I was running at the gym last week and thinking to myself.  The thought that came to me was, “I need to carve out time for myself like this all the time.  This is MY time, time for ME.”

And then I nearly fell off the treadmill with a realization.

What part of my calendar isn’t “my time”?

The events that are filling my evenings are obligations and activities that I chose to do, and that I have added to my goals.  Dance practice with friends. Band practice. Meeting up with buddy for dinner.  Somehow, these got reclassified in my brain as “obligations imposed by others” that trumped other goals. Was this because they involved other people than myself? Was this because I was making promises to people that I wanted to make sure and live up to, but didn’t feel the need to live up to the promises to myself?

It was like being smacked in the face with my planner.  If you really wanted to get down to technical details, there isn’t a single thing on my schedule that isn’t chosen by me, including my job. So, how could I tell myself that I had no time to do the things that I promised to myself?  Everything on my schedule is something I feel is important, and anything that falls into the times around my day job is most certainly something I want to do because it leads towards a goal I desire.  Even if I don’t put it formally on the schedule but have an “every day I must…” attitude, it is still a promise I made to myself.  It is something I desire.

After having acknowledged that all events in my schedule are my events, I revisited the original statement about going to the gym.  Didn’t I also want to do that? Don’t I have goals associated with the gym that are very important to me, perhaps more important than any other goals? What is the difference?

I am the one I make the promise to. 

BINGO.

Why am I capable of breaking promises to myself, but will go beyond expectation to keep promises to others?  If all events on my schedule are my promises, to myself or including others, they are all as important as I make them. 

I am responsible for what happens with my time, I am in control of my schedule.  That means I need to take responsibility for what happens during that time, and accept it.  If I feel I need a break, I need to be OK with that.  But I need to start thinking of all my promises as promises made to myself - because that is what they are. Just because they may involve other people does not make them necessarily higher on the chain for following through. They just have more stakeholders. 

And frankly, no one beats me up nearly as much as I do when I fail on a promise, and even moreso on promises to myself. 

So, I can choose to see my schedule however I want.  I can frame it as my life getting out of control and people demanding my time, or I can think of it as something I have complete control over, and have chosen to be involved in many pursuits. 

Either way, I have to accept that all my obligations, regardless of what’s involved, are promises I make to myself.