What is Your Say-Do Ratio?

Building integrity begins with the self

“I’m good for it,” Steve promised. I had fronted him the cost of a flight to Africa, where he had joined some friends of mine on a safari. I wasn’t in any position to loan anyone $1500. I did it anyway on the strength of a promise.

He wasn’t good for it.

“I’m good for it,” Sam promised. I had fronted him rent, food and the costs of being my roommate for months on end. Those stretched into years. He never paid me back. The cost was into the thousands.

He wasn’t good for it.

“We’ll spend time talking, I promise.” This, along with literally thousands of similar promises, from my last ex.

He never did, we never did.

The word integrity comes from the Latin integritas. If you look that up on line you see all manner of similar words that are connected: soundness, chastity, purity, and my favorite: unimpaired condition.

In other words, when you are out of integrity, you are impaired. I know the feeling.

It strikes me as I review those words that those people to whom I lent money, gave my body, dedicated my time and attention and who spectacularly let me down were fundamentally broken.

As was I.

The Say-Do Ratio.

For me that means that you do what you say you’re going to do. Or give a damned good reason why not.

Being T-boned by a speeding car is a good reason for standing your date up. That actually happened to a Match.com date who flat-out ghosted me. I later found out he had been in the hospital. When we did have that date, all he wanted was to enlist me in his MLM downline. That’s a different kind of integrity deficit.

This isn’t that. This is blowing off your commitments, most especially to, and always and for ever, yourself.

One of the reasons I am still single at 67 is that I hold integrity as a very high standard. While I admit to being loyal to people who did not care about that loyalty except to extract what they wanted: money, sex, attention, free home and board, you name it- I am still proud of the fact that I am loyal. Deeply so. Integrity matters to me. That informs my character.

When I am out of integrity with myself, when I am dishonest, let myself down or undermine my best efforts in one way or another, the resulting deep discomfort is exquisite.

The last BF used to promise and promise and promise again, but all he delivered were cheap reasons and excuses. You could argue, and I’d agree, that my propensity to give people multiple chances to hang themselves is a character fault on my part. I’ve always wanted those I love to be more than they turned out to be.

Which in truth is saying that I’d like to be more than I turned out to be, but that’s another story.

Here in Denver right now as I write this article, it’s just after 4:30 am. I’ve been up for an hour. The house is very nearly empty, what little I have (a table, a chair) is borrowed from my neighbor. The real estate agent is coming by today to pick up her staging materials.

Just as the sun rises on yet another nearly triple-digit day, I head out to Green Mountain where I will hit the trails again for about 90 minutes. (And I did, I took a break from writing to get that done)

Promise kept. At 67 and counting, I owe my body work, respect, love and care. I got back sweating, because I ran the second half of that four-mile hike. Downhill, on rocks, which for me is damned hard. I’m scared shitless of falling on rocks for good reason. But I have been working that bad boy.

Because I have kept that promise, I am now running downhill, on rocks, scree and very uneven ground. Not fast. Not the point. I’m running on rocks. That’s the point. Being able to do this is going to allow me to hike some pretty badass mountains- especially when travel opens back up.

I may be seventy by that point but I will bloody well be ready.

This is where integrity begins. Am I keeping promises I make to myself? For if I fail here, I can hardly expect to keep promises I’ve made to others.

In this article, writer Jan Bowen points out that integrity begins with us:

From Bowen’s piece:

Brain research shows that breaking promises actually registers in our brain activity, showing up as emotional conflict for the promise breaker as a result of suppressing their honesty.

It’s not just that we know we are a disappointment to ourselves and also to those to whom we’ve promised time or love or effort. We pay for it with stress, feelings of guilt. The brain likes honesty. It thrives on being in alignment with our words. It likes the sacred cycle of promises made, promises kept. Completion.

For most anyway. I have known plenty of people who lied with the polished, practiced ease of the psychotic. When you have no moral compass, it makes being immoral a walk in the park. Like the last BF. Like a lot of exes.

But some promises are eternal.

Nature fulfills her promise to me every single day when the sun breaks the earth’s plane and casts my shadow, long and spidery, over the midsummer flowers of Green Mountain, two miles from house. As she shines on me, my promise to my aging body shines inside me.

Every hike out here is a loving goodbye to almost fifty years in this state. Those hikes, which are beyond beautiful, are borne not just of good intentions but of commitment. I owe my body work. Because my body’s commitment back to me is to rise to the level of work I request of it. And beyond.

The older I get the harder that gets, for especially under quarantine, it’s ever so easy to settle in and just binge-watch. But I have promises to keep.

The older I get the harder it gets, simply because it takes a touch more work to discipline my eating, especially under the Covid stresses. But I have promises to keep.

The older I get the harder it gets for lots of reasons. More parts of me hurt or ache or bark. Some have disappeared altogether (I think they might have rolled under the couch). More parts of me want corrective work. My knees, not my face. That’s a lost cause. More parts of me are wearing down. Slowly, but inevitably. The upkeep is more involved, more time-consuming and costly. But I have promises to keep.

The payoff of solid upkeep, in all spheres from physical to emotional to mental to spiritual, is hard to measure, if only because it is so extraordinary.

That begins with me. For if I am willing to do the hard work of self-maintenance, then the hard work of standing up for myself (which is far more difficult), then the even harder work of setting boundaries.

…gets a whole lot easier.

That last, which one commenter said last year got her in the feels, is my most difficult. Being a veteran apologist, people-pleaser and doormat, it has taken me decades to create crisp lines in concrete, not just shifting beach sand. I have had a long-standing tendency to give folks many do-overs, even after they couldn’t nail the integrity landing the first fifteen times.

