How letting your yes be yes transforms your business, relationships, and character. “I’ll call you back at 3 pm today.” “I’ll send that feedback by the end of the day.” “Let me get back to you on that by Friday.” How many times have you made these small promises? And how many times have you actually kept them? If you’re like most people, including me, the answer is uncomfortable. We make dozens of micro-commitments every week, often without thinking. Then life happens, we get distracted, and those promises slip through the cracks. Here’s what I’ve discovered: every broken promise, no matter how small, erodes something precious. And every kept promise, no matter how minor, builds something extraordinary. Let me explain why keeping your word on the small things might be the most important business and life principle you’ll ever implement. 

Let Your Yes be Yes

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches something deceptively simple: “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” In other words: keep your word. All of it. Even the small stuff. The big commitments are obvious, aren’t they? If you promise to deliver a result to your client within a specific timeframe and you completely ghost them for a week, miss the deadline without explanation, we can all see that’s a problem. I’ve been on the receiving end of this with freelancers and contractors who made promises and simply disappeared.  It’s frustrating, unprofessional, and relationship-destroying. But what about the small things?

The Micro-Promises We Break Without Thinking

These are the commitments we make in passing, almost unconsciously:

• “I’ll call you back at this specific time today.”
• “Let me respond to that email about scheduling by tomorrow.”
• “I’ll send you that document by the end of day.”

We say these things without even thinking. They feel insignificant at the moment. But then life happens. You’re busy. Other urgent tasks demand your attention. If you’ve got young children (I have a baby and a three-year-old), chaos becomes the default setting. Things slip your mind. By the time you remember, it’s 10 pm and you really don’t want to fire up your laptop just to send something over. I completely understand. I’m guilty of this myself. It’s something I’m actively working on because I know how difficult it is to keep every single promise you make.

My Uncomfortable Truth

Let me share a recent example that made me deeply uncomfortable. We’re working with someone to build our website. My wife handles most of the communication because, frankly, the back-and-forth on technical details stresses me out. It’s not something I’m good at. I made an agreement with the website builder: “We’ll send this stuff by the end of day.” I gave everything to my wife to send over. Then the baby was up all night. Our three-year-old was misbehaving. She forgot about it completely. Two days later, we got an email: “Hey, you haven’t sent that thing yet.” That discomfort I felt?  That was my fault. 100% my fault. I made the promise. I’m the one trying to get the website built. I should have taken complete ownership of the project instead of delegating a task I’d already committed to, then feeling uncomfortable when it wasn’t done to my standard. This is real life.  These situations happen. But here’s the thing: if you want to pursue excellence, you need impeccable honour of every single commitment. Even the micro-promises. Even when it’s hard. Even when life is chaotic.

Why This Actually Matters

In Business: The Compounding Returns of Trust

Let me share something from my background in email marketing for high-ticket offers. When I was helping clients sell $5,000 programmes, here’s a principle we applied: Only 10-15% of people would invest within the first 90 days of initial contact. But 85% would buy after 90 days, sometimes months or even years later. That’s a 6:1 ratio. Six times more people bought over the long term than bought immediately. This made one thing crystal clear: long-term relationships matter more than quick wins. And how do you build long-term relationships? Through small deposits of trust. Small commitments kept. Micro-promises honoured. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Here’s what happens when you consistently keep small promises:

• You build trust and credibility that compounds over time
• Clients come to you already knowing what to expect
• You attract higher-quality clients who actually do the work
• They get results because they trust your guidance
• They give glowing testimonials and referrals
• Everyone’s happy, they got value, you delivered on expectations

Here’s what happens when you don’t: Recently, my wife bought an $8 parenting course. The company bombarded us with what she called “an insane number of upsells” immediately after purchase. Then we discovered they’d charged us for two things we didn’t knowingly agree to, a couple of hundred pounds gone from our bank account. We contacted them for a refund. They might be the best parenting company in the world, but we’ll never know. All trust evaporated in an instant. One broken promise, one lack of integrity, and the relationship is destroyed. From a business standpoint, what makes more sense: someone who trusts you, paying monthly because they’re genuinely happy with your service? Or someone who buys once, has a terrible experience, and never returns? The answer is obvious when you think about it. But how many businesses operate on the one-time-transaction model, maximising immediate profit whilst destroying long-term relationships?

