Today Harv solves the problem of failure to commit and the fear of commitment by sharing the real reason behind why some people can’t commit, shouldn’t commit, who’s fault it really is and what to do to cultivate habits that support progress.
Ready to experiment?
“I’ve broken so many commitments and promises to myself in regards to my personal, physical and financial growth.
What is the best course of action to get back in integrity with myself and the universe?”
Wow, thank you for a great question that so many people can relate to!
So… “What’s the best course of action to get back in integrity with myself and the universe?” you ask?
Number one…
Even though you’ve broken a lot of commitments to yourself, or maybe every commitment to yourself, at some point in time beating yourself up for that is not helping.
And that point and time is NOW.
You see, I’m going to say something right now that’s very advanced and here it is…
Your ‘ego self’, your ‘conditioned self’, your ‘false self’ actually does not want you to be HAPPY.
I’m sorry to tell you that.
‘It’ doesn’t want you to be happy, that’s not its directive… ‘it’ wants you to be in fear.
WHY?
So ‘it’ can control you, it’s as simple as that.
If ‘it’ controls you, then you’ll be okay, according to ‘it’.
Once ‘it’ controls you, and once you do everything ‘it’ says, then you’ll be okay and you’ll stay alive… ‘it’ doesn’t want to take any chances…
“Just do what I say and you’ll stay alive.”... that’s all ‘it’s thinking about, okay?
And the way ‘it’ does that is by controlling you.
Now if you’re HAPPY, then ‘it’ isn’t in control, and you don’t ‘need’ ‘it’, so why would you listen to ‘it’, right?
See, ‘it’ controls you by continuously keeping you off balance, as if something is basically ‘wrong’ with you.
So your ‘ego mind’, your ‘conditioned self’ for the most part, your ‘false self’ wants you to believe there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, to keep you where you are…
“There’s just something ‘wrong’ with you!”... and if there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, you have to do something about it, right?
Which means you have to get into your logic and reason and discuss it and delve into the negativity of ‘what’s wrong with you’, and ‘why it’s wrong with you’ and ‘where this SH!T came from’...
And the ‘ego mind’ loves that discussion OMG!
‘It’ could be entertained, for some people for days and for some people for weeks but for some people, their whole life!
The ‘ego mind’ is entertained by this BS back and forth of ‘what’s wrong with you’ okay.
But KNOW this… there’s NOTHING ‘wrong’ with YOU!
And the ONLY thing that’s ‘wrong’ with you is ‘your ego’ telling you there’s something ‘wrong’ with you.
That’s what’s ‘wrong’... the ‘ego voice’ is ‘wrong’.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with YOU, YOUR TRUE SELF.
There’s a ‘learned self’, an ‘ego self’, a ‘conditioned self’, a ‘lower self’, a ‘false self’ that keeps telling you there’s something ‘wrong’ with you.
That’s the ‘wrong’... ‘the voice’ is the ‘wrong’ thing and ‘the voice’ is the problem!
Write this down…
“I AM NOT THE PROBLEM!
‘THE VOICE’ IS THE PROBLEM!”
And don’t go… “MY voice is the problem…”, NO!
It’s not YOUR VOICE that’s the problem, it is ‘a voice’ that you hear inside of you but it’s NOT your voice!
So the first thing is… There’s NO problem with YOU.
There’s a problem with that same frickin’ Mindfrick that annoys you about everything else including… “There’s something ‘wrong’ with you…”!
Okay, so let’s get that straight.
Do you GET this?
There’s nothing wrong with you… the only issue is the ‘the voice’.
And there’s no difference between ‘that voice’ that tells you… “You’re a cr@ppy golfer!”, or ‘the voice’ that tells you… “You always sleep in too late!” and ‘the voice’ that tells you… “You can’t do this or that right!”...
It’s the ‘frickin’ voice’... that’s the only problem!
Now HOW do you GET RID of ‘the voice’?
Remember… “Thank you for sharing.”!
You have to come back to the PRESENT.
And very often, you’ll use a new TRIGGER, a positive ANCHOR to come back to the present.
So, there’s ‘a voice’ that tells you… “I don’t keep my commitments.”.
“Okay well, you don’t.
What does that mean exactly?”
