A LETTER FROM CHRIS SUAREZ

HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR PROMISE

I woke up this Sunday morning just having a feeling that I forgot something.  I thought through what I wanted to get done yesterday. All seemed to be checked off. I began to think about everything I needed for my upcoming flight. I am set to fly out this morning to our annual conference where a few thousand of our partners, employees, industry connections, and agents from across the country will be. Perhaps my feeling of forgetting something had to do with that. I went through my list and couldn’t find anything missing.  

As I sat down to read before starting my day it hit me. I hadn’t written this. I hadn’t written my weekly blog post. I hadn’t sat down to think about what I had learned and wanted to remember this week. I hadn’t taken any time out of the week to craft a message for our team for the coming week. For the past 175 weeks in a row I have written and shared a short message that I have been thinking about over the course of the previous week. With everything going on this week, for the first time in over three years, I had forgotten to sit down and write it.  

For a moment I thought that it would be ok. I had already proven to myself that I could do something consistently for a long time. This habit started as a way to connect with our people across the country at a very uncertain time in our history.  We had just launched a new company and Covid 19 shut down all travel, almost everything in person, and everyone retreated to their homes. The stock market had tanked and there was uncertainty in every corner of the country. And so every Sunday I would write a letter to our team, to keep something in our world consistent.  

But truth be told, it was equally just for me. I wrote about what I had learned, for me. I thought about what I most needed to work on, think about, listen to. I thought about my challenges and weaknesses.  As things settled down I kept writing and kept sharing. It became less about who read it - I appreciate the 12 or 13 who do each week, ha - and more about the fact that I had made a promise to myself to take time each week to reflect on an important lesson. As I think about it, this promise was more selfish than selfless. I needed to do this for me. To reflect on something I had learned. To reflect on something that helped me grow. To reflect on something that I was struggling with or needed help with. This was a commitment to myself. It was a promise to myself. It was a personal habit. The sharing gave me some early accountability. But the fact remains, that I may stop sharing these in the future, but I won’t stop writing them.

As I thought for a second that I didn’t have time this morning to sit down and document one of my biggest lessons of the week, I realized that was the lesson. I had to write it, as I had promised myself I would. It wasn’t a promise to anyone else. No one would text me or email me or call me later that day wondering where the blog post was. But I believe strongly that everything starts with keeping promises to ourselves. We often approach this from another angle. We don’t want to let someone down, so we make sure to keep our commitment or promise to them - at all costs. As noble as that is, we aren’t nearly as committed to keeping the promises we make to ourselves. However large or small that promise might be, it’s easy to skip it, promise to do it later, rationalize away why we couldn’t do what we told ourselves we would do.

This weekly letter has become a touchstone of keeping promises to myself. If we start with personal commitments and personal promises kept, it will naturally lead us to be a promise keeper in life. Without exception, our lives would be so much more abundant if we weren’t so willing or likely to break promises we make to ourselves. Waking up to work out because we told ourselves the night before that we would. Showing up to the office at 8:30 because we told ourselves we would. Completing our to-do list before quitting because we told ourselves we would. Being at our daughter's recital because we told ourselves we would. For most entrepreneurs, no one is checking on any of these things, but us. If we are in the habit of breaking these little promises to ourselves, the big life promises just seem a little bit easier to break as well.

So this morning after forgetting to do what I said I would do, I am reminded how these little promises kept - although at times inconvenient - are the basis for being the type of person I want to become. A promise keeper.

Chris Suarez