About seven years ago I volunteered at a project in Indonesia. We taught English to some local boys in a centre on the top of a hill. Every day the boys would climb up the hill to have their class. They were attentive, they contributed and they were loads of fun. The boys were fitting English class in to a day filled with working on their family plots, climbing the hill every day in the heat despite doing manual labour on their land. They showed up again and again, even when my friend and I were dragged away on a visit one day and couldn’t be there ourselves.
When I think back to that time I’m still inspired by their commitment. They said they were going to come to class and they did, in turn we felt mortified when we weren’t able to show up for them that day. Our absence highlighted their dedication.
Fierce commitment is inspiring. No commitment, or over commitment tend to leave us feeling either unmotivated or exhausted. It’s easy to fall into no commitment as it can be scary to step up and say ‘I believe in this and I’m going to dedicate time, effort, energy, money to this.’ It’s also easy to over-commit when people ask for our help. But what can be super powerful, is when we commit to the few things our intuition knows we really want to commit to.
This takes courage. It takes courage to step away from what we ‘should’ be doing according to what others tell us and what we’re telling ourselves. It takes courage to take action when we might not have done so for quite some time. It’s breaking our patterns, which is hard, particularly when we might have to explain that to other people.
But what commitment based on our intuition leads to is fierce dedication to a task, or a project, or a relationship. When you tune in to your intuition, step away from the noise of the internal ‘shoulds’ and allow yourself to commit to just those things that really sing to you, you will feel more energised, more passionate, more excited about life. Sure, you’ll have some fall out from the fact that you’re dong things a bit differently now, but the people who really love and support you will benefit in the end from your dedicated commitment to the things you really want to do.
*Image by Harman Abiwardani www.unsplash.com