Seven Simple Promises that Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Organization
“No empowerment is so effective as self-empowerment… In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are always positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right [because it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure].”
– David Landes: “Culture Makes All the Difference” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (edited by Samuel P. Huntington and Lawrence E. Harrison)
One of the most overused and misused buzzwords in the English language is empowerment. The word implies that somebody other than you can give you power. If someone else can give you power, they can also take it away – and loaned empowerment is not real power. In truth, no one can empower you but you. The only genuine empowerment is self-empowerment. Once you empower yourself, though, nobody can take that power away. Empowerment is a state of mind – not part of a job description, a set of delegated tasks, or the latest management program brought in by the boss.
The Self-Empowerment Pledge includes seven simple promises that will change your life, if you are willing to invest one minute a day for a year. Read these seven promises, and then ask yourself these two questions:
If I were to take these promises to heart and act upon them, would I be better off in every way – personally, professionally, financially, and spiritually – in one year than where my current life trajectory is taking me?
If everyone where I work were to take these promises to heart and act upon them, would we do a better job of serving our customers and supporting each other, and would this be a better place to work?
If you’re being honest, the answer will be absolutely yes – how could it be anything else? The promises themselves are simple, but keeping them will require desire and determination. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all at once. Focus on one promise each day, so that you make all seven promises to yourself each week. Do this each day for one year – it will be the best daily one minute you ever invest in yourself.
Repeat each day’s promise to yourself at least four times – morning, afternoon, evening, and right before bed. Each reading will take you about 15 seconds – so four times a day is one minute. At first, you’ll hear a negative little voice in the back of your head telling you that you look ridiculous and you could be watching a TV commercial instead of wasting this minute. Ignore it – the inner critic is easily bored and will eventually go away. But now it’s going to get even tougher, at least temporarily. You’ll begin to experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which is trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. Cognitive dissonance is a painful emotional state, a form of mental illness.
When you’ve been promising yourself to be responsible, accountable, and determined, but then catch yourself procrastinating, making excuses, and giving up, you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance. At that point, one of two things must happen. Either you take the easy way out and stop making the promises, or you change your attitudes and behaviors in such a way as to start keeping the promises. When you do that, you will start to get better results. Now you’re over the hump, and repeating the promises becomes an easy and pleasurable habit, because it’s self-reinforcing. Let’s look at each of these seven life-changing promises.
Monday’s Promise: Responsibility
Monday’s promise says you will take complete responsibility for your life and refrain from blaming other people for your circumstances. Several years ago, I shared The Pledge with a woman who was seriously overweight. No diet plan ever worked, but she always had excuses – lousy parents, failed marriage, no money. I recently saw her for the first time in over a year. I hardly recognized her. She’d lost more than a hundred pounds and looked terrific. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she said, “I made a promise to myself – three of them, actually,” and then recited the promises for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday by heart.
She told me that as long as she was waiting for someone else to lose the wait for her – the diet, the plan, the pill, or the program – it never worked, but she always had someone to blame: “Oh, yeah, I tried that diet but it didn’t work.” As soon as she accepted that she had to be personally responsible, hold herself accountable, and be determined to do the work and make the changes, she began to change her thinking and her habits. And then she started losing the weight. Not only that, she began to apply the same principles to her personal finances and her job – she was getting herself out of debt and had been promoted. Best of all, she told me, was the positive impact that sharing The Self-Empowerment Pledge with family members was having on her home life.
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden told his players that no one is a loser until he blames someone else for the loss. Life-altering success only begins when you take complete and absolute responsibility for your circumstances and your outcomes. When you stop playing the “blame-and-complain game” and take responsibility for your life, you’re on the road to achieving your goals.
Tuesday’s Promise: Accountability
On Tuesday, you promise to hold yourself accountable – not just for meeting your obligations, but for fulfilling your true potential. I recently spoke with someone who has completed the manuscripts for not just one but three books. Based on the titles alone, I would buy all three of them. That’s not possible, however, because all three manuscripts are still sitting in the bottom of the desk drawer. Most writers, me included, have manuscripts hiding out like that. More often than not it’s because we’re being held back by our own self-imposed limitations or by concern for what others will think, not because what we’ve written doesn’t deserve to be published.
In his book The War of Art Steve Pressfield describes Resistance (he capitalizes the word to denote that it is a real and visceral presence) as the inner accumulation of fears and doubts that blocks us from expressing our creativity. “The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution,” he says, “the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” The key to conquering Resistance is internalizing and operationalizing Tuesday’s Promise. Pressfield says that Resistance is like cancer. It’s a fight to the death, and every time you let it beat you, a little part of your soul dies.
Wednesday’s Promise: Determination
On Wednesday you promise to bravely confront your fears. I worked with one man who wanted to quit an odious job to start his own business, but was paralyzed by fear. I had him carry a stone around in his back pocket to represent his fears. Every time he sat down, he was reminded of the emotional pain being caused by those fears. When he was ready, he dug a shallow grave and buried his rock. Today, he’s in the fourth year of running his business; he’s making more money than he did in his old job, and he’s a lot happier.
A successful insurance agent told me that his business was booming because he’d made the Determination Promise part of his life; he was making calls he was once afraid to make, asking for the sale when he did, and was going after bigger clients because he was asking for help opening doors and making connections.
