Truth bomb: Momentum isn’t a straight line. 📈 If you’re struggling to find the motivation you had last month, please know you aren’t alone. We love to write our goals in concrete, but we have to keep the plan in the sand. Why? Because life happens! 🌪️ If 30-minute workouts feel like too much right now, we pivot. We find a new way to win. Let’s stop overcomplicating it and start winning again, okay?
🎙️ A Note from Heidi’s Lane
Go deeper into the mindset of Self-Integrity and Resilience. Listen as I share how to navigate life’s “sand” while staying locked on your concrete goals.
When Life Gets In the Way of Your Goals
Life has its ebbs and flows, so please remember that your goals are written in concrete, but your plan must be written in sand, something I think we—me included—often forget.
It’s completely, 10000% okay—and actually very normal—if you were on a roll doing 30 minute workouts 5x/week and now it seems like it’s just not going to happen. The only constant in life is change, and when life changes—and it WILL change, your plan often needs to change too. Being flexible about your plan can get you WINNING again, and again, and again.
Throughout my many, many years of helping people transform their lives, I’ve discovered repeatedly that THE key to achieving any goal is integrity: Doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it—especially when no one is watching.
When you experience true, personal integrity with the most important person in the world (YOU!), you begin to believe in yourself, love who you are, and see the limitless potential that exists within, a potential that includes achieving every single goal that’s important to you.
The Psychology of Self-Trust: How Power Promises Work
Confidence is a muscle that grows every time you keep a promise to yourself. Dive deeper into my philosophy on self-integrity:
Your personal integrity matters more than anything. And yes, I mean anything. How do you build personal integrity? It’s actually super simple. It’s all about making and keeping what I like to call a Power Promise to yourself, and this Power Promise is SO insanely simple that you can keep it every single time, no matter what. One super simple Power Promise—like brushing your teeth or making your bed every day—can increase your personal integrity, self-love, and success in life. Don’t believe me? A whole book has been written about how simply making your bed every day can actually change your life. Grab your copy here.
Here’s the deal: Every Power Promise made and kept (those baby steps one after the other) is an added brick to your foundation of integrity. And self-integrity built through keeping Power Promises is more important than making grand, unrealistic long-term gestures towards your goals. Integrity beats performance every. single. time.
Micro-Commitment Success: The Danger of “Big Promises”
When we have a goal that’s super important to us, it’s tempting to make big promises to ourselves, thinking they’ll help us achieve our goal faster. Unfortunately, this rarely works. Why? Like I said, life changes, and if your promise is too big, it’s going to be so much harder to keep that promise consistently. Anytime you break a promise to yourself, you’re eroding that foundation of integrity, including your self-love and any success you’ve experienced. And remember, it’s totally okay to tweak and revise your promises—and even your goals—as you go! In fact, when you give yourself the grace to make changes as needed, you’re adding to your integrity foundation too. The overarching goal is to ALWAYS aim for progress over perfection, because perfection is 100% unattainable.
Focusing on creating and keeping those small Power Promises can lead to faster success as well, because those small promises, kept time after time, can add up to success you’ve never imagined. After all, doing something—even the smallest thing—is ALWAYS better than doing nothing, which can totally happen when our promises are too big.
Ready to Set Your First Power Promise?
If you’re struggling to choose a “small promise” to start with today, check out these guides:
One caution: It can be tempting to want to make too many simple Power Promises so you can achieve your goal faster, which can be just as problematic as trying to do a few big promises. Here’s what the experts have discovered:
- Take on one new Power Promise = 80% chance for success
- Take on two new Power Promises = 35% chance for success
- Take on 3+ new Power Promises = 5% chance for success
Yikes, right?!?! And I know, I know. It can be SO hard to only take on one new thing at a time when you have so many goals you want to accomplish! If you just can’t do one new Power Promise, then make sure that any new Power Promises fit into different buckets in your life so they don’t compete with each other, buckets like physical, social, mental, occupational, emotional, and so on.
Every time you keep your Power Promise, which creates life-long habits that can serve you long-term, you’ll find the magic space that tips the scale towards achieving your goal. I don’t know about you, but that’s the space I want to stay in!
The C.R.R. Framework: Confess, Reassess, Recommit
When you’re trying to achieve ANY goal, you WILL have times when your personal integrity takes a hit. And that’s a promise. But, these small—or even not so small—hiccups on your path to your goals do not say anything about you personally. They don’t make you a failure, or less than, or any of those negative voices you’ll hear in your head when you break a Power Promise to yourself. It’s just data…pure and simple. And when you have data, you can make the changes you need to make to get you back on that path to success again! So, if you’re ever caught breaking those Power Promises to yourself, I’m going to share something that I’ve shared with clients for YEARS:
The CRR Process is the ability to be able to recognize those moments as they happen—those moments when keeping a Power Promise isn’t going so well— and have real, honest conversations with yourself to determine WHY your integrity took a hit and WHAT you can do next time to prevent it from happening that will make ALL the difference. I promise you!
Explore more on the Mindset of Flexibility:
You Are Worth Showing Up For
Reclaiming your integrity is a sacred act of self-respect, and self-respect is knowing your value and refusing to settle for less than you deserve—especially from yourself. Every Power Promise you keep, day after day, shows YOU that you are worth showing up for, worthy of that sacred self-respect, and worthy of every single achievement you will earn. And this integrity, belief in yourself, and self-respect will grow stronger and stronger. It is powerful. And it’s what I want for YOU.
Now…it’s your turn:
In the next couple of days, create a super small Power Promise and share it in the comments. For deeper support, join my Get Fit Challenge.
xo,
Related reading:
Life Lessons Learned | Developing Integrity, Learning to Love Yourself, and Setting Boundaries
Build a Life You Love: Set Goals + Achieve Them
Transformation 101: What Happens When You Fall in Love with Yourself
Self-Love: Mantras to Help You Fall in Love with Yourself
Our 12 Month Transformation: Hydration!