In Personal Life: Building Unshakeable Resilience

I’m an avid long-distance runner. Endurance running has taught me something profound about keeping promises to yourself. When I’m on a hard training run, gasping for breath, heat and humidity crushing me, still 30 minutes to go, I use every mental trick possible to keep going. And 95% of the time, I don’t stop. I finish the run at the intensity I set out to achieve. I’ve done this literally hundreds of times. Here’s what happened: I built resilience. Not natural, inborn resilience, learned resilience. Perseverance. The confidence that when things get hard, I can push through longer than I suspect I can. Every time I made a micro-promise to myself (“I’m not going to stop, I’ll keep going even when it’s hard”) and kept it, I reinforced a pattern. I built a habit. I created evidence for myself that I’m someone who follows through. Now here’s the terrifying flip side: if you make promises to yourself and consistently fail to keep them, you’re building a different habit. You’re training yourself that it’s acceptable not to finish things. That it’s fine to quit when it gets uncomfortable. That pursuing excellence isn’t really necessary. Do this long enough, and mediocrity becomes your norm. You don’t even notice it happening. But slowly, quietly, your standards erode. Your character weakens. Your ability to push through difficulty atrophies.

The Practical Framework: How to Actually Do This

Knowing you should keep promises and actually keeping them are two different things. Here’s how to bridge that gap:

1. Be brutally selective about what you commit to

Before you say “yes” to anything, pause for three seconds. Ask yourself: “Can I realistically keep this promise?” If not, say no. Or offer a different timeframe you can commit to. Better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse.

2. Write down every commitment immediately

The moment you make a promise, even a tiny one, write it down. Put it in your calendar. Set a reminder. Don’t trust your memory, especially if you have young children or a chaotic schedule.

3. Communicate proactively when things go wrong

Life happens. Sometimes you genuinely cannot keep a commitment despite your best efforts. When this happens, let the other person know as soon as you realise it. Apologise sincerely. Offer a new commitment you can actually keep. Communication is often more important than the original commitment.

4. Treat promises to yourself as seriously as promises to others

When you tell yourself, “I’m going to do this hard workout today” or “I’m going to finish this project by Friday,” keep that promise. You’re building your character with every small decision.

5. Review and reflect weekly

At the end of each week, ask yourself: “What promises did I make this week? Which ones did I keep? Which ones did I break? Why?” This awareness prevents patterns from developing unconsciously.

Why This Is Actually About Excellence

Excellence isn’t about grand gestures or massive achievements. It’s about the accumulation of hundreds of small decisions, made consistently over time. Every kept promise is a deposit in your character account. Every broken promise is a withdrawal. Keep making deposits, and you build:

• Trust with clients, colleagues, and loved ones
• Credibility in your marketplace
• Authority that draws people to you
• Resilience that carries you through difficulty
• Confidence that you can do hard things
• Character that reflects something greater than yourself

This is what we call the LIGHT framework at Kingdom Impact: Love, Integrity, Generosity, Humble service, and Transformation through Excellence. Keeping your small promises embodies all of these:

• Love means treating people’s time and trust as valuable
• Integrity means your words align with your actions
• Generosity means giving people more than they expected
• Humble service means honouring commitments even when inconvenient
• Excellence means holding yourself to the highest standard in everything

The Question You Need to Answer

Are you building a life and business on the foundation of kept promises or broken ones? Are you someone people can trust absolutely, or someone they trust “mostly, but…”? Are you training yourself for excellence or mediocrity? The answer isn’t found in your intentions or your aspirations. It’s found in your track record with the small promises. Excellence starts with the small yes. Not the impressive project. Not the big contract. Not the major milestone. The small yes. The micro-commitment. The promise that feels insignificant in the moment but compounds into something extraordinary over time. Your yes being yes. Your no being no. Your word being your bond. That’s where excellence lives. That’s where trust is built. That’s where character is forged. Start today. Make one small promise. Keep it. Then do it again tomorrow. Over time, this simple practice will set you apart in a world where broken promises have become the norm. Want help pursuing excellence in your business whilst staying true to your values? We’re currently looking to work with a small group of business owners to try out our framework – no cost / no pitch. Just a few calls (and hopefully) a huge transformation for you. All I ask in return is a testimony of your experience and results. And, of course, to pay forward the generosity.  It starts with casting an eternal vision rooted in having a positive influence on as many people as possible and aligning this with daily, weekly, monthly LIGHT-aligned actions.