Fierce Encouragement

Making a Commitment to Yourself

• Mark Walker • Season 3 • Episode 66

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Feeling off-balance, starting and stopping, and wondering why your best intentions keep slipping through your fingers? We dig into three grounding commitments that help you create with steadier hands: be coachable, embrace neutrality over forced positivity, and show up on time for the work that matters. The result is a simple, repeatable system you can use on a tough Tuesday, not just a perfect Monday.

First, we walk through a self-coaching practice you can start today with nothing but a notebook. Writing in the third person—iliism—adds healthy distance, reduces catastrophizing, and clarifies the next step. You’ll hear how 10 to 20 minutes of private, honest writing builds presence and momentum without needing an external coach. Then we reframe positivity. Instead of chasing hype, we adopt a neutral stance: acknowledge the difficulty, recall recent wins, and move one task forward. Neutrality preserves your energy and keeps you out of the all-or-nothing trap.

Finally, we turn to punctuality and time boxing as identity-level tools. When you honor your calendar, even in small, realistic blocks, you train follow-through and see progress stack up across creative projects, career goals, and family commitments. We talk calendar hygiene, combatting context switching, and how to protect a single focused block even when life is loud. Along the way, Mark shares a client story from big tech—work addiction wrapped in pride and pressure—and how boundaries, presence, and clear commitments rebuilt balance without sacrificing ambition.

If you’re juggling a hyperactive mind, news overload, or the pressure to perform, these commitments offer a path back to focus you can trust. Listen, try the notebook exercise, set one neutral sentence, and defend one time box this week. If the approach resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who needs steady momentum, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

