Commitment

In addition to becoming more authentic and willful, another consequence of knowing your operating strategy and processing your feelings is the wonderful effect on the capacity for commitment. Let me tell you about my friend Lou.

Lou and I have been friends for thirty years. One thing we had in common for the first fifteen years or so of our friendship was a fear of commitment to women. Both Lou and I would find new girlfriends, get intimately involved, and then, when the topic of the next logical step would arise, weasel our way out of the relationship. There was even one occasion where we broke up with our respective girlfriends on the same day. We had shared our reluctance to move forward and agreed we would connect later that night, after we had both done the deed.

I am proud to say that with a fair bit of therapy and effort, I managed to leave my fear of commitment behind. I met and married Joan, my cherished wife, more than fifteen years ago. It took Lou a few more years to make the leap into marriage. So for the first part of my marriage to Joan, we would observe Lou bringing one new girlfriend after another to our home for dinner.

One night, Lou was to come for dinner with his girlfriend Nancy. Joan and I were in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. We both went to the front door to welcome our guests. Joan opened the door and there was Lou, alone. I heard her whisper, ˜˜Oh, oh. Assuming that Nancy was suddenly out of the picture, I felt sad for her and for Lou. They had seemed like such a fine match.

Lou is a pretty smart fellow. He knew he had a problem. His rationality and realism meant that he could not commit. Yet he wanted to commit. It was a shame. For Lou, the thinking had always gone like this: ˜˜How can I ever stand in front of a justice of the peace , or anyone else, for that matter, and declare, ˜Nancy, I commit to you for the rest of my life, when I know that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce? I cant predict the future! I cant commit to what is not in my control.

So Lou went through the yearsas had I, since my view had been similar to hiswishing he could commit but feeling conflicted over his rational belief. It felt to him like a matter of integrity.

But Lou surprised us that night. At the dinner table, in Nancys absence, he raised his glass of wine and said, ˜˜You guys, I want to propose a toast . Always eager for another sip of a good Amarone, I raised my glass, wondering what Lou was about to say.

˜˜Nancy and I are engaged to be married. Heres to our future! ˜˜Lou-baby! I yelled. ˜˜Congratulations!

The three of us chattered away for the rest of the meal. After we cleaned up, Lou and I went for a walk. We walked the streets of my neighborhood, smoking a couple of big stogies.

˜˜Lou, my friend, how did you do it? I asked. ˜˜Well, its true. Nancy and I are committed. So long as neither of us changes as people, and so long as we are faithful to each otherwell, this is it. Permanent.

I squinted my eyesnot from the smoke of the fat, smelly cigar but from what I sensed, logically, was a bypassing of the fundamental problem. Lou had given himself an out. He was not committed, no matter what. He had conditions to his commitment. He had still not actually made the leap. Standing out there on the diving board of life, he could not make the jump.

Commitment calls for a no-holds-barred approach to things. The meta-level gets in the way. Our fears prevent the jump. There may be all sorts of logic behind the fear, but it is just retrospective rationalization. The fear comes first and rules. Until we put the meta-level in its place, our capacity to choose will always be its victim. But when we have done the work, we become authentic, willful, and able to commit.

My impression is that marriages that start with prenuptial agreements may be rational but dont last as long. Business commitments made with exit clauses arent true commitments. When a sales leader says, ˜˜Were aiming for a 20-percent increase, there is something fishy going on. As soon as we visualize what might excuse us, we let ourselves off the hook.

Humans normalize things very quickly. When we say, ˜˜Ill just skip this exercise session, since Im feeling particularly tired today, we set the stage for subsequent excuse giving. When we tell ourselves at the start of an extramarital affair, ˜˜Surely a two-second kiss on the lips is forgivable, were no doubt on the path to an exciting but inevitably painful future. Failure is assured the moment we say, ˜˜Ill smoke this one cigarette, and then quit later. We usually feel a little funny about letting ourselves down in these ways. But after a few permissions, were on our way. We normalize things that were once not really okay.

Strangely, normalizing has a good side to it. The speed at which people normalize things reflects the speed of learning. We do something a few times and we learn it. It works for the good things and for the bad. Our brains stop registering things if our meta-level thoughts deem them unnecessary. We have to manage the amount of stuff that makes it to consciousness because we just have too much going on.

An interesting problem is that my friend Lou and other commitment phobes and wannabe exercisers and smoking-quitters have what looks like a very convincing argument at their disposal: reality. Surely one more smoke will do no harm. And maybe a little kiss, in the big scheme of things, does have very little meaning. Whats wrong with a little reality?

When people let their meta-level thoughts rule, identifying with all the reasons they can muster for being the legitimate excuse giver, they deny themselves the chance to become pure will. They do not fully commit.

Now that my friend Lou has three kids , I do believe he has totally reconciled himself with the possibility of total commitment. If today you ask him about commitment and how he handles the fact that half of marriage commitments fail, he will say that the problem rests in the passage of time. He would say, ˜˜Look, commitment is about beingnot time! When I commit, it is for eternity. And what if the conditions change? Well, right now, with all my being, I am 100 percent committed to Nancy. The future does not exist. Talking about future conditions is not something I spend time on. Not interested.

Lou, in my opinion, is clear.

The effects of this kind of position on commitment are many. First, people of total commitment live by their word. They do not lie to themselves about their intentions. They have cleared away all of the chatter in their heads, and they simply mean what they say. They spend no time allocating blame, because, for them, blame does not exist. Commitment and fulfillment exist. When something goes wrong, they move to fix it. Action is the name of the game.

If they are on a team, they are committed to the performance of the team and to their role on it. If someone on their team has a problem, they are there to support the person and the team. If they are confronted with no-win scenarios in their team challenge, they move to overcome the obstacles just the same. They dont divvy-up responsibility, saying, ˜˜Billie has 20 percent of the job, and Linda has 50 percent of the job and I have this 30 percent over here. They say, ˜˜I am focused over here and have total accountability for my area of focus. And, Billie, Linda, and I all have total accountability for the whole thing.

People who have transcended the meta-level dynamics of their minds have the same fears as the rest of us. But they dont fight these fears. They embrace them and act on them as necessary.

• They dont get lost in worry. They choose faith. They will succeed. They know it.

• They dont fall into a neurotic quest for control. They see what must be done. They delegate. The future is coming at them, and they efficiently make things right. They do not fill with angst, because angst does no good. They roll with the punches, stay focused on the goal, keep in touch with their compassion, and calmly lead situations to success.

• They dont hide in a false projection. They expose themselves with nothing to hide. They are okay as they are.

• They dont seek attention. They dont suffer from their emptiness. They accept it. They have infused their acceptance of it into their being.

• They dont spend time on blame. They simply take responsibility and act.

• They dont find themselves prisoners of anxiety; their fears move through them, and they observe their fears while they act on their crazy world.

The problems most of us have on the job can be linked to inner fears. A sales rep in one company is afraid of picking up the phone. It hurts so much to be rejected! A manager in another company is afraid of confrontation. She thinks there is nothing worse than being unloved. An accounting clerk in the office down the hall doesnt like speaking up at meetings. She is afraid shell say something stupid.

But when we understand our fears and process them, they dissolve. When we comprehend this dynamic that operates in our heads, we transcend it and find ourselves making choices, being wholly committed, being authentic. When people are focused on the object-level , they act within it, losing themselves and finding freedom.