In aviation that’s called a go-around. Goose the fuel, lift the nose and get ready to line up for the landing again.

Now, and my buddy Kris Gage will like this, we’re on the skydiver model. No go-arounds under canopy.

Nail it the first time or you’re road kill.

Interestingly, that has begun to include the abusive, thinly-veiled rhetoric from various commenters on Medium which seeks to shame, punish and control. The Block (the Belligerence) Button has come in right handy.

In this regard, not to cop a phrase or anything, I am too old for this shit.

I choose not to allow abusers into my life. And that’s a promise, including social media trollers, no matter how they’re dressed up.

Kindly, with a tip of the ball cap to my Medium buddy Rosennab, that also means having the integrity to not beat myself up — for not meeting an impossible goal, for falling down once in a while (donut), for giving the wrong guy another chance knowing I’ll likely get hurt. We can be far crueler to ourselves than anyone else. So part of having integrity, and knowing that it begins with us, is being respectful and kind of our humanity and fallibility.

Our Say-Do ratio with ourselves is perfectly expressed in our January resolutions. Those of us past fifty not only stop making as many, but often quit making them at all. It’s exhausting to keep saying THIS IS THE YEAR I will (lose weight, get out more, get laid, get a personality, start exercising, whatever). Boy do I get that.

As someone who has been a five pack-a-day smoker (yeppirs), 80 lbs over my ideal weight, and a whole lotta other battles including seriously bad eating disorders for forty years, I know what it’s like to make that annual promise. In the case of the eating disorder the commitment lasted about 24 hours.

The deep hurt I felt having gone public with those commitments, or to myself, when I failed miserably, is, well. You know.

Took me forty years to fix that one big one. But I did eventually keep that promise. Sometimes that’s what it takes.

There is a terrible trap in some of our resolutions, like “losing 80 lbs.” I never set out that year to do it. It just evolved. The promise was to eat intelligently. When I took bread and sweets out of my diet, the rest slowly took care of itself, for at the same time I quadrupled my workouts. Doesn’t work for everyone, but it did for me. I committed to what I could control: what I ate, how much I moved. Sometimes what happens after that is unpredictable. I kept my promise day by day, hour by hour. Those small wins built on each other, and the backwards slides got far easier to forgive, and forget.

The more I did what I said I would do, in some cases by changing the wording of the commitment so that I couldn’t shoot myself in the foot, the more I trusted that I indeed had the backbone to keep my promises.

Bowen points out that all too often we make promises to others because (and my hand is up here) we so badly want those commitments from others.

Oh, well. That hurts. Of course I did. And didn’t get them.

I had this stupid idea that if I showed up full of integrity, others would respond in kind. Yes, and gargling Clorox is good for Covid. Yes and the Tooth Fairy is real. Yes and….well. You get it.

However. My Say-Do ratio is borne largely due to the level of commitment I’m willing to show myself. Sometimes I fall down badly (can you say “chocolate almonds? My hips can).

I’ve been working on one hell of a big one. And I delivered.

Every day for a few more days I return to an empty house. That house is empty because of a promise. I wanted out of Colorado. A completely new life. I wanted to move, and I wanted to live in a place surrounded by cool green.

I’m just a few days away from finalizing the sale of my house, and a few more days away from buying my new house in Eugene, Oregon.

Since February of 2019, when I packed the first brown box, I have steadily, step-by-step, boxed up my entire home. Got everything into storage. Researched towns from Great Falls to Cedar City to Boise to Spokane to Gig Harbor to Santa Fe. Made my choice. Hired agents in Denver and in Eugene.

Step by step, I boxed up my memories, threw away or donated or destroyed what no longer served. Mourned what misplaced dreams had died, and used those tears to fertilize the dreams I was building.

There were (and still are) a great many of them. Both dreams and tears.

I researched homes, hired movers, located storage. Drove to Eugene, largely sight unseen (I had driven through once in the early nineties). The moment I passed from high desert into rain forest, I pulled over. I had to. One moment I was in high dry, the next there were moss and ferns everywhere. I was stunned.

I was home.

I breathed in the sweet, oxygen-rich, cool air and took in the green that was like a soft weighted blanket for the eyes.

Promise kept. I am just under three weeks from inking the papers that put me into my Oregon home. The work it took to get me here, the stages, the heartfelt pain, the processing….yeah. You know. Almost fifty years in one place.

Are you keeping the promises you make yourself?

What is your Say-Do ratio, the commitments you keep to your Sacred Self?

Bowen lists three elements to helping you keep your word. I agree, with the proviso that I described (above). Sometimes we need to re-think what we’re committing to, and re-calibrate. Not to make things too easy, but to ensure that we can indeed influence the income.

If you want to strengthen the value of your word:

• First, keep promises to yourself. If you tell yourself you’re going to do something, follow through. You’ll experience first hand how wonderful it feels being at the receiving end of a kept promise — your own.
• Choose your words carefully when making a promise. Give the ones that you do give, freely and joyfully. If you are deliberate with your choices, you’ll be confident of keeping them.
• Change your plans, but don’t break your word. If something does come up, talk to the other person and offer an explanation and a plan for following through in a new way. Don’t pull a no-show or ghost them.

And please. Do not ghost yourself. Long before that was a term, that’s what I did to myself. But every time I set a Big Hairy Ass Goal and met it, I gained confidence. I still slip up (chocolate almonds). But then I get up and run.

I’ve got promises to keep.