What’s looming over your head today because you “don’t feel like” doing it? A networking obligation? Dry cleaning to pick-up? A conflict to face with a coworker or employee? Financials to reconcile?
We all know what it’s like to “not feel like it.” But when it affects our commitment to the job, our team, our family, our business, we’ve got to understand the impact it makes and reconnect with what got us to commit in the first place.
Commitment is, by definition, made up of the actions that support it. We stay faithful, we stay married. We do the work, we keep the job. We perform as a leader, we grow our leadership role (and, hopefully our team or our company). If we stop the actions that make our commitment alive, it dies, and what we’re left to deliver are empty promises. Yuck! This is where we kick in the emergency generators.
How to do that? Keep your word. Generate from your promise, not from your feelings. Consider that your feelings (i.e., “I don’t fee like it”) are irrelevant to your actual commitments. Think I’m harsh? Ask a marathoner if they “feel like” waking up and running 10 miles every morning. In the dark. In the rain. In the cold.
The Practice – Take inventory of where you’re disconnected and reconnect to your commitment.
Take inventory
Consider these things:
- Where did you make a promise that you are not keeping? What is the cost of that? To you? To others?
- When did you stop “feeling like it?” Where did you make your feelings matter more than your word or your commitment?
Reconnect
Think about what you care about—the marriage, the business-building, the company mission. Acknowledge that you broke your promise and then recommit, or revoke the promise and offer new terms of what you CAN do (always keeping your well-being front of mind).
- Ask someone to remind you why you committed. Set reminders yourself…like a weekly meeting, a regular date night with your partner, or alarms on your mobile phone.
- Enlist your team: own that you are disconnected and enlist their help in getting re-involved in your shared purpose. It’s amazing how much energy being inspired will drum up naturally.
Engage
- Consider where you are failing, and then SHOW UP right there. Just for the sake of showing up.
- If you still can’t do it, do it anyway. Integrity and energy get restored when you live into what you said you were going to do.
Think about your commitments and GENERATE your action from that place. Go do it! Say “so what” to your feelings and surprise yourself by creating something you have not created previously. After all, the bonus in completing what we were procrastinating far surpasses the malaise of procrastination. You have my word.
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