Self-control is the Gateway to Keeping Your Commitments & Achieving Ultimate Success

Ever planned a meeting with someone, got to the agreed meeting point in time and the person failed to show up? And as if that was not enough, the person never communicated their intention and moved on as if nothing happened. If you are like me, you felt betrayed, disappointed, and hurt. You probably had to process a painful message – that you weren’t important enough to keep a promise to. How about the person who failed to show up? How did you feel about him/her?

Keeping commitments, being reliable and knowing you can keep your promises feels great. To others, you come out as genuine, reliable and respectable, someone one can trust and do business with. When people find you reliable, they not only trust that you will deliver to your promise but also find it easy to recommend you to their networks. This creates a ripple effect and leads to ultimate success in career and business.

Unfortunately, keeping commitments is something many leaders struggle with. Am not an exemption and in real sense, this article is more about me than it is about you. It is a struggle that most of us will agree to fight each day.

By not keeping a promise, whether implied or directly committed, you: Go against your values of being honest and acting with integrity, compromise your trust and diminish your worth and importance – a case for both personal and interpersonal commitments.

The major question is, how can you (and I) become a person of your word – creating a perfect alignment between your words, intentions, and actions? This can only happen through exercising 100% self-control, by working with strength and persistence each day and remaining consciously disciplined at all times – through watching your words and maintaining a high level of integrity with yourself.

The truth is, inasmuch you are stretched so thin with resources at times, and are always being pulled in so many different directions all at once, your ability to honor your commitments to yourself and others is a direct reflection of who you are as a person and determines how successful you will become.

After interviewing over 500 business leaders over the last 3 years, I learnt they all keep their commitments. It is a major factor that have made them successful – yes, successful leaders keep their commitments. It is what makes them different from everyone else, that one plus being good at making decisions on what to prioritise.

Self-control, the ability to control our feelings, emotions and reactions, is related to the ability to work hard to achieve our long-term goals. While some people were lucky enough to be born with a high level of self-control as a child, some of us are a “one-marshmallow” people, prone to give into short-term temptations. To get out of it, we have to protect ourselves from ourselves – to give up things that might be fun in order to engage in actions that will be rewarding and in line with our projects.

You cannot give in to playing video games rather than working on a project if you don’t have any video games in the office or that app in your phone. You cannot eat too many potato chips if you don’t buy them and you cannot snooze that alarm if you don’t go to bed with your phone. It is that simple.

However, our human brain is notoriously poor at following through with our plans. This notwithstanding, viewing ourselves as free and responsible for our actions is the foundation for self-discipline.

By setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based) goals, establishing a daily self-monitoring system, setting boundaries for our own character, deciding to act in spite of discomfort, having strong personal values, mastering our emotions and having daily priorities in check, we can be able to have everything under control, enabling us to keep our commitments.

Another important aspect to increasing self-control is self-awareness – knowing yourself (emotional self-control or impulse control) is the cornerstone of emotional intelligence, preceding self-management. By knowing yourself, you are better placed to manage your emotions and impulses. For example, are you in the habit of reacting hastily to issues? Once you get started, do you find it hard to stop talking? Are you able to stay composed and positive in stressful circumstances? Can you exercise patience in annoying situations? The ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check is the mark of a seasoned leader.

As simple as this may seem, anyone with an experience in resourcefulness will tell you that it is not. It takes time and patience and work. It is like a muscle; we have to consistently exercise self-control for it to strengthen and grow. To get it right, we will stumble a couple of times before we finally can get it right – but the journey has just started.

Inasmuch we live in a world that compels us to strive for instant fulfillment of our needs – longing for instant pleasures that drive up to addictions that have long lasting consequences, self-control is truly attainable.

Start each day by asking yourself, what is the most important project that I must work on that will propel my career/business? Who do I need to email, call text or meet? Who am I expecting to hear from? Those are the things of a higher value and importance on that specific day – act on them.