The promises you keep breaking

Responsibilities don’t just leak between people: leader to employee, teammate to teammate, coach to player, parent to child, spouse to spouse. They can leak within you and you alone.

You assign responsibilities to yourself all the time. Go to bed earlier. Get in shape. Read more. Have the hard conversation. Start that business idea. Be more patient with your kids. Stop sweating the small stuff.

Assigning yourself a responsibility feels like progress. You might feel good about making it. But is it progress? Did you accept 100% responsibility for everything it requires, including the parts you don't enjoy and might never enjoy?

This is an opportunity to raise your awareness so you can strengthen your discipline.

Even self-assigned commitments can get rejected, despite good intentions. What does that look like?

You internally tell yourself to do it. In your mind, you’ve made the decision. You write it in your journal. Maybe mention it to someone.

But then, when the moment arrives and something uncomfortable shows up, when it gets personally hard for you, that responsibility you assigned yourself starts to leak. You may have assigned it with a sense of conviction but it’s now obvious you didn’t accept it with the same conviction. Otherwise, you’d still be doing it with 100% responsibility.

If those words burn in your chest as you read them, let them. The sharp edge of honesty is a friend to embrace, not an enemy to avoid.

Remember yesterday's diagnosis?

Starting things but dropping them when they get hard, repetitive, or inconvenient signals a lack of discipline. That's true. But the lack of discipline starts as a lack of acceptance. You can’t secure a responsibility you’re not holding. And you can't hold a responsibility you never actually picked up.

When you're both the assigner and the receiver, responsibility leaks don’t become less likely. They may become more likely but harder to notice.

Responsibility assigned is not responsibility accepted. Even when you're the one doing the assigning and the accepting.

Make the leap. Do the work.