Have you ever stopped to consider what your word actually means to you?
Not to other people, not to society, not to your employer or your partner or your children —just to you.
What does your word mean to you?
It’s a strange thing about human psychology. People tend to treat externally imposed contracts with tremendous seriousness.
You sign up for a cell phone plan, and suddenly you’re tracking payment due dates. You get a new job, and you show up exactly when you’re supposed to, day after day, week after week. You sign up for electricity, WiFi, a gym membership—whatever it is—and you follow the terms of the contract.
But what happens when you make a contract with yourself?
“I’m going to start working out four times a week.”
“I’m going to write that book I’ve been talking about for years.”
“I’m going to stop procrastinating on my taxes.”
“I’m going to call my mother more often.”
“I’m going to learn a new language by practicing 10 minutes daily.”
“I’m going to finally organize that closet this weekend.” “I’m going to stick to my budget and stop impulse buying.”
What happens to those contracts?
For most people, these self-promises or self-contracts vanish by the next day. Gone. Forgotten. Abandoned without a second thought.
And you know what? That’s a problem.
Because if you cannot trust yourself to keep your word to yourself, then who exactly can you trust?
You see, when you fail to honor your commitments to yourself, you’re essentially committing a moral crime against the person who matters most in your life—you.
You’re in breach of contract with the one person you can never escape.
Think about what this does to your psyche over time. When you make a promise to yourself, break it, make another promise, break that one too, and on and on in a cycle of self-betrayal, you’re gradually eroding your sense of self-worth.
Now, let’s think about why people don’t keep their word to themselves.
I believe there are several factors at play, and understanding these is crucial if we want to change this pattern.
1st
There’s no immediate external consequence.
If you don’t pay your electric bill, the lights go out. If you don’t show up to work, you get fired. But if you don’t go to the gym like you promised yourself you would? Nothing happens.
At least, nothing happens right away.
The consequences are delayed and cumulative—and that makes them easy to ignore.
We humans are notoriously bad at responding to delayed consequences. It’s like how climate change is such a difficult problem to solve; the worst effects are years or decades away, so we keep kicking the can down the road.
2nd
We have this weird psychological quirk where we value external authority more than internal authority.
We’ve been trained since childhood to respond to outside pressure. Parents, teachers, bosses—these are the people we’ve learned to listen to.
Most of us were never taught to develop that same level of respect for our own internal voice.
In fact, many of us were actually taught the opposite—to ignore our own needs and desires in favor of meeting external expectations.
3rd
We rationalize.
“I’m too tired today.” “I’ll start tomorrow.” “This one time won’t matter.” “I deserve a break.”
We’re masters at negotiating our way out of self-contracts, and because we’re both parties to the same agreement, there’s no one to call us on our BS.
There’s no opposing counsel to object when we start making bad-faith arguments to ourselves.
But what would happen if you started treating your word to yourself with the same respect as a legally binding document?
What if you created that internal structure and surrendered to it with the same discipline you apply to externally imposed contracts?
I’ll tell you what would happen: your life would transform.
When your word to yourself becomes inviolable or unbreakable, you develop what psychologists call “internal locus of control“—which is a fancy way of saying you trust yourself to do what you say you’ll do.
And once you have that, once you’ve established that foundation of self-trust, there is almost nothing you cannot achieve over time.
You see, your relationship with yourself works like any other relationship. Every kept promise builds trust. Every broken promise erodes it.
When you consistently honor your word to yourself, you develop an unshakable self-confidence.
But when you repeatedly let yourself down, you create a pattern of self-doubt.
Eventually, you reach a tipping point where you stop believing in your own commitments entirely.
You’ve disappointed yourself so many times that you’ve lost faith in your own word.
Now, you might be thinking,
“Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to break a commitment to yourself.”
And you’re right. There will be times when circumstances genuinely prevent you from keeping your word.
But those should be rare exceptions, not the rule. And even in those cases, you should treat the broken commitment with the seriousness it deserves.
If you had to break a contract in your job, or a business, you wouldn’t just ghost them. Right?
You’d call them, explain the situation, negotiate new terms, and make good on your obligations as soon as possible. So, why should it be any different with yourself?
If you can’t keep a commitment to yourself, acknowledge it explicitly, understand why it happened, and recommit with a clear plan for how to avoid the same issue in the future.
I also want to emphasize that this doesn’t mean you need to be perfect. Far from it. This is not about setting impossible standards and then beating yourself up when you fall short.
This is about setting realistic commitments and then honoring them consistently, regardless of whether you feel like it in the moment.
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of the time we break our self-contracts is not because of genuine emergencies, but because of momentary discomfort.
So here’s what I propose: start small.
Make one commitment to yourself that you know you can keep. Maybe it’s drinking a glass of water first thing every morning. Maybe it’s five minutes of meditation before bed. Maybe it’s walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator.
Something small, something simple, but something specific.
And then keep that commitment as if your life depended on it—because in a very real sense, the quality of your life does depend on it.
Treat that commitment as sacred. Do not negotiate with yourself. Do not entertain excuses. Just do it.
This perspective has helped me tremendously in my own life. There was a time when I would make big plans for myself — write a book, learn different skills, transform my physique — but I would rarely follow through.
I was full of good intentions but weak on execution. And the more this happened, the less I believed in myself.
The turning point came when I started treating my commitments to myself as non-negotiable contracts.
I began with small promises—10 push-ups every morning, writing 300 words a day, meditating for 10 minutes, learning portuguese 15 minutes on duolingo everyday, writing a blog or making 1 YouTube video a week.
As I kept these promises consistently over the last few years, I gradually rebuilt my self-trust.
And from that foundation, I was able to take on bigger challenges with confidence.
This is the foundation of personal power.
Not money, not status, not physical strength—but the ability to say something and then do it.
The world respects this kind of integrity, but more importantly, you respect it in yourself.
And when you respect yourself, when you know that your word to yourself means something, you develop an unwavering self-confidence that no external validation could ever provide.
In closing, I want to challenge you to take this concept seriously.
Start treating your word to yourself as a binding contract.
