A new start: say it loudly

or Chapter VIII of Marti Soosaare's e-book "New Beginnings"

You've probably noticed that when you've made a promise to someone, regardless of whether it may or may not have been irrelevant to the other person, saying it out loud immediately puts some moral pressure on us. First and foremost, we don't want to be tongue-lashers to ourselves, and we like our friends to think of us as tongue-sayers.

Do you see where I'm going with this already? If you promise something to many, you are much more likely to achieve it. Certainly, shouting things out loud like that is not very comfortable. There are a number of fears associated with it.

Am I failing? I don't know, a lot depends on what you promised. Erki Nool once promised loudly that he wanted to become an Olympic champion. Critical people, of whom there are many around us, were allowed to gloat that look where the big mouth boy is. They laughed until Erki Nool became Olympic champion. Then they took the next target.

There are other examples. The press conference of the Estonian ski team at the beginning of each season is a favourite event for the hamburger. It's a pity that the MK series does not take into account the top ten places and points that our skiers say they are going for. At the end of the season, we can only record 70-80th places and say once again that the promises were not kept. As always, Estonians dive into the international carousel of competition with high hopes and return with great experience."

Your lesson from this should be to word your promises in a way that makes them deliverable. Your friends won't make fun of you if you promised to lose 20 kg but lost 15 kg. Of course, if you promised to lose 20 kg but gained 2 kg, it might be a different story. But that doesn't happen if you've thought things through!

Of course, these clearly formulated objectives could be measurable. This is by definition, otherwise they are not clear. It's easy to say, while sipping a vodka pint with friends and grinding a pork knuckle between your teeth on a New Year's Eve: "In the New Year, I'm going to start exercising properly." That's exactly the kind of highly unspecific thing. When you end up walking to work one day on 12 September because your dad lent you a car to take a few errands to the country, you might think you've kept your promise.

Lose 20 kg. Start running 3 times a week. Start keeping a training diary. These are much more concrete promises. Make your promises measurable.

Be adequate when making a promise - this is the next piece of valuable advice that tends to be ignored. What I mean is, don't promise to 'conquer the summit of Jomolungma this year' on a sauna night somewhere with a drink above 1.5 per mille, when you've already had a lot of beer and a few more to go, without having done any work on the idea beforehand.

I have a very good friend who was once a good athlete, now a good sports fan and supporter. He tends to shout out promises like this at sauna evenings after some grassroots sports competition: "Next year I'll be in the running, I'll start training and I'll lose 20 kg." Of course, none of this happens and the next year the same thing is repeated after the same competition. In fact, I even have several friends like that and you probably do too. Hopefully, now that he reads this thought, it will all change for him and he will start to think through these promises better.

A promise made in such a jovial mood is often not backed up, because it is not properly thought through and recorded in the brain. The questions that remain unanswered are very important. What kind of training? How do I start the weight loss? Who will make the plan for me? All the things are unthought out, there is only the emotion of wanting to be young and athletic again and to run the hurdles in 3 steps.

The moral of the story is not that we shouldn't have fun with our friends, or that we shouldn't reminisce about the great memories we shared on the sports tracks. Of course, nothing bad will happen to anyone if you say those words at a sauna party. Everybody has fun, and of course dreams like that are great conversation topics. It's just that, if we want these promises to be of any use, they need to be better thought through and revisited at a calmer moment, critically assessed and, if necessary, adjusted for reality. That is, of course, if it is even remembered at the time that anything was promised.

Let's come back to the idea formulated by Kaire Leibaku here in the pages of the book. She goes to the gym as soon as she gets home from work. She has set herself not only a goal, but also a time when she will work out. Whether you put the workout on your calendar or you set a specific time, it's crucial. It shows that things have been thought through. "I'm going for a run as soon as I get home from work," is very specific.

Time and place matter. If you don't set a time and place for when and where you exercise, it's unlikely to ever happen. Take this into account when making and planning these commitments.

If one of your big goals for exercise is to lose weight, there's no way you can put time in your calendar to do it. It's just the kind of process that needs to happen continuously. However, it is still possible to make plans and plan specific activities. "I'm going to stop eating chocolate" is a concrete promise. "I'll join Fitlap and start planning my daily menu" is another specific promise. "I will weigh myself every day" is the third.

This last idea is somewhat controversial, as various studies show that people who weigh themselves every day are more likely to achieve greater weight loss than those who do so less often. However, there are also more of those who 'go crazy' and give up. Whether weighing yourself every day is something that helps or hinders you depends on your mental strength and analytical skills.

René Laane, founder of the Fitlap menu planning program, joined us on FitQ to talk about the "Energy Transfer" podcast, which you can also listen to/watch on FitQ. He knows that a loud promise is a promise you keep. In the podcast, he promised that by the end of March 2021, he will be in the best shape of his life. Generally speaking, this promise is not as specific as it should be, because as a former powerlifter, René could name a specific result in the flat press or powerlift. However, his experience in knowing his own body is remarkable and he is also generally a complete "no BS man", so I have no doubt that he can assess his own achievements more objectively than you or I combined.

I will try to be more specific and I will put my promise in a more concrete way, because I do not trust my own objectivity in this otherwise. My specific promise is this: for the whole of 2021, I will solve 1 packet (50 words) of Lingvist every day, first thing when I sit down at my computer in the morning.

For those who are confused by this promise, Lingvist is a foreign language learning programme based on learning words by repeating and writing them down. In one lesson, 50 words are asked and it takes me about 10 minutes to complete the pack. Go check it out. A good thing made in Estonia. Then write down your specific promise and say it out loud somewhere.

You're still not convinced that speaking out will help? You wouldn't want to promise your friends too much, but you could still get some of their energy and inspiration, right?

In this case, create a Strava account and invite all your Strava Facebook friends to follow you. Now, when you go out for a run or a bike ride and set up Strava, your friends will be able to "give you a thumbs up". Whether we admit it or not, it's still a little heart-warming.

There are also a bunch of alternatives to Strava, so you can google them if you don't like the orange colour for some reason and think the UI could use more blue, for example.

If you're still pretty sure you don't want to bother your friends with your stuff right now, there's a little hack for that too. It's something I discovered recently and I use it to help me remember things. Namely, say it out loud to yourself. You don't need to have someone next to you if you're afraid of being looked at strangely.

Maybe it would be really weird if I was weighing cabbage in the shop and someone was sighing loudly behind me: "As soon as I get home, I'm going for a run." If you say that to yourself in a quiet place, you won't disturb anyone. I've used it myself, for example, by telling myself before I go to the store that as soon as I come out of the store I'll go through the parcel machine and get my things. I've started to have a lot of times when I knew I had a parcel in the machine, but just forgot to go. At least with this tactic I remember things better. A break among others.

If you don't dare to make a loud promise to others, make it to yourself.

This was the eighth chapter of Marti Soosaare's e-book "A New Beginning". We have also published the previous chapters, you can read them on our website. from the blog, you can download the whole e-book but HERE.