Balancing Commitments: The Secret to Prioritizing Internal Goals over External Demands

Every week I have a daily theme where I give my overarching focus to planning. The key to planning isn’t just making sure you have your external commitments locked down and taken care of in the days ahead. It’s also to make sure that you’ve got your internal commitments locked down. You need to make sure you’re balancing commitments.

But, strangely, we often do this in reverse order. That means we are forsaking our internal goals for external demands.

It’s challenging to break the habit of dealing with and ensuring that your external commitments are taken care of before your internal ones are. There’s an inclination to try to match the amount of internal commitments. You have to your extra commitments when planning things out. When that doesn’t work, then the next thing that can happen is trying to fit in your internal commitments where you can amongst your external commitments with no plan in place.

That won’t work in the long run either.

What Does Work

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients in a coaching scenario and sharing my work with thousands over the years. And I’ve discovered there’s really only one way to get started with ensuring that your internal commitments – or at least on the same level as your external ones. And ideally, you want them to supersede your external ones.

You need to start small. You need to pick something that you’re going to do consistently and sustainably.

But I’m not even going to suggest you start small because that’s where another bias can creep in. Why?Because you don’t think small enough.

Get more granular. Start super-small.

And do it with just one thing.

One super-small thing.

But frame it out. Ensure that it gets the time and space it needs to be dealt with consistently and sustainably — and then keep doing that super-small thing until it becomes habitual.

Then add another. Repeat the process. And then add another.

That’s it.

That’s how those internal commitments get the attention that they deserve.

And that’s how you get what you deserve.