We believe in making and keeping commitments. These acts of faith are like stepping-stones for our progress as individuals and as families. For that reason, everything we do in our self-reliance groups is built around making and keeping commitments and reporting our results. We make at least three types of commitments each week. First, we practice foundational principles and habits and teach these to our families. Next, we act to complete business development and business operations commitments that help us develop new skills to grow and maintain our businesses. Before we leave each group meeting, we review our business commitments for the week and add our signature to our workbook to show our commitment. We also ask someone in the group to be our action partner for the week. This person signs our workbook to pledge his or her support. A couple of times a week or more, if needed, we will contact our action partner to report our actions and get his or her input and support. When contacting your action partner, make sure to set aside enough time to really listen and give some serious thought to your feedback. If you need extra help, you can call on your family, friends, or a group facilitator. At our next meeting, we will begin by reporting on our commitments. This should be a comfortable, positive experience where everyone feels heard and encouraged. We will all have tough days or even weeks. We may temporarily fail with a commitment or face a setback. That's to be expected. Remember that every failure is valuable, so learn from your experiences and use that knowledge to improve your business plan and keep moving forward.

Keeping commitments helped lead me to new ideas and identify new opportunities for my business. Taking the steps each week to talk to vendors, other professionals in my field, and group members helped motivate me to keep moving forward. I also found that I could see God's hand more clearly in my life as I prayerfully included Him in my plans and asked for His help. I felt I was enabling Him to help me by working hard to follow through on my commitments.

Having an action partner kept me focused on the weekly commitments ahead. It kept me on track. It was helpful to have a person who could serve as a sounding board and help me refine my ideas. I was also able to offer ideas to my partner that were outside of his knowledge base and that really helped him move forward with his ideas.

I thought self-reliance was something to learn on my own until I became part of a self-reliance group. Every week I had a safe place to report my success and failure, to set goals and experiment with new ideas, and to redefine my business purpose. My group helped me expand opportunities to grow my business more than I had learned on my own. True happiness is not made in getting something. True happiness is becoming something. This can be done by being committed to lofty goals. We cannot become something without commitment. I have been thinking recently about choices. It's been said that the door of history turns on small hinges, and so do people's lives. The choices we make determine our destiny. [MUSIC PLAYING]