*I still honor My Word*
Call me old-fashioned but if I give you my word to do something, you can be certain that I will do it.
I’m the kind of person that believe that giving your word means assuming your responsibilities, responding to your commitments and full filling your roles. That feels good and right until you find out that you are the only one doing it and that most people don’t give a dime.
I’m taking about friends or people we know outside work since “professionally” people from work at least have to pretend they care about giving you their word.
But let’s go back to friends and people that we know. There was a time when I could simply not understand why was so hard for people to honouring their word? The part that most used to irritate me about someone bailing on me was that when the ball was in my court, I really tried to make things happen, after all I have committed to do something. If I have given my word, I basically felt obligated to do it, even if I didn’t feel like doing it and even if I had a real reason to excuse myself from it, I was still prepared to honor my word.
I stupidly (or not) thought that giving your word was something set on stone, a valuable promise, a irrefutable commitment, a pact of good faith, an invisible contract that no lawyer can destroy. But life has taught me differently, I have learned to put boundaries, to be realistic, to lower my expectations, to be flexible, to turn a blind eye to the selfishness of some people, and many other things that have helped me to be less disappointed on people.
Now, I can clearly see that my problem was that I was expecting people to do the same I did, I strongly believed that people should have had the same considerations I had with them, and that people should have been willing to make sacrifices (if needed) to make things happen for others; and these beliefs were definitely the wrong way to approach things involving someone else besides me, someone who actions did not depend on me. Expecting people to do the same I did, was not only bringing me disappointment, but it was also making me vulnerable to their indifference, so I decided, many years ago, to change my approach towards these people.
First reality hits you, but then you learn to go with the flow and to understand a lot of things. Understanding is key!
Understanding that people are just not willing to change their plans, or to do the extra mile for others. Understanding that people have lives, schedules, and priorities and that they just work things around their convenience, driven by their purely sole self-interests. Understanding that some human beings could be irrationally selfish, and that we are still living in a world of excuses: from the classic ones “the dog eat my homework”, the stupid ones “sorry, I completely forgot about it”, the smart ones “my kid is sick” (this one goes especially for people with children), to the elaborated ones “I was driving to your place but I forgot something, so I turned around and then realized I didn’t have any gas, as I was coming from the gas station I got a traffic ticket and blah blah blah”. Understanding that there is always something that comes up for some people. Understanding the people that after making a commitment, believe it is OK to cancel, bail, ditch or ignore others.
It sure takes a lot of understanding to get used to the lack of commitment and responsibility from some people. So please, before committing to something, and with the purpose of avoiding the fake apologies, think twice; do not fulfill your calendar without organizing yourself; do not reply immediately without thinking through; and most of all, do not feel bad for declining, this is actually better than failing at the end.
Knowing that people’s interests are not always mine is OK for me, and I can totally live with that. Now, before making a commitment I think more than twice to give room to my priorities, to my life. I still honor my word but I commit to significant less things. I have to admit it feels good to be less considerate to others but I do it by purposely avoiding commitment.