Resilience Tips: Keeping Your Agreements - Bail or Sail?
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
Keeping All of Your Agreements
One of the foundations of vitality and personal resilience is the habit of keeping all your agreements.
First and foremost, this is a matter of having a clear set of personal values that includes some/all of the following: honesty, respect for others, compassion, empathy, accountability, great follow-through, dependability, reliability, and a personal commitment to making sure that you live by this credo:
No agreements broken or left behind.
Second, keeping all of your agreements is a matter of honoring the above personal values day-in and day-out. Life goes along best when you hold yourself to the highest degree of personal accountability imaginable.
When you keep all your agreements meticulously, everything in your life starts to flow smoothly. You become free to gain momentum and sail continuously through life with ease, grace, and purpose.
The Cost of Broken Agreements
Each time you break an agreement, you end up sapping some of your vital life energy. The same thing happens when you leave an agreement needlessly open and unresolved.
Whether or not you are consciously aware of the burden of all the broken agreements that you are carrying around, their combined weight invariably adds up and slows you down. Insidiously, this burden consumes your energy in the “background” of your life. In the extreme, the cost of too many broken agreements will also show up in the “foreground” of your life. Because broken agreements can needlessly drain away so much of your vital energy, your life can end up in disarray on just about every level.
Is Your Boat Leaking?
Imagine yourself to be merrily sailing along in a small sailboat. Each time you break an agreement, your boat magically springs a leak. The bigger the agreement you break, the bigger the leak. The same is true with agreements that you needlessly leave unresolved. Those incomplete agreements cause nasty little leaks, too.
When you have a lot of these failed (or failing) agreements, they will slowly but surely sink your boat. No matter how hard and how fast you bail water back out of your boat, eventually you will not be able to keep up with the incoming flow.
In the end, you will no longer be able to sail. You won’t even be able to bail productively. You will be left with just two choices: sink or swim. Depending on how far you are from shore and the temperature of the water around you, both of these choices can be most undesirable.
Plug the Leaks in Your Boat
As with just about everything in life, you can play an active role in determining which outcome befalls you. Would you rather bail or sail? Would you prefer to avoid the fate of having to choose between sinking or swimming?
If you prefer sailing instead of bailing, you need to make sure your boat is watertight at all times. No leaks, and therefore no tendency to sink even when your boat is just sitting still on its mooring.
When you are ready to make a commitment to sailing instead of bailing, all you have to do is start cleaning up all your broken agreements as fast as possible. That’s a surefire way to plug the leaks in your figurative boat.
Instead of wasting your energy bailing, simply start to keep all your agreements.
The Best Course to Steer
The best way to keep all your agreements is to be extremely careful about how you make them.
Only make agreements you fully intend to keep.
An obvious corollary of this guideline is: Don’t make agreements you don’t fully intend to keep.
If you are careful to follow these two simple guidelines, you will rarely find yourself carrying around a heavy load of broken agreements.
Here’s the trick: Before you make any agreement with yourself or anyone else, take time to make sure that you already know you are fully committed to keeping that agreement, and that, come hell or high water, you will keep it.
Once you take these two simple guidelines to heart, making and keeping all your agreements becomes a snap.
Call to Action
Pick one agreement of yours that you broke, or one that remains incomplete. Make a promise to yourself to repair it or complete it within a fixed period of time (ideally within 48 hours). Then follow through.
Once you plug that particular hole in your boat, take stock of how sailing becomes faster and more enjoyable.
Then pick another agreement that you broke or that remains incomplete, and clean that one up, too.
Keep doing this until there are no more leaks in your boat. Then stow your bailer carefully under a seat or in a compartment. You’ll likely not need it for a long while.
Finally, sail on, with purpose and pleasure, and relish not having to waste any more time bailing.
Relevant Quotations
“Make fair agreements and stick to them.” – Confucius, 551-479 BC
“Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep.” – Denis Waitley
“Those that are slowest in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.” Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Because your reality and your destiny are both largely shaped by the agreements you make, take care to make them wisely.” – Sandy Davis
For More Information
If you would like to know more about how you can profit from adhering to additional simple self-care structures that increase both your vitality and resilience, check out the instructional manuals available at: http://www.resilienceworks.com/instructional_manuals. They offer you additional concise information and precise instructions on how to methodically increase your own personal resilience.
You are welcome to re-publish the above article in its entirety either on a web site or in a blog, providing you do not change the article and you include the following attribution in its entirety:
Copyright © 2010 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related guides and services he offers, visit www.ResilienceWorks.com. To subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to Subscribe@ResilienceWorks.com. FYI, he’s “The Resilience Guy.”