Keep Your Agreements

Jack Canfield's Success Principle #54

When I was growing up, men shook hands after making an agreement. Their word was their bond. Over time, contracts replaced hand shaking, because no one seemed to be able to keep their word.

You can imagine my surprise when we moved to the country last year and discovered that people still keep agreements based only on handshakes. I have made handshake deals with contractors to repair my house, with farmers to buy their beef cattle, and with a man buying a piece of property from us.

I believe that individuals living in small communities tend to keep their promises more readily than those living in large cities. It's easy to disappear into a crowd and never keep a commitment if someone can't find us. Living in a small town makes it awfully difficult to hide from someone we've made a promise to. Our reputations are more readily tarnished in a small community where everyone knows everybody else.

Why don't people keep their agreements?
People frequently make agreements, knowing that they'll break them before agreeing to them. I once overheard a bride saying to her father on the way down the aisle, "If it doesn't work out, I'll divorce him." Within six months, the couple had gone their separate ways.

Why do people break their commitments? They don't want to feel uncomfortable questioning the terms of an agreement. They don't want to be the focus of negative attention. They prefer to avoid confrontation of any kind. Survivors of abuse often break commitments, because they fear retribution for not going along with whatever others tell them to do.

Calculate the costs of breaking agreements.
When we don't keep our agreements, we pay both external and internal costs. Externally, we lose trust, respect, and credibility with others. This includes our family, our friends, our co-workers, and our customers. After a few incidents of breaking our promises, people stop trusting us. We lose authority with them. In time, our relationships deterioriate.

Internally, the costs of breaking promises are even higher. Each time we make an agreement with someone, our brain hears it and registers it as a commitment. When we don't follow through, we begin to distrust ourselves. We lose self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect. We lose faith in our ability to produce a result.

Follow Jack's tips for making and keeping agreements.
I believe the following suggestions may prove helpful to us in limiting the number of commitments we make and keeping the ones we agree to.

1) Make only agreements that you intend to keep.
We must be very careful about entering into agreements without taking time to think and pray about them. If we check in with our gut feelings, God will give us a sense about whether or not an agreement is right for us.

I meet many women who are in marriages with the wrong men, because they didn't stop to take the time and think about the obvious red flags in these men's actions. They marry abusers, knowing that the men are exhibiting symptoms of violent behavior. Women who were abused as children suffer from such low self-esteem that they place themselves in abusive marriages to unwittingly perpetuate further abuse.

Keeping a commitment with an abuser can make a woman's life miserable and is inadvisable. And breaking a vow to a violent man can be difficult, not to mention life-threatening.

As survivors of abuse, we must move slowly whenever we are asked to agree to something. Our fear of rejection frequently causes us to say yes to things that are not in our best interest. When our hearts tell us to say no, we need to be true to ourselves and decline such commitments.

2) Write down all the agreements you make.
In a calendar, journal, notebook, or computer program, we can record all of our agreements. By doing so, we remind ourselves to stick with them. In addition, we prevent ourselves from over-committing our time and setting ourselves up for failure.

3) Communicate any broken agreement at the first opportunity.
If a snowstorm prevents us from getting the car out of the drive, or our child is sick, or our computer crashes; we must notify others as soon as possible that we can't keep our commitments. By doing this, we demonstrate our respect for others' time. We can then reschedule and limit any potential damage.

4) Learn to say no more often.
We need to take plenty of time to think over our commitments before we make them. Jack writes the word no in yellow highlighter on all of his calendar pages to remind himself of what he may be giving up by saying yes to something new. I love this practice, because we often forget what the costs will be if we can't keep our promises.

Up the ante.
Jack claims that if we really want to make sure that we keep a commitment, we can set up a consequence that is far greater than the payoff. Martin Rutte, a Jew, promised to write a $1,000 check to the Ku Klux Klan if he failed to learn to dive by a certain date. Having to write that check to an organization he despised would have been far more painful than overcoming his fear of diving. In spite of the challenges, Martin learned to dive.

Follow Biblical principles to keep commitments.
I prefer to follow God's principles for keeping our promises. Jesus spoke to a crowd about keeping oaths in Matthew 5:33-37 (NIV), and I prefer it to Jack's advice for upping the ante: Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

Today's Challenge
Write out a list of all the commitments you have made. Put a checkmark in front of the ones you are keeping with ease. Highlight the ones that you need to re-negotiate. Take care of those today. Then write no with a highlighter on every day of your calendar to remind yourself to think twice about saying yes to new commitments you may not be able to keep.

Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul© and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com