Why You Keep Breaking Promises To Yourself

Machine transcribed from the episode audio, lightly cleaned. Timestamps are approximate.

0:00
There is something about Monday morning that makes a man feel like this week it is finally going to be different. Coffee's hot, calendar's clean, and the failures from past weeks, those things are a distant memory. This guy, he always has a plan. And the plan, it's usually pretty solid. Monday, it's easy because Monday still has hope in it. Monday is not the test. And you know that, you feel that. But by Thursday, that plan, it is gone. And the man who made that plan, he's already building next Monday's plan. That loop though, it's not a discipline problem. It is an identity problem wearing discipline's clothes. I know because I have run that loop for years, not just for a season.

0:47
And so what I want to do today is I want to give you the actual order that breaks it. But identity, connection, calling, in that order, it cannot be the other way around. All right, so let's dig right in. And I want to first talk about this loop that I lived in. So this loop from the inside looked a lot different than it did to most people on the outside. And I'm sharing this because I don't think that I'm the only guy that's ever lived this. I think this is pretty common for high-performing Christian men that want to continue to succeed and don't want to destroy their faith of their family in the process. And so this is what it looked like for me. And I'll bet that this is going to resonate a lot with you too. So this plan that I would create every single Monday, I actually would

1:34
start on Friday, but really Monday, I would dial it in. Monday morning, I'd get up and I would get after it. I meant every single word of every plan I created. I wasn't about wasting words. I was about being intentional with every single thing that I put to paper. And I think this is what nobody tells you as a man who keeps failing at the same promise. You aren't lying to yourself on Monday. And I think that that is often spread and it needs to stop. I think that when you set out to have a super productive, high-performing week, you mean it. You believe it completely. But the week, it eats at your plan. So here's what the Monday morning ritual typically looked like.

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I'd get up in the morning. I would pray. I would read my Bible. I would get off to work. I would work hard until three o'clock in the afternoon. I would get to the gym by four. And then I would get home by 5.30, shower, and be at the dinner table and intending to be fully present and at it. And I would write that out and commit to it like it mattered immensely because it did. But by Wednesday, Wednesday would start to take a bite out of that plan. A meeting would last a little bit long. I'd have a catastrophe with one of my clients or a kid would need something. And by Thursday,

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man, Thursday would never pay Wednesday back. How many times that I just laid in bed running the math on how many Mondays started off that way and then Thursday or Friday did not end up the way that I intended it to be? I think this happened because I kept trying to solve that mess of a week with a better plan, a stricter schedule, a new accountability partner or text thread, or best of all, more willpower. I mean, I would just try even harder. And yet none of it helped. Because I was fixing the wrong thing.

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If your plan keeps dying midweek, Wednesday, Thursday, stop rewriting your plan. That is not where the break is happening. Okay, so this is the loop that you find yourself in that I found myself in time and time again. This is the man that believes in his own plan, but he just cannot seem to keep it. The good news is that is not a weakness, but this is a diagnosis. Once I finally understood that, once I finally got clear on the challenge that I was facing, on what was actually broken, and everything that I was chasing, I realized that I had to completely reframe it all.

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And I just want to stop right here and say, if any part of that loop described your week, maybe right now, if you're feeling that, I want to encourage you to hit pause and take 10 minutes and run our Gap Check. It is a free tool. The link is down below in the description. I talk about it all the time. If you want to find me on Instagram and DM me Gap, I'll send it to you that way. But in 10 minutes, that is going to show you exactly where the drift is actually happening in your life. Is it in your faith? Is it in your marriage? Is it in your body? Or is it in your calling? It's free. Again, link is down in the description below. Okay, so let's move on. I want to talk about the real problem underneath all of this.

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Because I think that's what we're all trying to figure out. It's like, what is really causing it? If it's not my hard work, if it's not my motivation, if it's not my plan being bad, then what is it? So, here is what I believe now, but I unfortunately was not able to arrive at very quickly. You and I, we cannot discipline our way out of an identity that we don't believe. Let me make that a little bit clear, because sometimes that can be a little bit complex and ethereal. So, you cannot hold a man accountable to a version of himself that he doesn't actually believe in. Let me make this more personal.

