Lesson: Mastering Presence with Diana Chapman

Step #9 Commitments: Willing vs. wanting

Commitment in our mind, we're looking at it from its Latin origin committere and that means to gather your energy and move it in a chosen direction. So it's not a moral issue from our perspective. It's an energetic issue. So for example, I gathered my energy and moved it in a particular way to sit in this chair. So right now I'm committed to sitting in the chair. And if you were to watch me to commit to stand up you'd see me gather my energy and move it in a different direction and that's committing to stand up. So in any given moment we're committed to whatever is showing up in the moment.

Now sometimes those are our conscious commitments so if I say I want to be ten pounds lighter and I'm becoming ten pounds lighter, then survey says I was committed to losing weight. But if I say I want to be ten pounds lighter and the scale isn't changing, survey says I'm committed to staying at the weight I am but telling you all I wish it were different.

So unconscious commitments are very powerful and they are here all the time and most of us don't want to take a full ownership of them. And so we're really interested in helping people recognize in any given moment you're either above the line in the commitment or below the line in the commitment and how you know is you'll just look at your results.

And when you want to change it, you just gather your energy and move it in a different direction. It's actually quite easy to gather your energy. It's as easy as sitting up in the chair just whether you’re willing. And willingness and wanting is two very different things. So we're getting close to the new year here and a lot of people will want to create new year's resolutions. They'll want to make changes but most of those won't change because they're actually not yet willing. They don't have a commitment, a whole body commitment to change. They want to but not willing to.

And that's the big thing that we want to help leaders come pay attention to is look and see what are you actually committed to and most of them will tell us, "Oh, we're committed to having lots of innovation and being connected and all these kinds of things." And we'll say, "Well, what's actually occurring?" They say, "Oh, we're having trouble getting along over here. And we're a little stuck innovatively." And so we say, "Survey says that's actually your commitment. Let's go look there first and address that before we support you in changing because likely you get some payoff for doing it the way you're doing it right now. So let's learn about the payoff first before you shift it." Otherwise you're likely going to default right back to where you were which is what happens for most people like for example in new year's resolution.

How many commitments could you have at one time? Well, if one commitment is opposing another then you're not going to be able to be committed to both things at the same time. But you can be committed to lots of things and you're just going to have to pay attention to can I sustain all of those or do they collaborate? Do my commitments collaborate with one another? If so, then I can have all of those in place? But if they don't then I got to start to prioritize and recognize certain commitments are more important than others.