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How can we hold to our commitments when we are no longer in the moment? A method to help bolster our Why (the reason we decided to do it) so that when the hard times come, we will have that little bit of ammo to help against them so that we don’t let our goals fall by the wayside. Today we are going to learn to refine those commitments ever more to bolster our arsenal even more. This is simple to look at our commitments and then define those things in them that are not an option for us. These are the non-negotiable.

The main  reason to put this into place in that it allows us to reduce the stress of decision making in concerns to our commitments any time one of those decisions come up. Time and time again, we are confronted by small decisions that cause us stress. These are the decisions where are minds will start to cause us issues. We will start negotiating with ourselves and this causes us stress. We will tell ourselves that having that we can have that cookie today, as long as we don’t have any more cookies this week, that we will still be on our diet. I feel this one very keenly on my low carb diet and it is one I face all the time, not just with cookies, but with bread and soda as well. This back and forth that your mind goes through is essentially just working to justify your cheating on your commitment.

If you define something as being completely off the table, then when the possibility comes up, you can already define your answer and save yourself all that time and mental anguish of the decision making process. Let’s take one of my goals for an example from my last post:

*I will create content for this blog at least 5 days every week

*I will NOT skip a day due to it being a holiday.

There we go, a simple non-negotiable that I put in place to bolster my ability to stick to my commitment. Then, when a day off the normal job comes around, or a national holiday like Thanksgiving comes around, if I have not already met my 5 posts for that week, then there is no decision to make. I sit down and I write my content. Now there is no back and forth in my own mind, no trying to find excuses to skip that day, just a simple answer to the problem.

This simple step will increase our ability to hold to our commitments over this next year and stick to them when so many others have fallen off the wagon. When it comes down to it, a good definition of commitment comes from Jim Roan: “Commitment is sticking to a decision even after the mood that you made that decision in have passed.” These little changes of our state of mind are tricks and tactics for ourselves to make sure that we have really committed to our goals.

So taking the goals you have set for yourself, what parts of them are non-negotiable for you?