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You cannot hold yourself accountable to becoming somebody or being somebody that you aren't. Every plan you built on Monday, it is all built by a man you wish you were. It's aimed, though, at the man that you actually are. You don't believe that plan yet. I know you think you do, but deep down, you don't. And so, the real first pressure that you face each week, it starts to crack that plan, because you don't believe it with your whole heart, because you aren't sure if you are truly in it or not.

6:59
And this is where I see the performance trap really coming into a play for a lot of go-getters. The performance trap is all about performing a discipline that has no foundation underneath it. This is for the guy that has been successful, that has achieved things in his life, and he's like, I've done it before. I can do it again. And so, when you start to crack, when your week starts to come unglued, when you start to become unraveled, your default fix is just more effort. And here's the frustrating part, because you're a hard-working guy, is you work harder, and it fails. Because the foundation just continues to crack more and more.

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And the real enemy in all of this, and I've been talking about this a lot online, and it pisses a lot of people off. The real issue here is because you have been told that it's all up to you, that you can do it all yourself. This is one of the biggest enemies of the high performer, and it's self-reliance. You are trying to become a new man alone, on your own schedule, on your own terms, and it doesn't work. Look, I get this. I've built the plan alone. I've broke the plan alone. And I rebuilt the plan the following week.

8:35
Still alone. Nobody could catch me midweek, because nobody knew the plan even existed. You and I, we were not built to close that gap by ourselves. We were built to be dependent on God, and to be dependent upon men that God puts into our life who will actually ask us on a Wednesday, what's going on, not just admire the amazing plan that we keep creating and save or following. My encouragement to you, if you're resonating with this, is to stop trying to discipline your way into a new identity. You need to get settled on that identity first. And if you do that, the discipline will show up as a byproduct

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instead of a battle that you have to continue to fight with yourself week in and week out. That's the shift. Identity first, discipline follows. It cannot be the other way around. You cannot be who you are. You have to do it the other way around. Or be who you want to become, is what I should say. You need to understand that man first, and then you can become him. Look, I know that can sound like theory, but I have watched this happen over and over again in men's lives, mine included. So I want to tell you about one of my clients. His name's John. And not a current client. He's a past client of mine.

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And he's got a pretty interesting story. So John was the kind of guy that most people assumed had it all figured out. He was successful, respected. He was a guy that so many of his peers, his colleagues, his friends, they would all ask him for advice. What was interesting was what he described to me when we first engaged with one another. It wasn't crisis. It was distance. He was struggling to be present in the rooms that he was in, which meant that he was absent from the people that were in the rooms. His wife, his kids, the people that mattered most to him. John said to me

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when we were working together, he was like, man, he said, like, I've tried everything. Therapy, coaching, counseling. He said, but what you are doing for me by pointing me to Christ first, it filled a gap that nothing else I'd done previously was able to touch. And I watched as his personal life started to settle, his professional success followed. It was all disrupted because home was disrupted. But when home came into alignment, everything else followed. And it's never going to happen the other way around. Temporarily, it will. Just like you can gamble and temporarily, you can go on an amazing run. But if you gamble long enough, you will always pay the house.

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And the same thing applies here. So we had to reorder his approach to his life to help him live the life that he desired for himself and for his family. We didn't start by fixing John's career and hope that his soul caught up in the process. We fixed his foundation. And then everything that we built, we stacked on top of that, got steadier and steadier. Look, I'm not bragging on the work that I did just because it sounds good. I'm sharing that because it is proof positive of the order that I watch happen over and over and over again. Most guys try to perform more and hope that they follow in line.

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But when we rework it and they figure out who they are, the work success, the work performance, it follows. John didn't need a better plan. He needed the same foundational work that I'm about to hand to you right now. So here's the actual order. Three moves. And this is why this sequence is so incredibly important. And it is the whole point of so much of what I talk about in our Aligned Man, a coaching program, in our Men of Greatness community. It's all over the place. And by the way, if you're finally getting tripped up, you're like, okay, okay, I get it. I get it. I'm resonating. I need to figure this out for myself. Click that link. Take that free gap check.