“Well, I make commitments and then I don’t keep them.”
“If you keep doing that all the time, that’s a clue.
What’s the clue?
The clue is there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, right? That you’re ‘bad’ at commitments, right?”
NO!
The CLUE is there’s a trick that’s being played on you!
A trick by ‘your ego’, that ‘sneaky ego’, that is being played on your HIGHER SELF, the REAL YOU.
That trick that tells you that…
“What I’m going to do is I’m going to make a commitment, even though I know I’m not going to keep it… But THIS TIME I will!”
And your ‘ego mind’ is laughing, going…
”UGH! You’re not going to keep this commitment…
And you know what I’m going to do to keep you out of balance?
I’m going to suggest that you make a commitment here.
You ‘need’ to make a commitment, Bob!
You ‘need’ to commit to waking up at 07h00 am.
Now you haven’t done that in your life except for once and then you broke that the next day…
But things are going to change!
And we’re going to commit to this!”
Now how many times have you made commitments?
If you’ve made commitments ten times and you haven’t kept them, it’s not a problem with YOU.
It’s the problem with the ONE OF YOU who ‘wants’ to make the commitment.
WHY make it?
WHY would you make a commitment you know you’re not going to keep?
Why?
So you can beat yourself up!
It’s not the real you that has a fear of commitment.
You see, the ‘ego voice’ is giving you rationale to beat yourself up.
In other words, the goal is to beat yourself… the goal is negativity about yourself.
The goal is to downplay yourself, downgrade yourself, degrade yourself, dis’ yourself…
That’s the goal of the mind!
Now, ‘it’ can’t do that for no reason.
So ‘it’ will create a strategy that ‘it’ knows you’re going to EFF up…
“So let’s do this and have you feel cr@ppy about it again..
Yay! We won again!”
WOW!
Can you see the whole vicious circle that’s going on?
“So why did you make a commitment in the first place?”
“Well, because I know I have to in order to get something done.”
“Well why make it if you know you’re not going to keep it?”
“Uh, I don’t know why. I guess it’s because I’m supposed to…”
Are you starting to understand why you believe you have a fear of commitment?
Yeah… what your ‘ego mind’ is doing is making certain you’ve got a nice rationale for beating yourself up.
“Hey Harv, why go out and golf again?
You know, every single time you go out you never feel good about yourself, you get to beat yourself up.
Why do that?”
And you know what, every single day it tells me the same thing…
“Today is going to be different.
Today, I’m going to hit it good.”
Today, what happens?
I don’t…
What do I do?
I beat myself up.
So what’s the ANSWER?
Number one… I can stop golfing.
Number two… I can stop making commitments.
OR I can say…
“You know what, I’m not going to play the game anymore, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
When I golf, I’m going to golf socially.
I’m going to golf to be with my kids, or I’m going to golf to be with my wife, or I’m going to golf to be with my friends.
And my GOAL is only to see how much fun I can have.
And I’m going to NOT equate FUN with ‘good’.
I’m going to go for a good time.
In fact, every time the ball doesn’t look good, I’m going to laugh okay.”
Now if I can practice this, and by the way I’ve done this, until my ‘ego mind’ gets back involved of course, I play a different game!
Instead of… “How ‘good’ am I at golf?” it’s… “How social am I? How good a time can I have? How much can I enjoy the trees and the mountains and the grass and the beauty?”.
And you know what?
I’ve done this several times, I refuse to feed the fear of commitment and every time it’s come out where I had a GREAT TIME.
Another example is when my son and I were going to football games and our team wasn’t doing so great.
So we decided with the next game we were going to that, instead of cheering only for our team, we’re going to cheer for any good play regardless of which team’s doing well.
It simply didn’t matter where the good plays came from because we were happy for any good play.
Guess what… we had the best time!
We had a great time, we were laughing, we were feeling good… it was amazing.
WHY?
Because we weren’t attached to the outcome.
We changed the game.
The game wasn’t the same… the game was to have a good time, that was it.
And we could do that and enjoy every good play and that was it.
So what about you?
Do you have to change the game you’re playing with yourself, and the tricks that you’re playing on yourself?
Maybe you do.
Maybe, instead of a commitment for you, if you can never keep your commitments, maybe it’s…
“Let’s do an experiment.
