Tag Archives: relationships

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Why I’m Bad At Promises – An Almost Incomplete Thought

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I’m really bad at promises. Here’s why: I forget the whole reason of a promise.

The tough thing about promises is they aren’t contracts. You don’t sit down with the person you are promising and decide on all the terms and conditions and then sign it.

And so I make a promise, and I go around and tell other people, and I get all excited that other people think that I’m keeping a promise. Yada yada yada.

During that time, I manipulate the conditions of the promise, and I think I am keeping the same terms, but I’m not because I’m not consulting the other person involved.

The tough thing about all of that is then the promise is worthless. If you have changed something that the originator of the promise wouldn’t agree with, then it’s worthless.

How do you keep promises?

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Dreaming of a One-Person Nonprofit

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I work for an organization that supports and aides nonprofits in the area. It’s a great job, and I get to be introduced to a lot of really cool organizations that are doing really cool things.

Yesterday, we brought in a speaker for some local nonprofits to help them with figuring out all the outs and ins of staying right with the law as a nonprofit.

She was from Guernsey County. Guernsey County is one of the ten least populated counties in the state with a population of 40,000. But Guernsey County has 600 nonprofit organizations. That means there is a nonprofit organization for every 70 people. That’s shocking.

At first, the idea of this many nonprofits just stressed me out. There are 30,000 nonprofits in West Virginia, a state with just under 1.9 million people. That’s a nonprofit for every 60 people. There is no way that each of those nonprofits is contributing something unique to the world. Wouldn’t it be better to combine some of those?

But then I realized that wasn’t really the problem. A couple of leaders of a local nonprofit started asking questions about insurance. They wanted to have volunteers drive senior citizens around. But they couldn’t do it because insurance for it would be through the roof.

That’s when it hit me. We need so many nonprofits because we fail each other as human beings about a hundred times a day. If we thought about people, if we took care of our neighbor, if we drove our elderly friends places, we wouldn’t need a billion nonprofits and we would change the world.

How do you help others?

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50 First Blog Posts Compliments of Your Support

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Last year, for a couple of weeks,  my friend and I had a contest. The goal of the contest was to compliment as many women as possible. We met up every evening and compared stories. We developed a very intense set of rules: The compliment must be genuine (self-policing); eye contact must be made; friends count but only if complimenting something not normally complimented; and most importantly, the compliment must not be conditional.

When you are making it a point to compliment people, you quickly learn that there are two types of compliments. There are conditional compliments and there are unconditional ones. Conditional compliments are much easier. They are also really tricky.

Almost everyone would agree that “You are beautiful when you wear your hair down” is a conditional compliment. But very few realize that “You look beautiful today” is conditional as well. It’s tricky.

The worst part about conditional compliments is that they are easy. They are really easy. They take off all the pressure. When you tell someone they are beautiful today, it just means that you like the way they dressed themselves that morning. You aren’t saying that you find them beautiful all the time. You aren’t saying you are attracted to them. You are saying that you like their taste in clothes or something. It’s a wimpy compliment.

It takes far more of a man or a woman to tell someone that they are always beautiful, always intelligent, always caring, always thoughtful. And it’s those compliments that change lives.

Has someone ever conditionally complimented you?