How Strong Women Keep Promises To Themselves

Hey there, I'm your host, Dr. Zoe. Have you ever wondered how strong women keep promises to themselves? Well, stay tuned because we're talking all about that today. Hi there, I'm Dr. Zoe. I'm glad you're here. This is the place for developing your strength as a woman and helping you navigate difficult relationships in your life, including that sometimes difficult relationship with yourself. Being a strong woman is not about what other people can see, and it's not about how loud you are about it. It's a quiet knowing. This isn't therapy, But you may feel like you've been to therapy after one of my episodes. Here, we also explore the intersection of psychology and faith, all with the purpose of creating a new kind of strong. Welcome to Redefining Your Superwoman. But first on the agenda, my Superwoman win and my Superwoman fail, which I share every week, just about. My win is that I made an apple pie from scratch for my daughter's potluck at her homeschool co-op. A few years ago, I made a rule that I will never make food from scratch for a potluck that my family is not going to benefit from. It was a really busy season in my life, and I actually talked about it on the podcast, but I just decided that I'm only going to invest doing things like making food from scratch for my own family, not for anybody outside. Once again, trying to keep my priorities in line, but I broke that rule and it felt really good, and I didn't feel any pressure. This is kind of like my rule, if you guys are listening, about not doing the volunteer work. It's important to recognize that rules don't have to stay the same for all seasons of your life. And this is going to go in today with what we're talking about, about promises that we make to ourselves. And I'll talk about why they should be short-term, not long-term. And see, in this scenario, the spirit of the rule was way more important than the rule itself. The purpose of the rule for me was so that I was making sure to invest the most of myself in my family and not outside. And like I said before, it was in a different season of our lives and our family. We're in a different place now. Today, cooking was fun and I did it. So as you are making rules and promises for yourself, be careful not to just honor a rule and then lose the spirit of it. Because the promise I really made for myself was I put my family first, and that certainly wasn't broken. My fail, on the other hand, is that I crashed my newish car into my garage. I got this car less than a year, year ago, and it still feels new to me, especially because of COVID because I'm hardly ever driving it. And we had just gotten our garage door fixed a couple of days before I crashed into it. Reality is, I move fast, and most of the time moving fast works for me, but not always, especially when I'm operating a couple-ton vehicle around stationary objects. So long story short, I wasn't paying attention. The back hitch tailgate was up. I backed into the back of my garage. Definite fail. Cost me a lot of money, although, you know, most of it's covered by insurance. So it is what it is. But a reminder for myself that I do sometimes need to stop, pay attention to what's going on, take inventory before I move. So onto the topic, how strong women keep promises to themselves. What happens when we don't keep promises to ourselves? Now, if you paid attention to the intro to my podcast, I talk about how This podcast is about navigating the sometimes difficult relationship that you have with yourself, right? And so this today is really gonna be all about that because you have to recognize that you have a relationship with yourself. It's a dynamic, moving relationship, one that needs maintenance, one that needs to be paid attention to, one in which you need to affirm. Mm-hmm. And invest in. So I want that to be on the top of your mind as you listen to everything that I talk about today. So when you don't keep promises to yourself, you send a powerful message to yourself about your own trustworthiness. And unfortunately, it doesn't just pertain to that area of your life, right? When you don't trust somebody, it permeates into all areas of trust with them, and this disrupts your relationship with them. So when you don't keep promises to yourself, you're disrupting your relationship with yourself In short, when we don't keep promises to ourselves, we lose trust in ourselves. On the flip side, as you keep promises to yourself, you start to trust yourself. You develop self-integrity, and it radiates into all areas of your life and the world. Now, you might be thinking, but I've already messed up so many times, and I don't trust myself. How can I fix this? Is it even fixable? The answer, my dear friend, is yes, of course it's fixable. Overnight? Certainly not. But over time, absolutely. It starts with making some changes in how you relate to yourself, creating rules of engagement that respect your relationship with yourself because, of course, your self-relationship is important. So here's some tips to implement to help you gain back self-trust. Don't make a promise you can't keep. Now this is basic, right? Many of us are very good about being careful not to promise something to our children, our friends, or our colleagues that we can't follow through on. Because we know how important our reputation and trustworthiness is in the world, but we don't often think twice about disappointing ourselves, and we can rush into promises that we haven't created the infrastructure to even uphold. So before you begin to make a commitment to yourself, ask yourself, is this realistic? Can I really do or not do that thing and maintain it? And what's my plan to do that, to maintain it? If not, Don't commit yourself. Instead, find a smaller action towards that goal that you can commit to. You're still moving forward, so that's good. And remind yourself, I want to be trustworthy, and I'm committed to gaining my trust back. For instance, I like to write down all my self-commitments as a reminder, and they're time-sensitive. So I will rarely say, from now on. I might have said that years ago, but I've learned I do not say, from now on, to usually anybody, and especially not to myself. Instead, I say, I'm I'm choosing this for this period of time or for this period in my life. So I'll say, for the next 4 weeks, I will wake up every morning at 5 AM to write, or I will quit grains from my diet. And sometimes I've done things like, for this year, I will do this. And that's okay. I've also trained myself to be very disciplined, so I know that I can hold out a discipline for a year if I need to. Not everyone is at that point. You might need a little more training. But here is why. If I embark on a regimen and I don't like it or it isn't working for me, I know that I can quit in a month or, you know, however long the period is that I set. But I won't quit right now because I made a commitment and there's something