Pledge: “a solemn promise or undertaking.”
To pledge is to put your hand over your heart and connect with yourself to better connect with others. It is a moment of introspection that you use to point you in a deliberate direction, i.e., with purpose on purpose.
When you take a pledge, you pause long enough to be able to establish a WHY. When you take a pledge, you pause long enough to assemble your core values to “suit up.”
This is why your pledge is sacred, spiritual, and resilient, and your goals or new years’ resolutions tend to be dull, superficial, and fleeting.
Your goals are only useful as long as they exist inside of the greater context that is your PLEDGE. Your pledge doesn’t care about a beginning, middle, or end. It only cares about this moment and the next moment you show up to reaffirm your allegiance and desire to practice infinitely.
I pledge allegiance to HIGH COMMITMENT, LOW ATTACHMENT.
This ideal is at the heart of The Practice. It is also the reason The Practice can feel so daunting. We are asking ourselves to professionally show up to intentionally and generously make assertions. But what if we don’t have anything to assert? What if we don’t have enough time to figure out an assertion worth sharing? What if what we assert falls flat? What if our assertion is so central to our identity and it is dismissed?
What if… What if… What if?
“What if” are attachment based questions. What if I throw the ball up and am unable to catch it?
“Our work is about the throwing. The catching can take care of itself.”
Seth Godin, The Practice
“Commitment is a statement of what is. You know what you are committed to based on your results” (15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership). High commitment is remembering to invest and expend most of your energy, thoughts, and attention on what you can control. Low attachment is being fluid with what is out of your control. Fluidity is flow, finesse, and freedom, which is the opposite of fixation, frustration, and fear.
High commitment, low attachment is an act of playfulness, and being playful is a practice as well.