If you’re tired of doing this work alone, I offer a free conversation to help you get clear on your next steps. Apply Here when you’re ready.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey there, this is Mark, and this is Fierce Encouragement. I'm getting back into doing some more video sessions and being live, not live on YouTube, but being here on YouTube. And for those of you that are listening in on your favorite podcast platform, really appreciate you being here. It's been a tough week of creating, and maybe I could even go back. It's been a tough month of creating. And as I sat down to think about what I wanted to talk about this week, I guess I wanted to talk about that permission that we give ourselves to create and maybe have it be a little wobbly, or maybe have it feel off balance and like it's something that uh isn't our best work. And so as I say that, I feel the nerves coming uh over me a little bit and thinking about oh, what do I want to give these guys? What am what am I trying to do today? And maybe, just maybe, that's part of the issue or the problem, at least for me. So hear me out. There's six commitments that I go through with my clients when I connect with them or even having conversations with people that might be interested in in getting some help uh on their work or in their own life projects. And if you haven't heard of these before, they're kind of straightforward and they make sense, but it's almost like one of those things we name and we're like, oh yeah, I've had that thought too. But the six commitments are number one, be coachable. Number two, focus on the positive. Number three, we want to show up to the sessions uh on time and with a good focus uh during that time. So maybe not driving or being preoccupied. Number four is to talk or to use the now state, like the current state. Number five is to make a commitment to an action, have some specific steps you're gonna make. And the final commitment, number six, is that follow-up, that accountability, that reinforcement of what we're working on or committing to. So those are the six commitments I use with my clients and my engagements. And sometimes they're spoken out loud, and other times they're just brought up again in sessions, right? If people have a difficult time staying in the now, that's one of the biggest areas that I was just talking about, right? Getting pulled into the emotions. I think it's good to speak to these commitments because we can check these against ourselves. So listen to me on this. My my coach often challenges us uh in our group coaching sessions to take the time to coach yourself. So if you're out there and looking for some support and some help and maybe feeling a little off balance or having a tough start to the year, or maybe you just want to level up, but you can't quite afford uh, you know, going and asking for help and paying for things. Well, take this as a practice for yourself. Coach yourself. Get a notepad or someplace that's just for you, where you can spend 10 to 20 minutes just coaching yourself, writing to yourself. This isn't for anybody else's eyes, just for you. And when we practice this habit daily through the weeks, we literally are making that commitment to being more present with ourselves, to be more coachable to ourselves. And here's a little trick you could practice during those journaling sessions. And it's something I got from Donald Robertson, the author, the Stoic and Roman author, ancient history author. It's called Iliism. So write to yourself in the third person. Speak to yourself and write to yourself when you're doing that journaling as if you are the third person. When we talk to ourselves in the third person, it actually activates some different areas in our brain and in our thinking that can help us maybe approach a problem or get more creative or stop catastrophizing as much. We start to see ourselves a little more objectively and talk to ourselves a little more objectively. So, yeah, check that out. Be coachable, make that first commitment to yourself and use the practice of journaling and coaching yourself in your journal. And then bonus points if you use Iliism. Write to yourself in the third person. The second commitment's kind of straightforward, right? Focus on the positive, remain positive, um, bring you know that best better attitude to the meeting. I think there's a little tweak here to that commitment that I make um and I use with my clients, but also with myself, because I've really struggled, and maybe this is to share a place where I've had some difficulty throughout my life, actually. I am a non-diagnosed, but definitely have a hyperactive mind. I'll find myself starting a project here, and then maybe 20 minutes later I'm downstairs folding the laundry, or maybe, you know, like circling through tasks or items during the day and navigating like that technical uh hurdle and making the space for myself just to be offline and recording and creating and being a good coach. I don't have a problem in sessions. In fact, I love those because it's something for my mind to be present with. But when left to my own devices, I often can go way off track. This second commitment, like, be positive then, Mark. You know, just smile your way through it. Well, that's true. I'm really good at getting down on myself and thinking that, you know, I wasted another day and this was lost, a lost cause, and then I'll just give up the rest of the day. I've trained in that arena for years, so I've gotten a lot, lot better at showing up even when I'm not feeling like it or playing well that day. But in this case, and I heard this from a great coach recently, uh, Miss McNabb, but she talked about neutrality. Instead of thinking we need to feel really positive or, you know, there needs to be fireworks when we think about this project or this struggle that we're kind of attacking, you know, this challenge we're attacking in our business or at school or in our relationships. It's easy to think like, oh, I need to be really positive about this. This is getting it has to turn out great. Well, number one, we can check our language again. Um, but the best thing to do here from Coach McNabb was talking about just be neutral. Just be neutral. You don't know how that is going to turn out, you don't know what the outcome is. So instead of trying to pump yourself up, make that effort just to kind of come back to a simple balance of neutrality and have your own phrase that works with you. Hey, this is tough right now. I'm excited to take the next step. We're gonna figure it out together going forward. And use your faith or use your visualization, if you want to, in those moments of how you are showing up, how you made progress even this morning, or how you've done well over the past week or the past month or two. Remember those moments of mastery and then come back to that just neutrality and take that next step. Now, what needs to be done, and have that focus. So instead of being Pollyannish or think we need to have everything rainbows and candy canes, try to be positive, but you can also use a healthy, neutral mindset here as well. The third commitment is that idea of showing up on time, showing up to your sessions on time and showing up to your life on time, I guess. I'm sure I could talk with other coaches and even people uh, you know, thinking of my years in the corporate world. When people showed up to meetings late, you knew the people that were gonna do that, right? Obviously, it wasn't a polite thing to do, and in that corporate world, it can kind of get you in trouble oftentimes, depending on who you are. But I think the thing that I was landing on here, and something that we can practice in that sense of coaching ourselves and committing to ourselves with these first three of the six commitments, is ask yourself, how do you show up? Are you on time or even a couple minutes early? Is that a priority for you? Because oftentimes how we do one thing is how we do a lot of the things in our life. My dad was in the army and he always talked about make your bed right away in the morning. Make your bed in the morning, because then the rest of the day you started that day well, and you will finish more projects and put the finishing touches on the things that need to be completed that day. And maybe it's as simple as getting better with your calendar hygiene. I uh have a new client, uh very successful person actually, and they're doing a great job building up their business and doing some studying at the same time and doing some creative projects. But one thing we've worked on in the first two sessions is realizing the power of our calendar. Oftentimes people get really, they'll buy the apps and you know, put a lot of money and invest a lot of time into learning something new. But honestly, the most powerful thing that I've done over the past 10 plus years of my life is get better at time boxing and honoring my calendar. That doesn't mean it's always perfect and I'm always doing the right things, but it does mean using our calendar to serve us instead of to get to Wednesday or Thursday or even the end of the week and be like, what the heck did I get done this week? I'm sure we've all been there. So honestly, taking that time to invest in your calendar, even if it's just boxing out 20 minutes a day, you want to work on a creative project or something dear to you. Maybe it's learning the guitar, maybe it's committing to a little bit of family time and making sure you invest in your loved ones and your family or even your friends. And maybe it's that journaling practice we talked about, coaching yourself, talking to yourself in the third person, like you are successful, that you can do it. And then, of course, bringing in that positive voice or even just coming back to neutrality, sending that uh intention out to the universe. Hey, this is hard right now. I know I'm gonna power through it, I need your help. Say your prayers, sending out that intention. And finally, of course, showing up for yourself on time. And you know, I got my hand raised for those of you not watching. It's been tough getting started in this uh first year or first month of the year. Um, I found a lot of stop starts and hesitation coming up. So instead of beating myself up, I'm choosing to honor my time blocks and really get focused in on what I'm doing on my calendar and especially working that journal, that coaching myself and staying positive. Because you know, when you're out here, it's not easy to create. It's not easy to be a mom or a dad. And especially with just the craziness going on politically here in the US right now, it is overwhelming and we don't know quite what to do next. And as I share that, it opens up a whole new emotional realm in us. So ultimately, slowing down, giving yourself maybe a break from the too much information and too much news, come back to making those commitments to yourself. Those first three commitments are a great way to start. And I think this is a good break. I want to cover the last three commitments and how they'll like you could pull them into your day and kind of your self-coaching practice as we go into the next episode. And as we kind of finish up, um, I wanted to share something that I heard from a client last year. Um, they are a great tech leader and they've worked in some on some amazing projects through the years, but this is what they said. I was working for big tech uh in Silicon Valley, and the work never stopped. I was always working. It was hard, but I had a good team. I felt almost addicted, this visceral addiction to the work I was doing. There was a deep satisfaction and this twofold emotion. I loved it and I also hated it. I loved what I was doing and I was bound up by it. I don't think this is a unique problem. And if this is something that you're struggling with, especially people who work in tech and management and IT, or you're taking on a new role, I've seen this and I've helped people like this client take those steps towards more personal balance, towards grounding themselves and creating positive boundaries in their life and actually making movement and taking steps in their career and in their relationships that they couldn't have foreseen. So if that's something you're interested in, check the link in the show notes or reach out to me somehow. I'd love to connect with you. Um, but I thank you for listening. This has been Fierce Encouragement. Thank you for watching if you're here watching. And I hope you have a great day, a great week. And wherever you're at, take care of yourself. Okay, we'll see you next time on Fierce Encouragement. Bye bye.