Travel Soul Therapy

Committing to Self —
Creating Integrity.

When you go travel you may choose to use it as an opportunity for committing to self, in other words begin to relate consciously to yourself as a co-creator of results in your life. What it means is that you begin to pay close attention to how you distribute your energy through your promises given to yourself and others. It is not an encouragement to be self-centered and aloof, instead it is a shift in focus towards developing mastery.

Commitment to self is relating to life as your domain where your word is your law and you are the first to follow it. It is a heightened awareness of your words imbued with meaning and responsibility. Its by-product is awareness of conflicting intentions when decisions are made, and strength to follow through with determination.

What travel has to do with committing to self?

Traveling presents a subtle opportunity to put a psychological distance between yourself and familiar environment with daily engagements of scheduled tasks and "to do" lists. That avails you to take a long view at the whole of your life — something that is more difficult to do while in a middle of life filled with a job, deadline-driven assignments or recreational distractions in between. 

When you travel, there are naturally occurring moments of self-reflection from which you can easily observe effects of your responses to rising situations and assess your inner relationship, a level of commitment to self.

Do you keep your word to yourself?

This is the ground from which your relationship to yourself arises. This is where your self-esteem and self-love appear. This the place where you develop inner strength of trusting yourself. 

If your make decisions casually, without inner alignment and resolution, and know at the outset that you not going to put effort in fulfilling them, then you practice and strengthening self-mistrust. When you know that you can't count on your word, you can't treat yourself as reliable partner.

When you are aware of that, then you don't feel like someone who is worthy of respect, and as a result you treat yourself with no regard. Externally it most likely will manifest in setting up others to disrespect you as well. You might feel upset and aggressively demand respect from others and become the first who will experience unhappy feelings of anguish and lack of self-love.

When committing to self is activated, you will realize when you make promises to others in order to please them. It is a big drain of resources at the expense of self-respect. This is usually happens due to low self-esteem and lack of self-trust; seeking approval from others rather that building a strong foundation upon self-acceptance and knowing the importance of committing to self. 

Realizing how important committing to self is, you begin to notice how in the past you might have avoided dreaming about more fulfilled life for yourself. You might have avoided others who seemed to be positive and successful in order not to be disturbed by their attitude of inspiration and belief that with focus come possibilities. You might have even defended yourself by saying that they are bragging or are just lucky.

Yet with closer and honest examination you will notice that it all appeared from not trusting yourself. When that is the case, a person usually avoids responding to inspiration as it requires to make a decision to follow through. Then inspiration is placed into a cocoon of wishful thinking, safety of a fantasy where action is not required, thus free from risk of failure. 
Decision requires active choice of new behavior based on conviction and this is where committing to self is powerful — it gives a strength to overcome the resistance of habit. 

Committing to self gives power internally — we learn that we can count on ourselves. We learn that our keeping the word requires allocation of inner and outer resources and as such we learn to value it. Intention for committing to self gives strength and energy to empower yourself and manifests as healthy boundaries of self-esteem. It signals to others that when we make promise, it is substantial and we can be relied on.

Resolve committing to self by following these two tracks:

• Be Impeccable With Your Word.
  Begin immediately treat your words as currency: there should be no counterfeits. Shift your attitude to respect your words. Imagine that when you speak you give away currency of your domain with your stamp on each word you say. Decide only to say what you mean.
  Account for every word you say like a good banker, thus rise its value for yourself and others. Having an attitude of being impeccable with your word will refine your awareness of how you communicate with yourself and will strengthen your commitment to self.


• Commitment Requires Resources.
  When you contemplate this, there will be re-balancing of how you position yourself in relationship with others. As you realize that your time is precious within your lifetime, it will be easier to evaluate how you like to allocate your limited resource. It will give you clarity to see whether you are wholeheartedly open to commit to something instead of reacting to influence of opinion or desire for comfort of approval. This awareness will give you ground of power to commit knowing that you will honor it by following with actions.

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