Let’s do an experiment and try it out for a day and see how I feel about it okay?"
So… “I’m going to wake up at 07h00 am… And not every single day…
But my INTENTION is to get up at 07h00 am tomorrow morning as an experiment, a research project to see if..
A, I can do it and…
B, if I don’t do it, what’s the process of how I don’t do it.”
In other words, it’s not WHAT you do, it’s HOW you do it.
My Zen Teacher talks about it all the time…
“Don’t talk about WHAT you do, watch HOW you do what you do.”
Okay, so my intention is to get up at 07h00 am tomorrow… that’s my intention alright?
Now, I’m not making a commitment, I’m just getting up at 07h00 am tomorrow.
I’m going to set my alarm for 07h00 am, period, over and out.
Now 07h00 am comes, my alarm goes off, I close my alarm, I keep closing it until 08h00 am when it’s my normal time to get up.
Okay... what happened during this experiment?
Was there any fear of commitment?
Am I beating myself up for not keeping my commitment?
No I’m not… But why?
Because I didn’t make any commitments.
I did have an intention though.
So now I’m looking at this thing and going… “How did I create the reality that I woke up at 08h00 instead of 07h00?”
Well let’s take a look…
Number one, I kept turning the alarm off.
Hmmm, maybe that’s an answer… it’s habitual.
Number two, I seem to require about 8 hours of sleep and I went to sleep at 00h30 at night and that gave me 7.5 hours.
Well, that could be a problem I guess...
Alright, let’s do another experiment tonight, either one.
Let’s attempt to get to bed by 23h00, I’ll set my alarm for 07h00 and see what happens.
So I go to bed at 22h45.
At 23h00 I feel wide awake, and I’m watching TV.
It’s 23h30, then it’s 00h00, and now it’s 00h15 and I finally go to bed.
Alarm clock goes off… ‘BAM’, hit the snooze… ‘BAM’, hit the snooze.
What happened?
What happened was I didn’t go to sleep at 23h00 because I wasn’t tired.
WHY?
Because I was watching TV.
Okay, let’s look at the process here…
Alright, so here’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to put my alarm clock on the other side of the room.
Let’s try that.
So tonight, my intention is to go to bed at 23h00, get up at 07h00, my alarm clock’s going to be on the other side of the room.
And BOOM! What happens?
My alarm clock goes off at 07h00… I have to get up, I get out of bed.
It’s a little cold and I’d love to get back into bed but I go… “You know what, I’m already up, I have to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth…”
WOW, that worked pretty good!
So it seems that there’s a combination of going to bed a bit earlier that’s habitual, and putting my alarm clock across the room until I don’t keep on hitting snooze, that worked for me.
Let’s try it again tonight and see if we can do it again.
So there’s no commitments.
We’re going to DO what WORKS.
We’re going to GIVE ourselves a WIN.
Do you understand?
And that’s going to take the ‘ego’ out of it.
We’re going to change the game.
Now, how many of you understand what I’m talking about?
I’m talking about a life of experience and adventure in watching the pot boil, instead of just knowing that the pot boils.
You’ve got to see what’s going on.
My Zen Teacher gives a great example in one of her books where she explains that, every morning, you hear the kettle whistling.
And you wake up to the kettle whistling and you go…
“What’s going on? Why’s the kettle whistling? I don’t remember putting the pot on heat. What’s happening? Why’s this going on? Why when I wake up every morning, the pot’s boiling?”
So, you can keep on asking yourself this question for a thousand years, or you can go to sleep during the day, stay up all night and watch the frickin’ pot!
And notice that the burner was set on a program that you didn’t know about, or forgot all about years ago…
And it’s on automatic programming, that’s why the heat’s going on at 03h00 in the morning and waking you up.
"Wow… I didn’t realize that.
After three years of the pot whistling I finally now got to see HOW I DID THIS TO MYSELF."
And that’s the key.
HOW am I doing this to myself?
WHY am I feeling ‘bad’?
Why do I have this fear of commitment?
Is it the commitments?
Well don’t make commitments then!
You’d like to get back in INTEGRITY with yourself and the universe?
Here’s what you can do…
Get rid of the idea that you have a fear of commitment.
