Philosophical Monday: The Tri-Weekly Habit – Promises, Promises

So I took care of a friend and fellow blogger recovering from orthognathic surgery from Thursday through Saturday, which made it really hard to keep up with my Tri-Weekly habit.

The writing for eighty minutes a day, that’s gotta stay, so I’m shaking off my less than stellar week and recommitting. But meditating — that’s a no-go. I tried it once last week and fell asleep. As I get older, I’ve begun to accept myself for who I am, and as it turns out, I’m just not that great at relaxing my mind. I’ve always been teased by friends and family about how quick I am to fall asleep at the most inappropriate times, but here’s the sitchy: I’m either engaged or I’m asleep. My mind is either on or off. I just don’t seem to have any other speed. I don’t zone out. My mind doesn’t stop. And apparently I’m no good at meditating.

I’m cool with that.

But I’ve found that if a habit isn’t working out for me in Week 1, it’s really important to take on another one by Week 2 or the entire 21-day challenge falls apart. I don’t know why goal habits don’t work without a lifestyle habit and vice versa, but the 21-day challenge seems to work better when you’re pursuing these two type of habits in conjunction.

Luckily, taking care of someone else this weekend gave me a lot of time to come up with a new lifestyle habit, and on Friday night I decided that the perfect shortened habit would be keeping my promises.

Now this sounds easy, but sadly, it’s really not. I didn’t realize how many things I said I would do that I just never got around to. “I’ll call you back.” “I’ll ask so-in-so about that.” “I’ll finish that by 2pm.” I wouldn’t call myself a liar, but I do tend to overestimate the amount of time I have and my level of organization.

So far I’ve broken 2 promises since promising to stop breaking promises, but I’ve also stopped and thought about it before I said I would do something without having a specific idea of when I could do it. Also, I’ve also busted my ass to keep the promises I did make. Consequentially, I’ve been feeling a lot better about myself since determining to do what I say and not saying unless I plan to do. So hopefully this will become one of those grand habits that I’ll be able to keep for life.

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flickr.com photo credit: Anywho