — where you can develop new thoughts, get inspiration from a good book, or whatever you decide at that moment. Don’t get tempted to plan with this time, promise yourself to keep it open and make sure to keep that promise. It doesn’t have to be the same time each day or each week, you decide what will work for you, but you do need some time.
This way, you should become better at keeping your promises. You will make fewer of them, but magically keep more than you did before.
In a sense, you will be breaking your promises before they are made, and people do most often understand that — after a while. In the situation where you say no, it can be tough, but think about how much better it is for everybody when you only make promises that you can keep.
And people will start seeing you as someone they can rely on, someone with integrity. And there is a good chance that even those who used to be demanding too much will start behaving better because they now see you as a person who knows how to make life work — and they cannot compete with that.
I try to do this, but sometimes life takes such unexpected turns. For example, I promised to read Phil's book by now 🙊, and I'm on it, but I didn't know my health was going to be such a mess lately. I still haven't got a handle on how to plan for the unexpected.