Every day, whether you are aware of it or not, you are doing something that sculpts both the way other people see you and the way you see yourself. Depending on how you handle it, that action can paint a picture of you as trustworthy and reliable or flaky, unreliable, or even dishonest.
What is that? You're making promises.
Until a recent conversation with Jason Womack (co-author of The Promise Doctrine), my definition of a promise was pretty narrow. When I tell someone "I promise," well, that's a promise. Pretty simple. But in Jason's view, any time you create an expectation, you're making a promise. And the sum total of your kept and broken promises has a big impact on your potential.
Your promises might actually involve the words "I promise," or they might be something like telling someone when they can expect something from you (e.g., a completed project),telling someone you'll send them some information, or even setting a time for a meeting. When you set up a meeting, implicit in that is your word that you are going to show up when you said you would. If you're late, you've broken your promise.
If you interact with people, you make promises. It goes with the territory.
Raising the stakes
There's something about the idea of treating every agreement as a promise that really struck me. I think part of it is that it raises the stakes on what you say you'll do. There's more of an emotional association (for me, anyway) with "I broke my promise" than with, "Oops, looks like I'm not going to get that to you when I said I would."
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of creating unnecessary guilt or self-flagellation. But the benefit to upping the ante by seeing your commitments as promises isn't about beating up on yourself. It's about recognizing that whether people feel like they can trust you, and whether you feel like you can trust yourself, plays a key role in the potential you have in life. And whether or not you do what you say is a big part of how that trust (or lack of it) gets shaped.
Managing your promises
Raising the level of emotional importance is just the start, though. If you do that and nothing else, your best-case scenario is that nothing changes. More likely though is that your inner critic will have more ways to club you over the head.
The real power of raising the stakes is that it makes each commitment you make more important. You start asking, "Is this a promise I'm really committed to keeping?" It can make you more conscious of what you say yes and no to. And that can help you be more realistic about what you take on and what you tell people you will do (how many people do you know who are chronically late to meetings because they try to shove four meetings in where there is only space for three?).
Not only that, it makes it harder for you to slack off on keeping one of those promises just because you don't feel like it, or it's inconvenient. It raises your personal stakes.
Creating self-trust
Keeping your promises isn't just about the internal perceptions you create. It also has an internal component. The more you keep your promises, both to others and yourself, the more you can trust that you will really do what you say. And the more you trust yourself, the greater your confidence. And the greater your confidence, the more potential you have to stretch yourself and achieve your dreams.
Whether you are an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, or employeed by a Fortune 500 company, success in your career depends not on just your ability to deliver, but on people's belief in your ability to deliver. And that belief is built by promises.
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Posted by: Keri | July 29, 2010 at 03:14 PM