Every great accomplishment was once the “impossible” dream of a dreamer who simply refused to quit when the going got tough. For the person starting a new business, it takes time to get the product and the marketing right, to get word-of-mouth working for you, and to find the right people for the team. There will be frustration and failure along the way – it’s all part of the game. The difference between winners and losers is that winners are determined to do what it takes to stay in the game, no matter what the score happens to be at halftime.
Thursday’s Promise: Contribution
With Thursday’s promise, you commit yourself to paying forward as well as to paying back. Richard Tripp was a homeless alcoholic living under a bridge in Kansas City. One day he looked up and asked God why He didn’t do something to help all the cold and hungry people under that bridge. What he heard back was, “Richard, that’s why you’re there.” Instead of assuming he was experiencing some sort of flashback, Richard took the words to heart. He founded a nonprofit organization called Care of Poor People (www.COPPINC.com) which today feeds and clothes thousands of people. He has also written two books.
As you internalize Thursday’s Promise, you will begin to appreciate the ancient wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who said you can never become happy and successful by trying to achieve happiness and success, but only by helping others to be happier and more successful. The first sentence of Rick Warren’s bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life is “It’s not about you.” One of the great paradoxes of life is that the more you devote yourself to service to others, the richer and more rewarding (and eventually rewarded) your life will be.
Friday’s Promise: Resilience
When I first started the business that is now Values Coach Inc. I put on a series of Never Fear, Never Quit conferences (named for a book I’d written by that title). We hired great speakers like Mark Victor Hansen, Laurie Beth Jones and Willie Jolley. These conferences were phenomenally successful in every regard except one: I lost my shirt financially. At the time, I was getting lots of advice to declare bankruptcy and start over. But one day I had lunch with a man who’d been through a similar experience during the early seventies. He told me he didn’t go bankrupt because he’d never again be able to speak with conviction about courage, integrity, and other values if he’d walked away from his own obligations. I’ll never forget what he told me that day: while he had less money now than he would have had he gone bankrupt, he liked who he was a lot better than the person he would have been. Driving home from that meeting, I decided that someday I wanted to be able to say the same thing. It’s taken a long time, and we’re still working on it, but today I can say that I’m a much stronger person for having bounced back instead of walking away.
In his book The Last Lecture (with Jeffrey Zaslow), Randy Pausch said that brick walls are not there to stop you, they are there to make you prove how much you want something. Internalizing Friday’s Promise will help you bounce back every time you fall and blast your way through every brick wall.
Saturday’s Promise: Perspective
On Saturday you make the “silver lining” promise of seeing the best in every situation. One of my favorite sayings is “Thank God Ahead of Time” (the title of a book by Father Michael Crosby). Bad things do happen to good people: when they happen to you, you can play the victim or you can say “thank you” and plumb the experience for its lessons. I’ve spent many evenings with support groups, and am always impressed with how people choose to find hidden blessings in apparent tragedy. If they can find blessings in cancer, addiction, or even the loss of a child, what can happen to you or me that we can’t immediately say “thank you – I don’t know why yet, but I’ll figure it out.”
Is it the best of times or is it the worst of times? The answer is yes. This month (and every month), thousands of Americans will lose their jobs. For those who slouch in front of the TV set waiting for a recall notice that’s not likely to ever again come, it will be the worst of times. But for those who take Saturday’s Promise to heart and start a new business, go back to school, or take new direction in life, losing that job will indeed be the best thing that ever happened to them.
Sunday’s Promise: Faith
On Sunday you promise yourself to be faithful. This isn’t a promise about religion – everyone, regardless of their religious belief or non-belief, needs faith: faith in oneself, faith in other people, faith in the future, and hopefully faith in things unseen.
On the wall of my office is a shadow box that’s home to a delicate handmade paper angel. A dear friend gave it to me several days before she died of cancer, at much too young an age. During her last year on earth, her faith and her gratitude for the blessings of her life radiated outward like sunshine pouring through a stained glass window. She was a constant inspiration to her family, members of support groups she stayed with to the end, and many others, including me. Ending your week with Sunday’s Promise will remind you to be thankful for all that you have been blessed with. And if you live in the America of today, you have been blessed indeed.
Launch yourself into your future
Think of a rocket ship that’s been launched toward the moon. If you alter its course by one tiny degree as it’s leaving earth, that rocket will miss the moon altogether and end up in the stars. In the same way, small changes made as a result of taking The Self-Empowerment Pledge, sustained over time, will have a huge impact on your future success and happiness. That’s my pledge to you, a pledge that’s backed up by having seen people just like you change their lives by making and keeping these seven simple promises.
You have my permission to download, reproduce, and share the seven posters featured in this article, each with one of the Promises of The Self-Empowerment Pledge. I hope that these reminders will help you empower yourself to take the actions needed to achieve your most important goals and become the person you were meant to be. Mount them on your bulletin board as shown in the illustration.
Pledge Poster bulletin board at Alverno Clinical Laboratories in Hammond, Indiana
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Joe Tye is America’s Values Coach. He is also the author of several books and audio programs on personal, career, and business success, and a popular motivational speaker. Visit www.JoeTye.com.