Last week I shared a few reasons you might be enthralled with the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. 

Then I had one of those weeks where I received the same message over and over again, starting with another on-screen (and real life) Queen. It all began with a fascinating scene from Season 4 of The Crown. The scene depicts the 21st birthday speech that real-life, then-Princess Elizabeth delivered from the British royal family’s 1947 tour of South Africa. There’s a lot that’s historically interesting in the speech about the evolution of the monarchy and the death of an empire.

But one line stuck with me and I just had to look the real version up and watch it on YouTube. The 21-year-old woman, whose father would soon die prematurely, leaving her Queen, said: 

“I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” 

A few days later, something in my inbox caught my eye. “Why hasn’t the Queen retired?” Quora’s top-rated answer pointed to this exact same line of this exact same speech. 

She made a commitment seventy-three years ago. And she will keep it. Theeee end.

This concept of commitment came to me once more as I was reading our Book of the Month in my Mastery program. The book is called Conscious Luck, and it’s like a breath of fresh genius from a favorite author of mine, Gay Hendricks, and co-author Carol Kline. 

Right in the first chapter, Hendricks tells the story of a relationship in which he realized that he’d been having the same argument script with his mate for five years.

He writes: 

“I stepped back from the process and wondered: Why would I engage in a pattern like this? Why would I create the same basic argument over and over again for years? Given all the experiences I could be having as a human being, why have I kept repeating the pattern of lying and being lied to, being criticized and criticizing, blaming and being blamed, and thinking of myself as a victim?”

Then in a rush of realization, I got the answer: These things kept happening because I was committed to being criticized, committed to being betrayed, committed to arguing and lying. I was more committed to my established pattern than I was to having a great relationship. The commitments were obviously unconscious….

The moment I realized what my commitment was, I felt a huge shift inside. I wasn’t a hapless victim of my circumstances, I was the powerful creator of those circumstances!” 

He goes on: “The very act of becoming aware of our unconscious commitments is an enormous first step in taking ownership of our results in life. It loosens the negative grip of our old patterns and allows us to begin practicing new, conscious habits of behavior. It swings wide the door to claiming our power so we can create the life we truly want.”

As I read this, and connected the dots between my reading and the Queen’s words that had captivated me earlier in the week, I sat down with my journal and wrote out the question: 

What are my commitments? 

As I continued doing what I do this time of year, which is to metabolize 2020 and envision 2021, I kept coming back to that question:

What are my unconscious commitments?

As I identified areas of my life and my work where I’m not getting the results I want (yet), I asked myself again:

What have I been committed to? What commitments have I outgrown?

And as I started “writing the vision and making it plain”, as the Scripture says, so that my team, my vendors, my partners, my students, my clients and all my future collaborators may see and understand it with crystal clarity, I sat with the question still: 

What fresh commitments am I making right now? 

Your commitments — conscious and unconscious — are creating the results you’re seeing in your life, especially when it comes to the areas where you feel like you dwell daily in your zone of genius, which is the same as your zone of freedom, wholeness, meaning and self-actualized fulfillment.

Your commitments — conscious and especially the unconscious ones — are creating the results you’re seeing in your life, especially when it comes to your self-limiting beliefs and worldviews, your self-sabotage, your blocks and your inner glass ceilings, all those thoughts you think and stories you tell yourself that cause you to hold yourself back.

My life’s work — my commitment —  is to help you reverse the repression that began so long ago, all the conditioning that causes you to hide your light or hold yourself back from anything ever. 

That’s the same thing as saying my mission is for you to reclaim sovereignty over your life and your experience of it. 

Every time you break the pull of your patterns by even 1%, you get a little bit of sovereignty back.

Every time you take 1% or 5% or 10% more ownership of your results in life, you get a little closer to wholeness, joy, and liberation. 

So in the interest of shedding even a tiny, onion-skin thin layer of whatever old self-critical, scarcity-based, fearful mindset programming bugs have you in their thrall, I challenge you today to ask yourself this question and to do it without even an iota of self-judgment or self-criticism: 
 
What are your commitments?

What commitments are you ready to release? 

What is ONE unconscious commitment you can now see that has created unwanted results in your life? 

What would happen if that commitment was no longer important to you? 

How would that feel? 

What would be possible for you? 

What one commitment will you retire as 2020 comes to a close? 

What gift of a commitment will you give yourself now, as we onramp into 2021?

If this one is tough for you, here are some thought starters: 

• What fears have you been committed to? 
• What self-limiting stories have you been committed to telling? 
• What painful, self-punishing interpretations of your childhood or your past have you been committed to, maybe for years?
• Are you committed to self-soothing through consuming (wine, TV, Facebook, online shopping)?
• Are you more committed to not rocking the boat than to saying what is true?
• Did you make a commitment as a child to look for others’ approval as your green light? 
• Did you commit years ago to never outshine someone? 
• Are you committed to your few extra pounds? 
• Do you have a commitment to self-deprecation, or to bonding with others in low vibration, petty complaining? 

Remember what Carl Jung said: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

What unconscious commitment are you ready to make conscious, so you can get your life back?

Hit reply and let me know what comes up for you.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: I predict that at least one of these 3 things is taking place in your mind right now:

• Your struggle switch flipped on when you read the word “commitment”, because that sounds like setting a goal where you fail if you don’t get a 100% perfect score. 
• You started telling yourself that you’ve tried and failed at dozens of commitments before.
• You started thinking “Well, Tara’s super disciplined, so she can just decide what her commitments are gonna be. But I can’t just do that! It’s not that easy.”

That’s your Inner Critic at work.

Listen: YOU are beautifully unique. But your Inner Critic is wildly unoriginal. It’s been telling the same damn stories for decades. I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people on their Inner Critic problem, and I will tell you that almost everyone you know could put their habitual self-limiting or self-critical thoughts into one of just 7 primary categories.

I’ve been keeping track. 

So here’s my advice: Don’t get ahead of yourself. For now, just identify one commitment you want to set down and another you’d like to make. Next week, I’ll tell you how I know you can do it, and we’ll talk about next steps.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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