Number one… FORGIVE yourself because you didn’t know.
You didn’t know that the ‘ego mind’ was playing a trick on you, and playing a trick in ‘its’ way of making you feel ‘bad’ about yourself.
And ‘it’ keeps on playing that same stupid game with you… that fear of commitment game…
“I’m going to make you commit and make you think you’re doing the ‘right’ thing by committing, just so you don’t commit so you can feel like SH!T and I can control you.”
Alright?!
You don’t have to do what makes you feel ‘bad’ remember.
And you don’t have to experience a fear of commitment once you realize you don’t have to commit.
That’s number one… forgive yourself.
Number two… Make whatever you’re doing EASY… simple.
Forget about the commitment.
If you can’t keep to a commitment, don’t keep making stupid commitments that don’t work for you!
Have an INTENTION… have an EXPERIMENT.
If you’d like something to start changing, start changing your HABIT okay.
Get out of the habit where you live in fear of commitment and replace that habit with something intentional.
But one at a time, very very small ‘commitment’.
So if I’d like to wake up earlier, instead of waking up from 08h00 to 07h00, you know what I’ll do?
Tomorrow I’m going to do an experiment and I’ll see what happens.
I’ll set my alarm for 07h55 and put it on the other side of the room.
Okay… that’s my goal.
There’s no fear of commitment here.
My intention is not to wake up at 07h00 because that’s too hard, but I think I can probably wake up at 07h55 and if I can’t, I’ll see HOW I’m not doing it.
Understand?
Make it SO EASY, because if you think you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and first thing, work out for 60 minutes despite not being in the habit of doing that, you won’t…
Aim for a workout of 60 seconds, that’s easier, much more doable and it’s better than zero seconds!
Write this down…
Make it STUPID EASY.
One minute is a great start, especially if you haven’t done something for a long time, or ever and have a fear of commitment.
One minute over 7 days is 7 minutes of building a habit and that is a VICTORY!
And when you get that right, aim for 2 minutes.
“But Harv, it’s going to take forever to get results!”
You know what, it’s going to take forever if you do nothing to get any result!
Make it stupid easy, ridiculous and get an accountability coach or an accountability partner to help keep you on track…
Someone who will ask you if your experiment of getting up at 07h55 was a success…
Who will stop you from setting a new goal that’s unattainable, and will suggest that your next experiment be to get up at 07h50 instead of 07h00.
STUPID EASY.
And be accountable… that’s number three.
Number four… set reminders.
So the only way to replace a ‘bad’ habit is by doing it over and over again.
Your ‘ego mind’ will say… “Aaah, no big deal…” but if you have daily reminders to do something it becomes ingrained in you.
To improve a habit, it must be with frequency, and it must be daily.
Kick your fear of commitment out the door by choosing not to commit, but experiment and create small wins so that you can build your confidence and the habit of following through.
If you would like to discover the same tactics millionaires use to overcome their mindset challenges, with proven strategies to be happier and to become unstoppable in life and in business, then check out T. Harv Eker’s complimentary web class “Don’t Believe a Thought You Think” in our free virtual event.
This free virtual event includes:
Has your Mind ever wondered…
It’s understandable that you have a fear of commitment when your past experiences have been dismal.
But you have to recognize the true reason behind your fear of commitment.
It’s not that there’s something wrong with you.
It’s your conditioned mind that has to be rewired.
Your conditioned mind is fear-based and keeps you in survival mode.
So to stop you from taking risks and taking action ‘out of the ordinary’, it will amplify your fear of commitment by getting you to commit to situations you’re bound to fail with.
If you’re attached to the outcome of a situation, this could feed your fear of commitment.
Why not simply just enjoy the moment, have fun with the experience, and be fully present to live right now?
By having attachment and making, or demanding, impossible promises - because nobody can reasonably predict future events in detail - fear of commitment becomes inevitable and you remain in fear that your expectations will not be met.
Instead of committing to something, do an experiment so that you can strengthen your habit of follow through.
If you have a fear of commitment, your conditioned mind is still very much in the driver’s seat of your life and to change this, you can learn from millionaire expert T. Harv Eker how he mastered his conditioned mind to achieve the success he enjoys today.