Why is it so easy to break commitments?

It only took 9 days into my commitment of publishing a post every day before I broke that commitment.

I had a full day with early morning meetings until a dinner meeting late night. I didn't intentionally break my commitment. It honestly slipped my mind until the next day when I realized I hadn't wrote anything.

Once I missed that first day of writing though, it was an integrity check for me that I struggle with. At that time, my blog posts weren't public yet, as I was publishing them behind the scenes. I could very easily have written two blog posts that next day, changed the date on one and then moved on as if nothing happened.

But that didn't feel good. So I didn't. Instead I stopped writing for 11 days until I finally decided that I wanted to start posting again, not try to play catchup and hid my break of commitment, and just roll with it.

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For me in this situation, it could be said that I wasn't fully committed. It could also be that I was trying to force myself into this new behavior. Or any other number of reasons or excuses why I didn't follow through.

At the end of the day, I didn't have the right structure in place to follow through with my commitment. I didn't have a plan for what to do when I didn't write first thing in the morning. And before you know it, the day was over.

Keeping to our commitments is a matter of integrity, something that I hold in the highest regard. In this matter, it's not a big deal. The world moves irregardless of my 11 day absence.

More importantly, I allowed my "keeping commitments muscle" to get a little weaker. Time to put in more work in the gym, build the habit of publishing every day and hold my commitments to a higher standard.

How do I measure my own personal growth?

I had a magical moment of reflection a few days ago. It was an awareness I am very grateful to have had and just as easily could have missed. And it got me thinking...

As a person who spends my fair share of time focused on my own personal growth and development and working with others to do the same, how come I had to randomly stumble upon this realization?

At an immersive event in June 2018, I wrote down a list of 5 areas that currently felt out of integrity for me. Believing integrity to be one of the most important qualities in a leader and correspondingly having it very high on my list of personal values, these 5 areas did not feel good to me.

And yet, after that weekend, I did not take any action on this new information. Instead, the list got lost in the shuffle and life happened.

Fast forward to last week. I was looking for something in my old notes when I came across this list. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

Without any awareness of this happening, I resolved all 5 areas that were out of integrity. It forced me to stop and consider all of the growth that occurred, often behind the scenes, over the last year. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

And so, I'm doing a little rapid prototyping on some ideas to help me better track my growth and development over time. This way I can be more intentional about these amazing moments of reflection and ideally have something to share with you all to do the same.