gained from sticking that commitment out. But if I say from now on, then there's no option to quit. I've put myself in a kind of a lose-lose situation because if I keep doing this thing and it's not working for me, that's not good. But if I quit, then I've broken a promise to myself and I erode the trust that I have in myself. And you know what else I always do? Whenever I write these things down, I always add at the bottom of the page a written declaration to myself: I am doing this because I love myself. It's just a little affirmation just in case I forget when I'm in the midst of following through on my promise. Next, never use the word I hope when it comes to yourself. I've probably talked about this before, but I'm gonna keep on talking about it. You are the one and only entity in this world that you can control. You can hope that things will happen, you can hope that others will behave or react in a certain way, but you can't hope that you will do something. When you use that language, when you say something like, I hope I can stay on this diet, or I hope I won't overreact, you're making a direct statement to yourself that you don't trust yourself. So no more hoping in your own behavior, okay? Instead, replace those words with I choose. I choose. I choose to react calmly. I choose to stick to this eating plan for a week. I don't care if it's a day and you need to make that new choice over and over again. Take your power back and use the word I choose, not I hope. Now I want to make this super clear. I don't have this all down. I practice these practices that I'm talking to you about today, and I still fail. I won't say regularly, but I definitely fail from time to time. And there will be days when I will find myself yelling at my kids. There will be days when I will find myself putting a donut in my mouth when I intended not to. And that's the time when you need to own up to that, that I made that choice. Now, maybe it was an impulse, and maybe I need to work on putting a little more time in between an impulsive thought And my behavior. But as soon as you see yourself doing the thing that you've promised yourself you would not do, acknowledge it, explore it, look at what happened before, what drove you to do that, and work through it and let it go. Remind yourself it was a choice, may have been a mistake, and I'm gonna move on and continue to build trust. Because that's all you can do. The past is done. Right? Even if it was 5 minutes ago, it's done. You can't go back and change it. Of course you would if you could, but you can't. So what you also can't do is try to catapult yourself back there and beat yourself up. You just keep moving forward, and you will find that as you give yourself grace and as you acknowledge what you are doing in the moment, you will become more self-aware and you will become more trustworthy. Next, make choices, pacts, and promises to yourself that are not based on a moment of time or something external to yourself. Unless you decide it's only going to be for these 2 weeks. But what you don't want to do is do something like, oh, I need to lose weight for that dress, and use that dress as a motivating factor to lose the weight. Because what happens— like, let's say it's an event like a wedding— but what happens when the event is over and you've worn the dress? Your accountability just vanished. Your why just disappeared. And then you wonder why you regressed. Your why must be bigger if you want to maintain it beyond a specific event. If you don't, then like I said, make it clear that you're only doing this for this amount of time and you plan to gain weight again after that wedding, and that'll build trust too. Just be honest with yourself and make sure your accountability doesn't have an option to disappear in the midst of you actually doing the thing. And as long as you make it super clear to yourself, then you're good. When someone Is vague and you can't pin them down, you don't trust them either, right? So the same goes for yourself. Be clear with yourself about what you're doing and why, and you'll begin to build some trust. And remember, when someone else breaks a promise to you, it's not easy to just immediately trust them again. And it works the same with your own broken promises to yourself. You have to earn your trust back in baby steps with consistency over time. But you can and will do this. You've got to train yourself to change your habits. So you can't rely on your emotion or your urges. They are not reliable and they will not move you forward in the way that you want to. Your emotions, I mean, they're just mercurial. They kind of go up and go down and sometimes you feel like it, sometimes you don't. So they mean nothing and they will betray you every time when it comes to willpower to change a behavior. And that is why strong women don't ask themselves if they feel like it. It's an irrelevant question when you've already made a commitment to yourself. I trained in the New York Marathon by never asking myself the question when the alarm went off at 4 AM. Because reality is, there will be times when it's inconvenient, when you don't feel like it, when it doesn't feel good anymore, when you question why you're even doing this, and that's okay. This is a promise you made to yourself, and you can evaluate all that stuff later, but don't ask yourself in the moment of implementation whether you feel like it. And last, spend some time with yourself, dear friend. Ask yourself questions, get to know yourself, and you'll plan better and make wiser, more loving choices for yourself. This also builds trust. When people take care of us, we begin to trust them. And like I said at the top of this episode, this podcast is about navigating that sometimes difficult relationship with yourself. And it's important that you first acknowledge that you do have one. You have a relationship with yourself. You have an obligation to yourself. And your relationship takes maintenance, as do all of them. So this is you taking care of yourself. You're not fighting yourself when you're working on being trustworthy. You're working with yourself and against an unhealthy drive that is not at the core of who you are. You are not the enemy. You are your friend, and you can also be your own mother. And you can be a good mother to yourself by putting in healthy boundaries, by saying no when you need to. And nurturing yourself, especially when you fail. Because if you fall off the wagon, you need to be right down there encouraging yourself to jump back up again. It's time to learn to trust yourself again. You've got this, my friend. Thank you for listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman. New shows go up every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and text the word strong to 38470 to get my weekly encouragement. I look forward to connecting I'll be connecting with you amazing women on social media throughout the week. Have a super week! Have a super week!