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I'm telling you right now, 10 minutes, it's going to show you so much. And this is not some generic AI tool. We spent a ton of time making sure the logic, the intention was all to help you understand you, not some generalized idea of the man you could be. Links below. Make sure you click it. Okay. Here is the order that actually works. And this is where we're going to start to bring it home, where you can start to apply some of this if you are resonating with this message. So if the plan was never the problem, then what is it that's actually going to break the cycle? Well, three things. In this order. And the order is the whole point. And by the way, skipping this order is why your plans keep collapsing.

13:58
Just as a reminder for you. You were trying to build the third thing on the foundation that skipped the first thing. Okay. So here are the three moves. Number one, you need to have a settled identity. And this is the stuff that I'm teaching in programs that guys are paying me $2,500 to $5,000 for. The guys are paying me tens of thousands of dollars to coach them on. So this is valuable stuff that I'm offering to you. So the first one of these three moves is a settled identity. You need to know who you are underneath all of your performance before you touch another workout schedule or business plan. You've got to get clear there. Secondly,

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you need to have known connection. You need to be in a room where men know the real version of you, of your week, and ask you about it with intention to help you get better. Not to tear you down, not to somehow just gaslight you up, but to help you get clear on what it's going to take to become the man that God has created you to be. And thirdly, is clear calling. Once identity is settled and you are known, then the direction that God is calling you toward, it's no longer guesswork. It becomes so clear. Settled identity, known connection, and clear calling. And here's what this looks like

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in practice. So most men that I work with, most men that I talk to, have only ever known themselves through what they produce. Again, could have been early high school achievement in school or sports, could have been some glorious season of life, it could have been the business award, it could have been the title, it could have been the massive following, it could have been the affirmations and the awards and whatever else. But this is where settled identity starts. We've got to tear that down and get clear on who we really are. Known connection is not a group text or a beer once a week or once a month or once a year. It's real accountability inside the hardest weeks, inside the hardest days,

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where you are fully able to depend on and rely on those guys to walk you or walk with you on this battle or in this battle that you're in. And finally, clear calling. It shows up last. But only once those first two things are actually in place. Stop white-knuckling a schedule. Stop trying to figure out all this stuff on your own. Get the order right and the schedule stops being a fight. That order is why the plan alone never worked. It never worked for me. It never worked for John. And it is never going to work for you. And if you're saying to yourself right now, Ryan, it's working.

17:00
I'm able to muscle through it. Time is not on your side, buddy. Eventually, it's going to catch up to you. Identity, connection, then calling. And if you want to walk through that order with men who will actually hold you to it, here's where that lives. We have a room. Actually, small rooms. 12 men. It's called the Align Man. 12 weeks. It's built on that exact order that I just walked you through. Look, this isn't a hard sell. We filled our last cohort two and a half weeks after we opened it up. We're about to open up the next one and we already have multiple men on the wait list waiting for us to open and it will fill quickly too.

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I'm not trying to sell you on something. I'm trying to tell you the truth because you were never meant to close this gap alone, this drift that you're on right now, this unsettled feeling that you have. So either way, take the gap check first. Allow it to show you. Maybe you're 100% dialed in and I'm totally off. But maybe it's going to show you something that you need to see for the first time. The full breakdown of The Aligned Man, it's down below as well, but you can go to mogbrotherhood.com slash the slash or dash aligned dash man dash journey. If you just go to mogbrotherhood.com, you can find it there as well. It's called The Aligned Man. But I'll put those links below so you have them in the description.

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And let me close by telling you this. And this is good news. You are not in crisis. You are not at a catastrophe. I pray you are not. But you are drifting. And you already knew that before you hit play to watch this video or listen to this audio. Stop trying to discipline your way out of it alone. Get a settled identity. Get known. Get a plan. You actually believe in enough to keep Monday through Sunday. And if you're like, Ryan, I'm not sure yet. Then just keep following along. Because I'm going to continue to press into

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what a settled identity looks like, what known connection feels like, and how clear the calling can actually be in your life. Peace. Peace.